I tend to agree with Xannon, that 'fairness' is defined by society. So the question is if the societal moral norms still affect the three opponents. If Xannon decides "we are still members of society where equal shares for everyone are considered fair" he might side with Yancy, share the pie into 1/3's and label Zaire to be a criminal. If he decides "we are out in the desert with no society around to push its moral values unto us" he might side with Zaire, divide the pie in 1/2's and tell Yancy to shove his ideas of equality up his behind.

The whole Y's "fair distribution is an even split, not a distribution arrived at by a 'fair resolution procedure' that everyone agrees on" argument seems to either say 'fair' == 'equal division' or bring in some sort of external source of morality "The Howly Blooble says we shall divide equally and so we shall."

The Y's intuitive grasp of fairness seems to be derived from ideas of modern western society, but even in our world there is, for example, a medical practise of triage where a doctor spends more time with patients who require more treatment. Nobody seems to call that unfair. As already have been mentioned the same situation would be different if X and Y had big dinners an hour ago and Z hasn't eaten in two days. I suppose in that case Y would be arguing that it is fair to give the whole pie to Z.

It seems, that a lot of problems here stem from the fact that a lot of existing language is governed by the intuition of non-deterministic world. Common usage of words "choice", "could", "deliberation" etc. assume non-deterministic universe where state of "could be four apples" is actually possible. If our minds had easier time grasping that deliberation and action are phenomenons of the same grade, that action stems from deliberation, but there is no question of being able to "choose differently", that existence deliberation itself is itself predetermined, we would have far fewer comments in this thread :) And Andy and Roland wouldn't have to post the warnings and Hopeful wouldn't have to struggle with "illusion of choice". It seems a lot of comments here are laboring under misapprehension, that "if I knew that I lived in deterministic world, I would be able to forgo all the moral consideration and walk away from the orphanage", where while this is definitely the case (a universe where you make such a choice would have to accommodate all the states leading to the action of walking away), nevertheless in the universe where you step into the fire to save a kid there is no state of you walking away anywhere.

Robin Z: thank you for enlightening me to formal classification of free will/determinism positions. As far as I know, the modern state of knowledge seems to supply strong evidence of us living in a deterministic universe. Once we take this as a fact, it seems to me the question of "free will" becomes more of a theological issue then a rational one.

What's the point of these duplicate posts?

I am sorry. I should have read the rest of the series BEFORE starting to ask questions about this particular article. Please disregard my previous post.

I am having a bit of trouble with this series. I can see that you are explaining that reality consists of states with "amplitude" numbers assigned to each state.

1. You seem to assign arbitrary numbers to the initial states and an arbitrary amplitude change rules to mirrors. Why is this in any way applicable to objective reality? Or are these numbers non-arbitrary? Or am I just missing something elementary? 2. Why states of photons or detectors are complex numbers and mirror is a function? 3. How does time factor into all of this?

Speaking of shortcuts and connotations, it always amazed me, that a single person might "always give money to homeless people" and "hate bums" :)

AnneC, I am russian, but I hate cold weather, I don't play chess well and I cannot hold my liquor nearly as well as I should to fit the stereotype. I am fairly sure though, that statistically speaking, russians are more tolerant to cold and can drink more, simply as a result of natural selection and percentage of people playing reasonable chess is bigger for historical reasons. You have mentioned, how much pressure you felt when child, to fit in with "female" stereotypes, so wouldn't it be reasonable to assume, that due to this pressure, percent of girls who actually like science might be less then percent of boys who like science? Boys, who are frequently even encouraged to like science/engineering activities. Intuitively though, I think, that correlation between "girls" and "don't like science" is smothered into irrelevancy by the "people" and "don't like science" correlation.

It is very insensitive to refer to people using the W word the way you do.

Oh, I get it, the other box couldn't contain a dagger as well, because the king explicitly said that only one box has a dagger in it. But he never claimed that the writings on boxes are in any way related to the contents of the boxes. Is that it? Or is it that if the "both are true or both are false" sign is false, basically anything goes?

This reminds me strongly of a silly russian puzzle. In the original it is about turtles, but I sort of prefer to translate it using bulls. So, three bulls are walking single file across the field. The first bull says "There are two bulls in behind me and no bulls in front of me." The second one says "There is a bull in front of me and a bull behind me." The third one says "There are two bulls in front of me and two bulls behind me."

And if the king wanted to be particularly nasty the other box would also contain a dagger :)