You awake after being abducted, you’ve been EXACTLY cloned including memories and the other ‘you’ is sat opposite you.
To leave all that you have to do is have one, and ONLY one, of you press a button in the middle of a table. There are no windows, the room has perfectly cyclindrical walls and you have no bearings (so you can’t both think and say the person nearest north press the button).
I’m arguing that the person sat opposite you will beieve you to be the clone and will think exactly what you think, speak when you speak and stop speaking when you stop speaking.
So would you go mad first or would some random fluctations in the brain lead to 2 seperate entities?
Anyone manage to get themselves out (you can’t kill the imposter as they’ll also think that and fight exactly how you do)
Nask
p.s. I can’t think of a satisfiable way out of this one so can’t supply answers.
It may take a little while but random fluctuations in the brain would lead to two separate entities.
However, it’s a false dilemma. Since there is inherent uncertainty in matter, you and your clone wouldn’t be identical even when you started the experiment.
It seems to me there are any number of ways out, because pressing the one button gets you both out. So all you need is some way to distinguish any difference, it doesn’t matter which way the difference points. So we boths muss each other’s hair at once. I find it hard to belive that the mussing will end up the exact same. We look at each other and whoever has a hair closer to the tip of the nose presses the button. Or we both do 200 jumping jacks and whoever has a bead of sweat fall first…
OK, on some level you can argue that the hair mussing will be the exact same. Or that the sweat will fall the exact same. But I don’t believe it. On some level, there are bound to be differences, even if incredibly microscopic. Go down to quantum mechanics if you want. (I am ignoring those who claim quantum mechanics plays a role in thought processes.) Then what you need to do is find chaotic systems that will amplify any difference between you. (Chatoic in the sense that small differences in initial input lead to large differences in output.) I think hair mussing or sweat falling might do it, but you could come up with other examples. Breathe in each others faces for 15 minutes and go to sleep. One of you will presumably have gotten slightly more CO2 than the other, and that might affect the wake-up time. Both of you fall down on the same spot of floor at the same time, I think you will not bounce off each other like perfectly elastic bodies, but there will be some resutling assymetry which can be exploited.
Under the stated conditions, the best thing that I can think of is to engage in a game of random chance. You couldn’t simply flip a coin because you would both want heads, or both want to flip, or something like that. If both of you think the same way, though, another type of “random” game would serve well. Playing rock, scissors, paper, for example. Even thinking the same way, you won’t mimic each other perfectly. If that fails, there is always something along the lines of “bloody knuckles,” played to first blood, and the blooded one pushes the button. There would be no conflict this way, because “winning” conditions would have been predetermined by both people.
Viewing this strictly as a logic puzzle in which the rule is that the two of us are going to do and think exactly the same things at the same time:
How about we both simultaneously flip a coin, and if they come up both heads or both tails, we’ll flip again. Otherwise, the one who got “heads” pushes the button.
Oh, they took our money, too … or maybe you’re going to argue that because our musculature is exactly identical, we will always flip the coins with exactly identical results.
Actually, all you need to do is find a randomizer of some kind like that that can be operated by the both of you simultaneously with a prior “agreement” as to how it is going to determine who pushes the button.
In real life, there are no such things as perfect donkey’s paradoxes.
(The donkey’s paradox is the old chestnut about the donkey that starves to death between two equally tasty bales of hay because it can’t decide which one to eat. Your puzzle is pretty close to it.)
Immediately upon awakening, both turn and look at one another. At that point, one is looking to his left and one to his right. Since most people are inherently right or left handed, one of them will be looking in the direction of his handedness. That should induce enough of a difference in perspective that the two personalities will diverge even if they were exactly the same initially. It’s the butterfly effect. – Unless of course they were asleep standing up with their heads and eyes intentionally pointed directly at one another.
How about a game of chess? If your strategy is to mimic your opponent’s moves, there comes a point when your strategy breaks down, either because your opponent moves, say, his queen to capture your queen, or because you’re in check, and mirroring the last move made will leave you in check. Or, of course, if you’re in checkmate.
I’m not sure why there has to be some way of distinguishing between the two yous. If youse (NY version) are able to agree on how to determine a difference (game of chance, hair mussing, etc), then youse are able to agree that “I” will push the button.
If the two will behave exactly the same, a game of chance will help. You’ll both shout at each other “Heads I push the button, tails you push.” You can’t play chess because you’ll never agree on which one makes the first move. In fact you can’t have any kind of discussion because you’ll both speak the same thing at the same time.
this seems kinda simple if you think about it, (but I may be cheating) I’m building on muttrox’s ideas here, but instead of comparing something about yourself which is apparently exactly the same down to the electron (or whatever) you could use an external source like say a wall, instead of playing bloody knuckels with each other, in which case you would both bleed an equal degree at the same time play it with the wall, even though you are the same the wall will have subtle differences in strength allowing one of you to bleed first.
If there is nothing other in the room other than the two of you (naked, one would suppose), you could have a spitting contest (or peeing), towards the button (nearest the button wins). You would assume some randomness in the trajectory of the pseudo-missile.
The donkey paradox reminds me of a time when a group of friends and myself went drinking in a London pub. One of the group who had had too much ale, left early. Some time later the rest of us left, only to find him still outside the PH, his excuse was that he “couldn’t decide whether it was best to turn left or right to get home”. (straight up)
Well, there would be no problems with deciding who to go first or anything with me.
I wouldnt mind if the fake me went first.
But then again, i could be the fake me couldnt i?