From: Dickey, Michael F (michael_f_dickey@groton.pfizer.com)
Date: Wed Oct 30 2002 - 14:33:38 MST
From: Robert J. Bradbury
On Tue, 29 Oct 2002, Dickey, Michael F wrote:
> The latter would require, as far as I can tell, someone to argue that
> logically a copy is indeed a continuation of the subjective consciousness
of
> the original. Given the fact that a copy and me will see different
things,
> and that we both can exist simultaneously, and are spatially separated, it
> seems unlikely.
"So we put Damien under general anesthesia, disassemble him atom by atom,
then reassemble 2 copies, each of which has half of the original Damien's
atoms. So they are both "copies" but would seem to equally have Damien's
"identity". When they both come out of it, how could they *not* view
themselves subjectively as the continuation of the original?"
I am not disputing that both would view themselves as subjective
continuations of Damien's Identity, I am saying that even though they
believe they are, they are not. In your example, half of damiens original
atoms were used for one copy and half for the other copy, what was the
intermediary state of these atoms? If they were removed from the original
reference damien, they were in one instant part of the pattern that made up
the one damien and in the next not part of that pattern. Were they
collected into a pile of atoms, and then used as raw materials to construct
the two copies? If that is the case, the original pattern made up of the
original group of atoms was at some point completely destroyed, thus there
would be no continuation of the subjective experience of the original
reference Damien. Or so my argument goes...
Your question confuses what I have been trying to argue, I have not argued
that the atoms themselves hold some mysterious 'piece' of damiens
conscioussness and that is why a copy is not him, I only worked backward
from the result of my oft quoted thought experiment. If we copied damien,
he and his copy would not experience the same subjective events, thus the
copy of him is not a subjective continuation of him. If that were the
result of this experiment (which I believe it reasonable to assume it would
be, because if it were not *that* would imply a mysterious magical
connection) Then I ask, why is that the case? I say it is because the
original Damien was comprised of both a pattern and a group of atoms that
made up that pattern, and the vast majority of that group of atoms was
present in the same pattern that made up damien the instant before, thus he
was a continuation of the previous one.
Michael
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