From: Eliezer S. Yudkowsky (sentience@pobox.com)
Date: Sun Apr 06 2003 - 13:06:23 MDT
Rafal Smigrodzki wrote:
> ----- Original Message -----
> From: "Hal Finney" <hal@finney.org>
>
>>I understand the pragmatic concern that the desire to get from one place
>>to another by a teleportation machine would be thwarted for the copy
>>that gets left behind. You have to consider whether there wouldn't be
>>something useful that an extra copy of yourself could accomplish.
>
> ### In other words, suicide is a way of leaving places you don't want to be
> in, copying might be a way of reaching places you want to reach, and a
> combination of the two achieves both objectives.
See, this is the problem with *not* renormalizing your probabilities.
Suicide eliminates your measure. Copying divides your measure. Moving
transfers your measure. These are three different events. Spin-up may be
decomposable into a superposition of |left> + |right>, as well as many
other possible bases, but actually detecting the particle moving up is not
like detecting it moving left, then right. |move> may be decomposable
into a superposition of |copy> + |suicide>, but "move" is still not "copy"
plus "suicide".
-- Eliezer S. Yudkowsky http://singinst.org/ Research Fellow, Singularity Institute for Artificial Intelligence
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