From: Lee Corbin (lcorbin@ricochet.net)
Date: Wed Jun 06 2001 - 20:51:18 MDT
In over thirty years of lively disputes about identity, I have found
that along one particular scale, people fall into seven categories:
1. Will travel by space warp, but won't permit atomic disassembly.
He or she objects to disintegration and reassembly of the atoms
constituting his or her own person (given, of course, that this
has become technologically reliable). This is the most skeptical
position of the seven.
2. Will permit teleportation, but only if the same atoms are used.
Subject agrees (as always, for suitable reward) to be disintegrated
here and later reassembled at a remote location. However the
subject forbids disassembly here and reconstitution at a distant
location using different atoms.
3. Will teleport, unless there is a delay.
Suppose the original at the the point of departure is scanned and the
information is used to construct the remote duplicate, but then there
is a delay before the original is destroyed. This is not acceptable.
The subject anticipates that he or she will experience seeing his or
her duplicate emerge from the distant teleporter station, and that
this will void the transferral of identity to the remote. The local
will then experience disintegration, and that this will mark the
actual death of the subject.
4. Will teleport, but finds backups to be useless.
Subject finds it a waste of money to get "scanned" for the purpose
of getting himself or herself restored in the event of catastrophe.
Not long after the scan is complete, the subject exclaims, "That
information is me the way I used to be! Were I to die, and that
person brought back to life, it wouldn't really be me."
5. Finds backups acceptable, provided that they've had no run time.
Subject finds it desirable to keep frozen physical duplicates in
storage (in case anything happens to him or her), but only provided
that the duplicate, whether physically instantiated or merely kept
safe as information, is completely identical to him or her at a
particular past instant. In this case, he or she expects to survive
physical destruction of the present body, but not if that body has
already been reanimated and is having experiences elsewhere.
6. Anticipates future experiences of duplicates, but only one in
particular.
This is the nearly incoherant "closest continuer" theory. If you
must die, but N duplicates of you were made at several points in
the past, then you "really are" whichever one of them survives
and is the most similar to you. Your soul, or identity, is
transferred by hidden celestial machinery into this particular
one, but somehow not into any of the others.
7. Logically, but not necessarily emotionally, anticipates all
experiences of all duplicates past or future, near or far.
By subscribing to "the faith of a physicist", the subject believes
that any physical object at any coordinates whatsoever is the same
person that he or she is, provided only that the physical process
running in the object closely enough resembles him or her.
The extreme difficulty of sitting across a table and watching your
physical duplicate and honestly being able to exclaim, "There goes I,
by the grace of God", or of being able to say with a straight face,
"Logically, I anticipate the dinner that I had last night as much as
I anticipate tonight's repast", prevents almost everyone from going
to level seven. My own belief is that nonetheless, countless thought
experiments lead one inexorably to level seven, and to a recognition
that the other concepts of personal identity are outmoded legacies
of evolution which do not sustain careful scrutiny.
I would appreciate very much hearing from anyone who also feels
comfortable with level 7. Please send to lcorbin@ricochet.net
Thanks,
Lee
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