From: John Clark (jonkc@worldnet.att.net)
Date: Thu Dec 07 2000 - 09:32:50 MST
Jason Joel Thompson <jasonjthompson@home.com> Wrote:
> you'll note my emphasis of the word "particular." As it stands, MY
> discrete experience of reality is contained within a -particular- pattern.
A pattern is nothing but information, if it's the same information then it's
the same particular pattern.
> Unless you are proposing a means by which that particular discrete reality
> experiencer is able to transition to a new substrate,
I am proposing such a mechanism, use a pattern to know how to arrange off
the shelf atoms in the same way they were before, the result is another you.
> *I* (by definition)
I'd like to hear what your definition of "I" is. I'll give you two of mine, both work pretty well.
1) I am John Clark's thoughts.
2) I am matter that behaves in a John Clarkian way.
> [I] will not be thrilled with the copy process.
You might have been copied and destroyed a billion times a second every second of your
life from the day you were born and you wouldn't even know it. As I said, a nanosecond is
far too short to have a thought, and yet something still thinks, something is still conscious.
That something is you.
>The copy process could fail and the results would be identical
Not so, if the copy process failed externally things would be very different, nobody could
talk to me anymore for one thing, and my subjective experience would be different too
because I wouldn't have one.
> with respect to the perspective of the original discrete reality experiencer
I've been trying to puzzle out from your context what "the original" is but I've been unsuccessful,
it might as well be Egyptian hieroglyphics, all I'm sure of is that it's 11 ASCII characters.
> Well, that's sort of a fast and loose definition of death,
Except for pure mathematics I don't think precise definitions are very important but
If you have a better definition of death than having a last thought I'd love to hear it.
>its difficult to even call the new pattern MY thoughts, since they are discrete
>from the original.
What's discrete about it? And what's "the original"?
> What if you were to make 10 copies? Would they all be my thoughts?
Certainly, they would all be Jason Joel Thompson's thoughts.
>They would each be their own divergent reality experiencer
As time progressed they would start to diverge into different people due to
differences in the environment they experience or just because of random
fluctuations, but at the instant they were made they'd all be you.
> How are you transferring my subjective experience of reality across the two
> humans?
Superbly.
>If you don't destroy the original, do I somehow get to experience
>both realities simultaneously in a single brain?
Only if both of you are in a identical environment, but then experiencing
two identical environments is undistinguishable from experiencing one.
> 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?
Yes, assuming the copy was made a nanosecond before the bus hit.
>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
Let's cut to the chase, there is one way and one way only that could be true,
if the holly rollers turned out to be right and the human soul exists. I consider
the likelihood of that to be too low to worry about
John K Clark jonkc@att.net
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