Rationality Quotes June 2013

Thomas

Another month has passed and here is a new rationality quotes thread. The usual rules are:

Please post all quotes separately, so that they can be upvoted or downvoted separately. (If they are strongly related, reply to your own comments. If strongly ordered, then go ahead and post them together.)
Do not quote yourself.
Do not quote from Less Wrong itself, Overcoming Bias, or HPMoR.
No more than 5 quotes per person per monthly thread, please.

Another month has passed and here is a new rationality quotes thread. The usual rules are:

Please post all quotes separately, so that they can be upvoted or downvoted separately. (If they are strongly related, reply to your own comments. If strongly ordered, then go ahead and post them together.)
Do not quote yourself.
Do not quote from Less Wrong itself, Overcoming Bias, or HPMoR.
No more than 5 quotes per person per monthly thread, please.

What I meant is that some time after the cloning, the clones' lives would become distinguishable. One of them would experience X, while the other would experience ~X. Then I would anticipate experiencing X with 50% probability.

If they live identical lives forever, then I can anticipate "being either clone" or as I would call it, "not being able to tell which clone I am".

My first instinctive response is "be wary of theories of personal identity where your future depends on a coin flip". You're essentially saying "one of the clones believes that it is your current 'I' experiencing 'X', and it has a 50% chance of being wrong". That seems off.

I think to be consistent, you have to anticipate experiencing both X and ~X with 100% probability. The problem is that the way anticipation works with probability depends implicitly on there only being one future self that things can happen to.