From: Damien Broderick (d.broderick@english.unimelb.edu.au)
Date: Wed Oct 09 2002 - 02:13:43 MDT
At 02:41 PM 10/9/02 +0930, Emlyn wrote ecumenically:
>I now think all of the vaguely consistent viewpoints are correct.
They might all be *correct*, but are they *identical*? Sorry, I seem to be
trapped in this looping--
>Basically, I think that whatever you believe is probably how it is for you.
>After all, we are talking about subjective phenomena here.
>For instance, when those in the xox-is-me camp are replicated, how are they
>going to feel about it?
They will feel just as confident as the Heaven's Gate dupes who died in the
expectation of awakening in the cometary UFO.How you feel really *isn't* a
test of any fact except the fact of how you feel. Maybe that's all that
matters in this peculiar instance, as you suggest. I just hope that when
the 98% of you crazed Xoxes come after me with your disintegrator guns, you
really will agree to the live&let live principle and put them down (rather
than putting me down).
>The "original" will think "I am me, and so is the
>other guy". The copy is going to think "I am me, and so is the other guy".
>If one of them is to be disintegrated (say the "original"), then he's going
>to be ok about it, because "that guy over there is also 'me'", unless he has
>a sudden change of heart.
We have an empirical test of this theory, up to a point. The world is
choked with people sharing variants of the delusion that their identity
persists beyond `death of the body': that they have, or are, a `soul' which
instantiates all that is worthy of their subjectivity or `life force', or
something nice. Do they call out `Bring on the disintegrator, homes, it's
all one to me. See you on the Other Side, bro!'? Some do, it's true. Most
seem to shiver and shake with dread, unless death for them is a blessed
relief from unendurable suffering. They cry out to god for an extra minute
of life. Is it just that they fear the unknown, or hell, or a billion years
manning a Pumping Station for Xenu? That's part of it. But I reckon that
they have grave (ahem) suspicions about identity continuity.
Some will answer that this is because they don't actually *know* there's an
`afterlife', whereas Xoxes will see the proof every day; moreover, the
Xoxen will return to the same world (unless they teleport to Alpha Grommett
and live among the robots), so they know what to expect. (More of the
bloody same, eh.)
And so it goes on...
Damien Broderick
[NOT the Dr D Broderick who is apparently the author of the thesis:
*Body/Language: A Post-Transsexual Psychoanalytic Reading of The Well of
Loneliness*]
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