From: Lee Corbin (lcorbin@tsoft.com)
Date: Thu Oct 10 2002 - 18:46:06 MDT
Robert writes
> So long as I can't cognize like a *specific* instantiation of
> an individual duck then its pretty darn difficult to notice
> that they are missing.
>
> Would anyone be posting notes missing me, as we did with Sasha,
> if a Robert-xox or even a Robert-[AI]-bot continued to post
> notes to the list? Moreover how would the list detect that
> the Robert-function was being fulfilled by one or more
> combinations of Robert-xoxs and/or Robert-[AI]-bots?
The key question is whether *you* would detect the difference.
I, like John Clark, claim that you might have been replaced
by an identical copy while you slept last night, and *no* one
---not you, not the you of yesterday, not the list members,
no one---is any the worse for it.
It has been said that there is no reality as to whether you
are the same person after xoxing or not. But can we not
perceive some falseness to the claim of someone close to
you that he or she is not the same person as they were
yesterday? Especially when they have not a shred of
evidence beyond a suspicion that they were copied?
Moreover, I have a question for Damien and the other reluctant
teleporters. Suppose that a disintegrator ray could be trained
upon you, and reduce you to an exact set of atoms in a plastic
bag, while recording the precise location and momenta of all
those atoms at the moment of disintegration. Then when the
re-integrate button is pressed, all the atoms fly to their
exact previous locations. (It is further stipulated that in
no case of millions of trials has any anomaly been detected,
and people and every other quantum object, to the limits of
our ability to measure, are completely unchanged by this
operation.)
Would you agree to go through this process if it meant
a *much* cheaper and safer trip to Texas? The plastic
bag is placed into a steel box the whole trip, and goes
in the baggage compartment, and it will survive intact
any kind of normal airplane crash. So you'll not only
be re-integrated in Dallas, but will have avoided
the tedium and most of the cost of the trip, and
can even time it so that there's no jet lag! What
a deal!
Lee
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