One you in the worlds with total weight of 0.001 will observe remaining on Earth, while either the exact or approximate you in the worlds with total weight of 1.000 will observe arriving on Mars. That is all that actually happens.
Then they’ll start making strange proclamations about their newfound epistemic states and empirical observations from the personal observation stream relevant to theories of identity, but that’s beside the point.
Your comment can be interpreted as a statement that theories of identity are meaningless. If they are meaningless, then copy=original view prevails. From the third-person point of view, there is no difference between copy and original. In that case, there is no need to perform the experiment.
There is a full explanation right there, in the description of the thought experiment. It describes all outcomes, including all observations and theoretical conclusions made by all the people-instances. We can look at this and ask whether those theoretical conclusions are correct, whether the theories the people-instances use to arrive at them are valid. You can tell what all the details of outcomes are in advance of actually doing this.
Personal experimence of people existing in the world is mediated by the physical states of their brains (or other physical hardware). So we can in principle predict what it says by asking about the physical content of the world. There are agents/people that don’t have concrete instances in the world, and we can ask what they experience. They might leave the physical world, or enter it back, getting instantiated once more or for the first time. They might persistently exist outside concrete instantiation in the world, only communicating with it through reasoning about their behavior, which might be a more resource efficient way to implement a person than a mere concrete upload. But that’s a different setting, not what this post describes.
They might persistently exist outside concrete instantiation in the world, only communicating with it through reasoning about their behavior, which might be a more resource efficient way to implement a person than a mere concrete upload
That only seems to make sense if the next instant of subjective experience is undefined in these situations (and so we have to default to a 3rd person perspective).
A 3rd person perspective is there anyway, can be used regardless, even if other perspectives are also applicable. In this case it explains everything already, so we can’t learn additional things in other ways.
Any “perceive yourself to X” phenomenon is something that happens within cognition of some abstract agent/person instance, whether they exist in some world or not. What kind of person instance is “perceiving themselves to black out” (that is, having blacked out)? Ghosts and afterlife seem more grounded than that. But for Earth/Mars question, both options are quite clear, and there is a you that perceives either of them in some of the possibilities, we can point to where those that perceive each of them are, and that is what would be correct for those instances to conclude about themselves, that they exist in the situations that contain them, known from the statement of the thought experiment.
What kind of person instance is “perceiving themselves to black out” (that is, having blacked out)?
It’s not a person instance, it’s an event that happens to the person’s stream of consciousness. Either the stream of consciousness truly, objectively ends, and a same-pattern copy will appear on Mars, mistakenly believing they’re the very same stream-of-consciousness as that of the original person.
Or the stream is truly, objectively preserved, and the person can calmly enter, knowing that their consciousness will continue on Mars.
I don’t think a 3rd-person analysis answers this question.
(With the correct answer being, of course, that the stream is truly, objectively preserved.)
Since I don’t think a 3rd person analysis answers the original problem, I also don’t think it answers it in case we massively complicate it like the OP has.
The 3rd person perspective assumes the existence (or at least possibility) of some observer X who knows everything and can observe how events evolve across all branches.
However, this idea assumes that this observer X will be singular and unique, will continue to exist as one entity, and will linearly collect information about unfolding events.
These assumptions clearly relate to ideas of personal identity and copying: it is assumed that X exists continuously in time and cannot be copied. Otherwise, there would be several 3rd person perspectives with different observations.
This concept can be better understood through real physical experiments: an experiment can only be performed if the experimenter exists continuously and is not replaced by another experimenter midway through.
By “3rd person perspective” I mean considering the world itself, there is no actual third person needed for it. It’s the same framing as used by a physicist when talking about the early stages of the universe when humans were not yet around, or when talking about a universe with alternative laws of physics, or when talking about a small system that doesn’t include any humans as its part. Or when a mathematician talks about a curve on a plane.
Knowing absolutely everything is not necessary to know the relevant things, and in this case we know all the people at all times, and the states of their minds, their remembered experiences and possible reasoning they might perform based on those experiences. Observations take time and cognition to process, they should always be considered from slightly in the future relative to when raw data enters a mind. So it’s misleading to talk about a person that will experience an observation shortly, and what that experience entails, the clearer situation is looking at a person who has already experienced that observation a bit in the past and can now think about it. When a copied person looks back at their memories, or a person about to be copied considers what’s about to happen, the “experience” of being copied is nowhere to be found, there is only the observation of the new situation that the future copies find themselves in, and that has nothing to do with the splitting into multiple copies of the person from the past.
One you in the worlds with total weight of 0.001 will observe remaining on Earth, while either the exact or approximate you in the worlds with total weight of 1.000 will observe arriving on Mars. That is all that actually happens.
Then they’ll start making strange proclamations about their newfound epistemic states and empirical observations from the personal observation stream relevant to theories of identity, but that’s beside the point.
Your comment can be interpreted as a statement that theories of identity are meaningless. If they are meaningless, then copy=original view prevails. From the third-person point of view, there is no difference between copy and original. In that case, there is no need to perform the experiment.
There is a full explanation right there, in the description of the thought experiment. It describes all outcomes, including all observations and theoretical conclusions made by all the people-instances. We can look at this and ask whether those theoretical conclusions are correct, whether the theories the people-instances use to arrive at them are valid. You can tell what all the details of outcomes are in advance of actually doing this.
Personal experimence of people existing in the world is mediated by the physical states of their brains (or other physical hardware). So we can in principle predict what it says by asking about the physical content of the world. There are agents/people that don’t have concrete instances in the world, and we can ask what they experience. They might leave the physical world, or enter it back, getting instantiated once more or for the first time. They might persistently exist outside concrete instantiation in the world, only communicating with it through reasoning about their behavior, which might be a more resource efficient way to implement a person than a mere concrete upload. But that’s a different setting, not what this post describes.
Interesting. Can you elaborate?
That only seems to make sense if the next instant of subjective experience is undefined in these situations (and so we have to default to a 3rd person perspective).
A 3rd person perspective is there anyway, can be used regardless, even if other perspectives are also applicable. In this case it explains everything already, so we can’t learn additional things in other ways.
Does the 3rd person perspective explain if you survive a teleporter, or if you perceive yourself to black out forever (like after a car accident)?
Any “perceive yourself to X” phenomenon is something that happens within cognition of some abstract agent/person instance, whether they exist in some world or not. What kind of person instance is “perceiving themselves to black out” (that is, having blacked out)? Ghosts and afterlife seem more grounded than that. But for Earth/Mars question, both options are quite clear, and there is a you that perceives either of them in some of the possibilities, we can point to where those that perceive each of them are, and that is what would be correct for those instances to conclude about themselves, that they exist in the situations that contain them, known from the statement of the thought experiment.
It’s not a person instance, it’s an event that happens to the person’s stream of consciousness. Either the stream of consciousness truly, objectively ends, and a same-pattern copy will appear on Mars, mistakenly believing they’re the very same stream-of-consciousness as that of the original person.
Or the stream is truly, objectively preserved, and the person can calmly enter, knowing that their consciousness will continue on Mars.
I don’t think a 3rd-person analysis answers this question.
(With the correct answer being, of course, that the stream is truly, objectively preserved.)
Since I don’t think a 3rd person analysis answers the original problem, I also don’t think it answers it in case we massively complicate it like the OP has.
(Edited for clarity.)
The 3rd person perspective assumes the existence (or at least possibility) of some observer X who knows everything and can observe how events evolve across all branches.
However, this idea assumes that this observer X will be singular and unique, will continue to exist as one entity, and will linearly collect information about unfolding events.
These assumptions clearly relate to ideas of personal identity and copying: it is assumed that X exists continuously in time and cannot be copied. Otherwise, there would be several 3rd person perspectives with different observations.
This concept can be better understood through real physical experiments: an experiment can only be performed if the experimenter exists continuously and is not replaced by another experimenter midway through.
By “3rd person perspective” I mean considering the world itself, there is no actual third person needed for it. It’s the same framing as used by a physicist when talking about the early stages of the universe when humans were not yet around, or when talking about a universe with alternative laws of physics, or when talking about a small system that doesn’t include any humans as its part. Or when a mathematician talks about a curve on a plane.
Knowing absolutely everything is not necessary to know the relevant things, and in this case we know all the people at all times, and the states of their minds, their remembered experiences and possible reasoning they might perform based on those experiences. Observations take time and cognition to process, they should always be considered from slightly in the future relative to when raw data enters a mind. So it’s misleading to talk about a person that will experience an observation shortly, and what that experience entails, the clearer situation is looking at a person who has already experienced that observation a bit in the past and can now think about it. When a copied person looks back at their memories, or a person about to be copied considers what’s about to happen, the “experience” of being copied is nowhere to be found, there is only the observation of the new situation that the future copies find themselves in, and that has nothing to do with the splitting into multiple copies of the person from the past.