From: Lee Corbin (lcorbin@tsoft.com)
Date: Wed May 08 2002 - 18:30:32 MDT
Emlyn wrote
> I wonder if a brain enhancement which takes care of context switching would
> be speculatively possible? Imagine you are in the middle of a hugely complex
> task at work, and it's time to go home. You dump the state of your brain
> into persistent storage, and go home. When you come back the next day, you
> restore your mental state from storage. [Say] you'd forget everything that
> you did in the intervening time.
>
> Hmmm... you could become two people...
> So "home" you would experience no work time at all. "Home" would travel to
> work, dump brain to storage, load up "work" ...<skip>... then would go home,
> noticing that all the clocks had skipped forward.
For many materialists ("statists" who believe in the information theory
of identity), this is equivalent to having a duplicate. Over time, your
home self and work self would diverge, of course.
But I'll have to employ your scenario the next time I argue with one
of those people who has no more regard for his duplicate than he does
for complete strangers. (These are people who, after the "fork",
don't identify with their duplicates.) Using your scenario, now
I need only ask, "assume I'm talking to your work self: now, is it
better that your home self suffer some great setback---say a 20 KB
file of text you wrote vanishes---or better that you suffer some
minor setback, (say a 2 KB file vanishes)?
Maybe folks will be more sympathetic to the doctrine that duplicates
are self.
> Now all the sci fi writers/buffs are going to tell me eight
> stories which explore this idea but do it better, including
> at least three which are older than I am.
Yes, people love to do that, and don't realize how old it gets.
First, if you were boring them, then they should just move on.
Second, it's almost always true, as you say, that the harder
you look, the further back you'll find that some SF writer
had the idea first. (I exempt from my criticism here the
folks who just can't resist the temptation to relate an
especially good story!)
Lee
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