From: gts (gts@optexinc.com)
Date: Wed Oct 23 2002 - 12:41:22 MDT
Michael F Dickey wrote:
> I still find it difficult to understand how people
> can assert that a copy of you is you.
I'm glad to see I'm not the only one. :)
The closest I can come to believing anything remotely similar would
involve an instantaneous destructive teleportation, as mentioned here
previously (by Jef Allbright, I think).
It would not be necessary that my actual atoms be transported to another
location. There is an equivalency principle of physics that states that
subatomic particles of the same type are identical, e.g., one electron
is identical to any other electron. (In fact, according to one theory
there is only one electron in the entire universe, but I digress.)
If subatomic particles at the destination location could be assembled in
the exact states as those that comprise me at the origin location,
instantaneously and destructively such that I vanish here and appear
there in the same instant, then I see at least a faint possibility that
my sense of self might live on in that teleported duplicate. I think the
teleportation process would need to take place in less than the shortest
meaningful division of time, which is the time it takes for a photon to
traverse one Planck length -- a very, very short time interval.
The above assumes of course the truth of my materialist view of
consciousness as an entirely physical phenomenon. If materialism is
wrong then we're ghostly spirits potentially capable of all manner of
weirdness.
-gts
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