From: Lee Corbin (lcorbin@tsoft.com)
Date: Sat Oct 12 2002 - 01:35:11 MDT
Damien writes
> At 02:43 PM 10/11/02 -0700, Robert wrote:
>
> >So -- If one Damien xox goes to Costa Rica and another Damien
> >xox goes to Pakistan, while the original is being put back together
> >in Australia (reassembling all of those atoms accurately takes
> >time you know) who do you prefer to take to diner at the next
> >Extro conference?
>
> Robert, you're still sidestepping what I consider the important issue:
> namely, what is at stake for the original.
>
> I believe everyone here grants that *operationally*, for *other people*, an
> exact-ish emulation is as good or bad as the original. In the case you
> describe, the emulation also has more interesting tales to tell, which are
> pretty much identical to the tales the original would have told had he
> experienced the same travels. The burning issue is a deictic or indexical
> thing: it never matters to *you* (defined as whoever is *outside* the
> person, looking in), it only and absolutely matters to *me* (whoever is
> inside, looking out).
I question how much it matters to you or anyone reading
this, based upon the following thought experiment.
So long as we are discussing tropical places, let me
suggest that for suitable monetary reward, any of us
would be willing to spend 60 days in solitary confinement
in Angola. (It turns out that the Angolans have a
perfectly awful dark dungeon, but not so bad that for
a few hundred million in cash and freedom after the
sixty days, it won't be worth it!)
Let's also suppose that most everyone on this
list would consider that a perfect xox made 60
days ago---currently residing in that jail cell in
Angola---is *not* a suitable replacement for one.
That is, one would consider it tantamount to death
to be disintegrated, with the sole comfort that
one's duplicate in Angola continues to thrive (so
to speak).
However, I would consider it nothing like death,
but merely an unfortunate decrease in the extent
of my run time, and here is why.
Would you not, for suitable monetary reward, agree
to have your last 60 days memory lifted? That is,
suppose that you had ingested an imaginary drug
60 days ago, and unless you take the antidote today,
the last 60 days' memories will never (it turns out)
make it to long term memory, and you'll lose them.
I think it reasonable to suppose that most people
would *not* consider it to be "like death" to lose
those memories. Yes, it might be terribly inconvenient,
but few would consider this the same as death.
Yet what I propose resembles this latter case much more
than it resembles death. For let us suppose that after
you lose your memories, you are to be taken to Angola
and placed in that cell, and held for 60 days. (Then
you'll be placed in suspended animation for another
sixty days, just so that the total balance of time
from your point of view works out.) I say that in this
case you do not consider these operations tantamount
to death.
Well, you see, if you agree to be disintegrated now so
that your perfect xox gets to continue to live in Angola,
you are agreeing to what is *physically* the same end
result. In short, unless you believe in the existence
of some non-material component of *you*, the equivalence
of the two foregoing operations proves that the death
of one *xox*---even if he's the one reading this right
now---is not anything like actual death. One continues
to live as one's duplicates, because duplicates are self.
Lee
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