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Article 3149 of comp.ai.philosophy:
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>From: markc@smsc.sony.com (Mark Corscadden)
Newsgroups: comp.ai.philosophy,sci.philosophy.tech
Subject: Re: red light / blue light scenario: a better forum?
Message-ID: <1992Jan26.004726.24463@smsc.sony.com>
Date: 26 Jan 92 00:47:26 GMT
References: <1991Dec20.004238.11206@smsc.sony.com> <1992Jan23.194357.8713@smsc.sony.com> <1992Jan24.022109.23048@convex.com>
Organization: Sony Microsystems Corp, San Jose, CA
Lines: 127

In article <1992Jan24.022109.23048@convex.com> cash@convex.com (Peter Cash) writes:
  <description of red light / blue light scenario deleted>
>Let's take a look at what you've said above. After a bit of thinking, it
>occurred to me that one possible source of confusion in your story is your
>equivocation over the word "you". That is, if I foolishly agree to subject
>myself to your experiment and lie down under the apparatus below the blue
>light, then do _I_ open my eyes and look up at the red light? When you say,
>"The light above you was blue when you closed your eyes", then you are
>begging the question at issue.

True, my using the word "you", given the details of this scenario, is
asking for trouble once the duplication has taken place.  Which "you"
am I directing the question to?  As you say, this begs the question.
Since it doesn't work to directly ask "what do you think you would
experience in this scenario", an indirect approach seems to be required.

I've tried to indirectly maneuver people into letting me know what I
want to know, by devising a new scenario in which they have to make a
simple binary choice rather than trying to answer an ill-formed question.
The idea being to avoid asking for the information I want directly, with
all the semantic nightmares that entails, and instead to try and learn
about what they believe indirectly, based on the nature of the choice
they make.

This approach has failed miserably.  First, if there is nothing serious
at stake then people have simply claimed that there is no basis for making
any choice; that they are indifferent to which option is chosen.  Second,
if stakes are contrived to be very severe, then the discussion breaks
down into an analysis of the stakes themselves and the duplication scenario
is lost in the smoke.

Perhaps a modified scenario, which calls for a simple choice to be made
instead of asking an open-ended question, will work if it is presented
with a completely transparent explanation of why the scenario is set up
the way it is and what I hope to learn from the choice a person makes.
It is to be understood in advance that the specific scenario given is
flawed as an investigative tool, but that the reader will be capable of
apprehending the intent and compensating for the flaws (hopefully).

The new scenario presumes that some method exists to motivate a player
to maximize their self-interest in a competition where their gain may
be at the expense of another's loss.  The "motivational tool":

  Imagine two people, A and B, each identical to you.  Can we devise
  some experience that A would be motivated to try and have, at the
  expense of denying B the opportunity to have that same desirable
  experience?  Since A and B are copies of you, we presume that you
  should know what they would or wouldn't do.  For some people, they
  just would not be willing to participate in such an experiment.
  
  If A and B were copies of me, the answer would be "yes".  I'd just
  make up a silly medal that says "duplication game winner" on it.  Both
  A and B would be comfortable trying to maximize their chance of being
  the winner at the expense of their "twin", since there's no real harm
  done; and both would be willing to try their best to be the winner for
  the sake of the experiment.  Substitute anything that would work for
  you, if such a thing exists.  Something like this is essential to the
  new scenario.  You have to want to *experience* what it's like to win
  that medal!

Given the tool above, here is the new scenario.  You have two choices.
You pick one today.  Whatever you pick today will take place tomorrow.
The question is: what do you choose today?

  choice 1
  Tomorrow, a duplicate of you will be created and awarded the medal.
  The original won't get anything.

  choice 2
  No duplicate will be created tomorrow.  There will be a random lottery,
  and you will have one chance in ten of getting the medal.

At this point, if you have a workable "motivational tool", the question
"what choice will you make?" is a perfectly clear one, free from semantic
ambiguities and question-begging.  So what is your answer?

Now for the promised explicit description of the motivation behind this
game, with my apologies to those who feel that the motives are already
transparent.  This is a simple game intended to reveal which of two simple
alternatives you believe in.  You may well find both belief systems
described below to be too simplistic for your tastes.  You may also find
that the following descriptions are laden with the usual accurst semantic
problems which will make their meanings quite questionable, but I don't
know how to avoid that.

  belief system A
  You feel that your personal experience is tied to your current
  physical self.  Thus, choice 1 offers you no hope to feel for
  yourself, tomorrow, what it's like to win that medal; although it
  would allow your to-be-created duplicate to have that experience.
  A player who believes this way and is playing within the spirit
  of the game will make choice 2, to maximize their own chance of
  winning the medal tomorrow, at the expense of their duplicate.

  belief system B
  You feel that it's possible for your personal linear sequence of life
  experiences, what you feel within you, to start in the original and end
  in the duplicate.  It's a toss-up whether you will *be* the duplicate
  or the original in the end, in every sense that's relevant to what
  you will feel internally.  Thus, you make choice 1 in order to have
  a 50/50 chance, tomorrow, of feeling what it's like to win the medal.

Again, the descriptions of alternatives A and B above are fraught
with the very semantic problems which made the original scenario so
unacceptable.  The whole idea of offering the two choices was to thrust
the entire problem, semantics and all, back onto the reader.  So if
the alternatives A and B read like nonsense to you, trash them.  But
please try to make a choice (1 or 2) and explain why you made it.


>You might say that the matter changes drastically if _I_ am the one who
>wakes up under the red light. But that can't be--not according to the story
>you've told me. I will wake up under the blue light--my duplicate wakes up
>under the red light. To be sure, he will seem to remember writing these
>very lines--but he won't have written them.

If I understand this right, Peter would make choice 2 and take the one
in ten chance of winning, since choice 1 allows only the duplicate to
win.  Yes?  By the way, this is the opposite of what I believe.  I would
go for choice 1 and expect to have, going in, a 50/50 chance of coming
out as the duplicate and experiencing whatever the duplicate experiences.

>Peter Cash   |       (apologies to Ludwig Wittgenstein)      |cash@convex.com

Mark Corscadden
markc@smsc.sony.com
work: (408)944-4086


