From: Lee Corbin (lcorbin@tsoft.com)
Date: Sat Oct 26 2002 - 06:58:10 MDT
Earlier gts wrote
> -----Original Message-----
> From: owner-extropians@extropy.org
> [mailto:owner-extropians@extropy.org]On Behalf Of gts
> Sent: Thursday, October 24, 2002 8:00 AM
> To: extropians@extropy.org
> Subject: RE: duck me!
>
> If I am tasting wine in Napa Valley while my allegedly perfect duplicate
> is guzzling beer in Tijuana, then does my wine taste like beer? Or does
> my duplicate's beer taste like wine? Or do we both complain that our
> drinks have been adulterated with wine or beer as the case may be?
No, as you may have surmised already, I don't mean
for any telepathy to be in force. Since childhood
one customarily believes that one's identity ends
with the extent of one's body. Later on, one revises
this inward to just the brain. I'm just revising this
outward to include very similar duplicates.
> I think you should reformulate your arguments and your published essay
> to advance a theory of how me might someday manufacture what might be
> called "clairvoyance tools." ... From that representation angle you
> might then be able to structure an argument for the possibility of
> something very similar to "being in two places at one time" that does
> not insult the intelligence of your readers.
Well, now that you understand that it is proposed to
change the *concept* of self---to more readily fit
the physical possibilities sure to occur in one way
or another in the future---then this isn't really
insulting anyone's intelligence (though perhaps at
first it did come across this way).
Because from the outset, in the formal argument
the burden has always been on someone to explain
why two people could be in the same place at two
different times but not at the same time in two
different places. You solve that by asserting
that we are not the same person from second to
second, which has IMO much more awkwardness than
does my proposal.
In particular, one has to question the wisdom of
any sacrifice made for one's future self. Why go
to the dentist if it's someone else who'll
eventually get the toothache? Our *deepest*
programming provided by evolution urges us to
identify with future selves.
Now it is also true that our deepest programming
urges us *not* to identify with contemporary
duplicates (because nature never encountered
any before). If I and my duplicate are tied down
and tortured, very soon each says "Please stop and
to it to him!".
But since I contend that one *survives* if one's
duplicate does (for reasons gone heavily into in
other posts), then one's quick defection under
torture against one's duplicate is seen as the
reaction of animalistic machinery (namely the
pain circuits) getting to the primitive parts of
our brain which are trained to avoid pain to the
present body regardless of intellectual knowledge.
In other words, we have a hard choice here, and I
think that in the future, the choice will be made
to regard one's duplicate as one's self.
Lee
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