From: Damien Broderick (d.broderick@english.unimelb.edu.au)
Date: Thu May 31 2001 - 08:28:34 MDT
At 01:37 AM 5/31/01 -0700, Robert Bradbury wrote (and I apologize to Eugene
for helping keep this thread reduplicating in its identical but different
iterations):
>After watching Damien squirming in the most recent edition
>of "The Spike", that it "isn't him", I still haven't seen
>any substantive arguments that make the case
Squirming? Not on your nelly, mate. I'm dead set against it. Regardez vous:
==================
The bottom line, I conclude, is that physical and general brain-process
continuity support our current sense of continuing identity. They allow us
to believe that the person who wakes up tomorrow is the same one who went
to sleep tonight. What of awakening after ten years in a coma? Nobody
denies that this case is deeply traumatic, but still we assume that *the
same person* has woken up. Waking after half the brain is removed to
forestall death by cancer? No one denies that this case is even more deeply
troubling.
But look-- Even if *I* can't tell the difference between you and your
perfect clone, *you* surely can, as they strip your brain down.
Don't beam me up, Scotty
If I were copied by a teleport machine, xeroxed elsewhere by a `transporter
beam', and the one at the transmitter end was to be killed (to even up the
metaphysical balance of the universe), I'd go kicking and screaming... I'd
be not one whit reconciled by the simultaneous existence of my double in
the receiving pod-- *unless* I had remained, throughout, in perfect
nonlocal continuous connection/identity with him. In that case, I'd swiftly
get used to the notion that it was just like dropping off to sleep on the
jet and waking up in another town. Of course, I could be *fooled* into
believing that this were the case, even if a destructive-uploading expert
knew it wasn't, which would soothe my dread. `Just step into the nice warm
shower, Damien...' But I'd rather not be deceived in that way.
THE SPIKE, p. 212
=======================
The only squirming I'm doing there is away from that damned
destructive/reconstructive matter duplicator...
Damien Broderick the XXVII
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