From: Jason Joel Thompson (jasonjthompson@home.com)
Date: Wed Dec 06 2000 - 13:28:23 MST
----- Original Message -----
From: "John Clark" <jonkc@worldnet.att.net>
> Jason Joel Thompson <jasonjthompson@home.com> Wrote:
>
> > "The Original" is a reference to the accumulated movement of
a -particular-
> > pattern through time
>
> Ok fine, but using that definition why can't "The Original" be "The Copy",
> why can't the pattern move from one to the other? For that matter, why
can't
> there be two "Originals" if pattern defines the concept as you say, after
all a
> pattern is made of information and information can be duplicated.
Yes, but you'll note my emphasis of the word "particular." As it stands, MY
discrete experience of reality is contained within a -particular- pattern.
Unless you are proposing a means by which that particular discrete reality
experiencer is able to transition to a new substrate, *I* (by definition)
will not be thrilled with the copy process. The copy process could fail and
the results would be identical with respect to the perspective of the
original discrete reality experiencer-- and again, at this point, that's the
only perspective that matters to me.
>
> > Only because you've killed the insider. A fine solution.
>
> Yes I think it's a fine solution too because there is no injured party.
> Death means having a last thought and in this case you didn't have one,
> your thoughts went on uninterrupted.
Well, that's sort of a fast and loose definition of death, but I can safely
adopt it in this context because I don't differentiate in the same way
between the thinker and the thoughts. Further, its difficult to even call
the new pattern MY thoughts, since they are discrete from the original.
What if you were to make 10 copies? Would they all be my thoughts? Of
course not. They would each be their own divergent reality experiencer and
would have necessarily discrete and original identities.
I think its safe to say that we represent a pattern with sufficient
complexity to support all sorts of interesting emergent properties. One of
those properties is what I can call the higher brain experiencer (simply to
divorce it from other psychological mish-mash.) You cannot expect that this
discrete entity is going to make any sort of transition should you choose to
copy the human matrix as you would software. You -will- have pleasing and
effective results if the copying resolution is fine-grained enough-- I don't
dispute that. But should you leave the 'original' intact, you now have TWO
discrete experiencers-- if not, one of the higher brain experiencers has had
his/her existence terminated.
>
> >My particular pattern does not have a contiguous experience
>
> I'm not sure what you mean by contiguous experience but your subjective
> experience is certainly continuous, I could make a copy of you, destroy
> "The Original" wait a thousand years and then activate "The Copy" and
you'd
> never notice any interruption, at least not until you looked at the
external world.
How are you transferring my subjective experience of reality across the two
humans? If you don't destroy the original, do I somehow get to experience
both realities simultaneously in a single brain? The mere act of creating a
copy does nothing to preserve the continuity of my subjective experience--
you could create such a copy covertly and I, unawares, could walk out onto
the street and get hit by a bus-- does my subjective experience then
mysteriously jump across to the clone?
Let us suppose that you make a copy of me. Dazed by the copying process, I
slip out of the "termination chamber" and go home and go to bed. The copy
wakes up. It thinks its me. You think its me. Is it me? Or am I now
slowly dozing off to a bad Saturday Night Live episode? Realizing that I've
slipped out, you tell the copy to go to bed and you send an assassin over to
my house. He sneaks in and kills me while I sleep. The copy wakes up in
the morning in the lab. NOW is it me?
> >and frankly, I couldn't care less (literally: couldn't) if my
identical copy is
> >happy with how things turned out.
>
> You're wrong, I know for a fact you do care because you see you are that
copy,
> I just made you 10 seconds ago.
Well, that's fine 'cause *I* am the copy, so obviously I'm happy with how
things turned out. I'm not so sure about that dude that you killed 10
seconds ago...
Or did you really kill him? Maybe he's off doing something else-- if so,
I'm sure he's not confusing himself for me.
--
::jason.joel.thompson::
::founder::
www.wildghost.com
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