From: Charlie Stross (charlie@antipope.org)
Date: Fri Jun 01 2001 - 03:59:44 MDT
On Wed, May 30, 2001 at 06:37:28PM -0400, Deniz Sarioz wrote:
>
> Anyway, the claim is that the two were the same person to begin with. If
> you make the bold claim that two distinct (however similar) brains can be
> merged at all, you can't deny that this is possible. That "proof" can be
> used to show that everyone is the same, an absurd proposition from a
> materialistic point of view. The glitch in the proof is the merging--
Wrong. The glitch is in the logic, which omits any consideration of the
time dimension.
We consider two items that exist at different spatial locations and the
same temporal location to be different; we *may* consider two items that
exist at different spatial locations and different temporal locations
to be the same item (especially if the continuous intervening temporal
locations contain a similar item at continually varying spatial locations
between the two items we're considering).
You may be able to merge two minds, but you won't be able to violate the
constraint that before they were merged, they existed at the same temporal
location in different spatial locations.
(So when dealing with personality uploads I think it's important to
distinguish between "duplicating" my state vector, and "moving" it from
one medium to another.)
-- Charlie
"Your password must be at least 18770 characters and cannot repeat any of your
previous 30689 passwords. Please type a different password. Type a password
that meets these requirements in both text boxes."
(Error message from Microsoft Windows 2000 SP1)
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