From: Harvey Newstrom (mail@HarveyNewstrom.com)
Date: Sat Dec 09 2000 - 15:06:36 MST
At 12:34pm -0500 12/9/00, John Clark wrote:
>Rather than answer such questions
>let me try to clarify my position with a thought experiment I sent
>to the list a few years ago.
Your duplicate earth doesn't explain anything. It merely restates
your position. You claim that the duplicates are somehow connected
or mystically "one". But you don't explain why you claim this.
>The bottom line is we don't have thoughts and emotions, we are thoughts and
>emotions, and the idea that the particular hardware that is rendering them
>changes their meaning is as crazy as my computer making the meaning of your
>post different from what it was on yours.
According to this line of reasoning, I don't ever need to watch a
movie. It doesn't matter whether my particular hardware experiences
the movie. Someone somewhere probably saw the same movie and reacted
the way I would. According to you, those parallel instances of the
same experience are mine just as much as if I had them in this body.
That may be your definition of watching a movie, but I don't want the
attribute of movie watching to exist after I die, I want to
personally experience this attribute the same as I do now.
>Try the experiment.
>Switch the position of the two hydrogen atoms and you find that the
>state of the
>system remains identical, the two could be instantaneously changing position
>and there would be no way two tell and no reason to care.
Why do you assume this? One may be sharing a bond with an oxygen
molecule, while one is not. One may be vibrating at a different
temperature than the other. One may be traveling at a different
velocity than the other. One may have its electron excited to a
higher level than the other. One may have acquired a neutron and
become part of a heavy-water molecule. If these two hydrogen atoms
suddenly switched places, there could be a difference. Just because
two parts of a system are identical does not mean that they is only
one such part.
>Time for another thought experiment, me and my exact copy and standing an
>equal distance from the center of a perfectly symmetrical room. A
>mad scientist
>presses the button on a magic machine that he claims will
>instantaneously exchange
>my brain with that of my exact copy.
So you can mock up a room so each person sees the same exact thing.
We can do this with two people who are not similar. It doesn't prove
a thing. You still aren't explaining why you think that just putting
them in the same environment mystically links them so that they
become "one" with each other. Do you believe that all Sufi mystics
become "one" when they all meditate on the same mantra and put their
thought processes into exactly similar states?
>I maintain that absolutely nothing
>is happening, not objectively and not subjectively, and if there is
>any difference between
>this madman and a charlatan the difference is too small to be measured.
But you are using circular logic. You require them to be programmed
the same, put in a symmetrical room, and not marked so we can tell
the difference. Then you claim because we cannot tell the
difference, that there is no difference.
What if they were wearing numbered prison uniforms? Would they be
different people? What if the numbers were the same? Would the
become the same person? What if they tried on 100 shirts in a row?
Would they merge and unmerge as the same person depending which shirt
they were wearing? What if the numbers were covered so they couldn't
tell the difference?
Again, you keep restating your case, but you don't say why you
believe this. I understand that you are transferring information
from one body to the next. With enough information transferred, the
new body can emulate the old one. A good actor can do this today.
What transfers the consciousness between one to the other? When I
send you these notes, and you read my exact sentences, I don't feel
that I am transferring bits of consciousness to you. If I did, I
could kill myself right now, because anything I might think has
probably been thought or will be thought be somebody else. If your
goal is to preserve information, all humans could die and floppy
disks could live on. However, those floppies aren't alive, and if
they were, they probably aren't me, and even if they were another me,
this me still loses consciousness and dies of old age.
-- Harvey Newstrom <HarveyNewstrom.com>
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