From: Eugene.Leitl@lrz.uni-muenchen.de
Date: Mon Jun 04 2001 - 02:29:13 MDT
> "Smigrodzki, Rafal" wrote:
> As much as it might surprise you, I sincerely believe that it might be perfectly OK to
> do it. I would object to any method involving pain, suffering, or anticipation of such
I have no problem with that (though I would love to see how you would react to a
real experiment, where you're the one who's going to push the button which is going
to detonate the turban of plastique wound around your head -- it's perfectly painless,
though a bit hard on the cleaning up crew). Try to visualize it, the floodlit
clean white room, you sitting in it, and the other guy who used to be you waving you
buh-bye from behind bulletproof glass. Still feel like pressing the button?
> but an instantaneous decomposition would be OK. If both of us were in the same room and
> only one of us would be allowed to live, we could flip a coin and neither would cheat (I
> wouldn't cheat on myself), although we would prefer to live, even if we had to split the
Interesting attutude. I wouldn't cheat on the other guy, either, but preferably we
would both agree to make cheating as difficult as possible. Humans who're going to die
sometimes get desperate. And of course you might be damn sure the experimenter is going
to make sure the surviving one doesn't get him. Tit for tat, and stuff. I'm old-fashioned
that way.
> car. If the copy was made after my "original"'s deanimation, the problem would not exist
> at all. Of course, I would have to be quite sure that a sufficiently exact copy of me
> exists. I wouldn't mind it.
>
> > May I at least prick you with a pin? Strange, the other guy over there
> > didn't jump.
>
> Now this is not nice. My copy would not jump but would have a lot of empathy for me,
> just as I would empathize with him. We would do our best to pay it back, too. Surely
> there are people who would say "Who cares" about any pain they can't feel by direct
> neural input, and those should't be copied too much.
Of course it's not nice, but I didn't prick *you*. You don't need to look pissed,
it's the other guy over there who's going to get me. Uh-oh. Excuse me, gotta run.
> If I had taken Versed, I would't remember anything either. If we (copies) link up and
Very well, another substance I should not be taking. I should make a list of them,
some of these chemicals do really have nasty impacts. I've heard of the African
practice of women taking revenge on their husbands, by giving them a drug causing
severe brain damage. I'm not sure whether it's not an urban legend, but there
*are* some nasty molecules out there. I should actually really make a list...
> exchange data (should be a trifle if you have the tech to copy people in the first
> place), we would be one again. And if we don't link up, over time we will diverge enough
Sure, you can make you one being again via trajectory forcing, as long as the
diff is still small. But in this case the other guy *will* jump when I prick you.
He's incapable of moving an arm while you don't want to move that arm, in fact
you're incapable of not wanting to move that arm, because you're forcing the
fork prongs to fuse again.
As soon as you're one, perfectly synched, it's perfectly allright to off a
superfluous copy (provided you both agreed to fuse, as the other guy might
have thought different meanwhile), as there's only one person which happens
to be in two different places.
> that at some point I would say my copy is just my brother (probably when he starts
> listening to Britney Spears or something). There is no instantaneous fork for me but a
> gradual divergence. I agree that attitudes my differ on this point.
I'm arguing the shit did hit the fan when you look around, and realize you've
forked. Without advanced tricks like trajectory forcing this is pretty much
irreversible. I would argue against killing either me or him, and the other guy
would do just the same for me.
> I don't perceive these as problems. I know I could live quite well with my copies,
> because they would be just like me. Did you see "The 6th day"? There are persons who
I have absolutely no problem with living with my copies (we would get along nicely),
but nevertheless they would be entirely separate human beings, forking out to live
their own lives.
> couldn't accept copies, except when shifted in time (like the CEO of the firm in the
> movie, got copied after death, but treated his original like a piece of meat when he was
> resurrected too early), some people could deal quite well with their copies (like
> Arnold's character), and some wouldn't even try it (the religious guys).
Living with copies is an issue orthogonal to copies being you or not being you.
> If you miscount the number of legs in your chair, your real world future will be
> contrary to your expectations - you might trip. I know of only one form of reasoning
> applicable to such problems - arithmetics. If your math ideas are different, every sane
I know my math ideas are different, I usually start counting with zero. 0, 1, 2, 3, 4
fingers on your hand. I also think that the decimal system sucks, and we should
be teaching binary in the elementary school (making importance that numbers are also
patterns, making a binary rule, and the like), and showing how to use octal
and hex later. (One should really deprecate the decimal system, and don't get
me started on how we count time, oh my). I don't use that in practice, because it would
unnecessarily confuse people.
> person knows you will run into trouble. But with differing self identity models you can
> have various real life solutions, successfully serving different tastes. I'd be happy
> with spawning (producing huge numbers of my copies to form a social group, preferably
> with memory synching), it should serve my goals just fine, you probably wouldn't. Some
I have no problem with going Borg. It's just the members of the collective are
individuals, coupled, but distinct from myself, just as cells in your body.
> people like chocolate, so they eat it, others don't like it, so they abstain.
> So if you are resurrected by this method in one instance you are "old" made anew but if
> by clerical oversight two copies are made at the same time - none of them is you?
One of them is me. Which one, is easy enough to find out, using the wedgie test.
> In graphical arts a painting is defined as one-of-a-kind, all, even very exact copies
> are just forgeries. The monetary value of such a copy is, by convention, nil. A print,
> however, may exist in many copies, as long as all are made from the original block. The
> monetary value of such copies (all of them "original") is, by convention, same. So,
> depending on circumstances, the esthetic or ethical dimension of a material object may
> vary.
A painting doesn't think. I very much object to persons being traded on the free
market. This smacks of slavery.
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