From: J. Goard (wyattoil@foothill.net)
Date: Mon Jun 11 2001 - 01:51:55 MDT
At 01:30 AM 6/11/01 -0400, John Clark wrote:
>Lee Corbin <lcorbin@ricochet.net> Wrote:
> > 7. Logically, but not necessarily emotionally, anticipates all
> > experiences of all duplicates past or future, near or far.
>
>Yes, if the memories were merged you would have the experience of
>living several lives in parallel. Might be fun.
A non sequitor. What if you don't expect them to ever be merged in any
significant way? Would you expect to experience being each of them, at the
same time?
>> 6. Anticipates future experiences of duplicates, but only one in
>>particular.
>
>I see no reason to be limited to one.
I do see a reason, in the very definition of the thought experiment. If
something is a duplicate of me, then it doesn't have an awareness extending
across several bodies, because I don't have such a thing, and such a
radical difference would be more than sufficient to make one thing not a
"duplicate" of another. If you believe that by duplicating a body, a
single awareness will then coexist across the multiple bodies, then you're
really challenging the possibility of (personal) duplication itself.
I'm a bit thrown by the word "particular" in the above. Personally, I
wouldn't anticipate future experiences of one *in particular* -- more like
one *randomly*. That is, assuming I could know for sure that they were
true "duplicates". If so, then one by definition could not have more or
less subjective continuity with the original than the others do. Chance
splitting sounds bizaare, but I believe it's the only solution compatible
with the definition of the problem, short of saying that duplication is
really impossible.
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J. Goard, jjgoard@ucdavis.edu/wyattoil@foothill.net
e-gold account #100592 (www.e-gold.com)
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The Beyond outside us is indeed swept away, and the
great undertaking of the Enlightenment complete;
but the Beyond *inside* us has become a new heaven
and calls us to renewed heaven-storming.
--Max Stirner
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