From: Lee Corbin (lcorbin@tsoft.com)
Date: Sun Apr 06 2003 - 23:18:22 MDT
Eliezer writes
> Rafal Smigrodzki wrote
> > Hal Finney [wrote]
> > > 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.
Something's not right here, because it seems to me that moving
obtains from letting delta t approach zero in copy+suicide
scenarios. In other words, just as in operating systems and
disk transfer operations, moving is often tantamount to copy
plus erasure.
So, since erasure (or suicide) *does* decrease measure in the
many-worlds, what could be amiss? I think that the answer is
that in the copy+suicide (i.e. move) case, no suicide really
takes place---the data is read into memory, the bits on disk
cleared, and the bits replaced elsewhere with the memory
zeroed. But, frustratingly, this just "moves" the problem to
the first point at which the data was copied from disk into
memory!
So here must be the answer: the initial copying (whether it's
operating systems or teleporters we're talking about) occurs
when the subject is first scanned. In MWI-speak, this doubles
the measure of the subject! The clearing of the disk bits (or
elimination of the original), then restores the many worlds
measure back to what it was---and the interval of time between
these operations can be made as close to zero as desired.
Philosophic continuity is also preserved by regarding *moving*
as *copying+suicide*.
(Has anyone seen my notion---philosophic continuity---or anything
like it in print? The definition is:
A set of events or outcomes is "philosophically continuous"
if tiny differences in timing of processes results in tiny
differences in preference.
This was inspired by the abortion debate. If an egg is destroyed
10^-2 seconds before a sperm has reached it, then according to
some people the deaths involved is 0. Yet if the egg is destroyed
10^-2 seconds after a sperm has reached it, then they believe that
the number of deaths involved is 1. This holds true no matter how
small epsilon, i.e., 10^-2 is made, because there has to be an
instant (according to some theologies) in which a unit soul is
transferred to a living being, and destruction following that transfer
is a murder while destruction before that transfer is relatively
harmless.)
> 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".
Well, the way that superposition arises in most of these considerations
is that at some point in time the superposition decoheres, right? (A
good answer to this should occur in a new thread.) That is, the only
difference I know of between collapse of the wave function and decoherence
is that the latter does not eliminate outcomes, but just reduces their
measure (keeping the total constant).
Lee
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