From: Lee Corbin (lcorbin@tsoft.com)
Date: Sat Nov 02 2002 - 13:17:51 MST
gts wrote
> -----Original Message-----
> From: owner-extropians@extropy.org
> [mailto:owner-extropians@extropy.org]On Behalf Of gts
> Sent: Friday, November 01, 2002 7:07 PM
> To: extropians@extropy.org
> Subject: RE: duck me!
> > Level five is equivalent to surrendering some recent
> > memories for suitable reward.
>
> I think it's equivalent to dying with the sole satisfaction that a close
> sibling will live on and enjoy the reward for which I have sacrificed my
> life.
Damn. You already answered a question that I just posted to
the list. My apologies, again. I must be more careful.
> You have never explained the mysterious mechanism by which my sense of
> self should be transferred upon my death into the old self of mine that
> is to be restored from my past backup. What kind of magic is that? It
> reminds me of "familiars" (cats that are said to adopt the personalities
> of people upon their death.)
Suppose that your sense of self derives from physics. That is,
what you feel and experience is only molecules in motion and
the progression through various states of a physical device.
If that is true, then you would have the same sense of self
that you had in the past when that particular state got
additional run time. (It did, of course, or else you wouldn't
be here.)
> Furthermore, even if you could find a way to explain that witchcraft,
It's not witchcraft, quite the opposite. It's our instinctual
behavior, also embedded in our language, and in most of our
concepts of "I" and "me" and so on, which is false to facts.
Nature has caused us to vaguely "anticipate" certain states
that we have been trained to think occur only in the future.
Organisms following these prescriptions survive. But this
feeling of anticipation, while a very
important part of your "sense of self", is something that
I've never been able to make into a consistent concept, and
one which about twelve years ago I just had to abandon.
But I can only abandon it logically, because it's hard
wired into my head. If physics is all that there is, then
I don't think that there is any place for anticipation,
or a sense of self that doesn't include duplicates.
> you acknowledged that if I had a personality change since my last backup
> (e.g., a religious conversion) that the restored self would not be me.
> You then tried to dismiss smaller personality changes as irrelevant, but
> such judgments are purely arbitrary.
I think that they're objective, at least as objective as to
whether a new operating system that I write is LINUX or not.
Many people will probably note that Lee's new PC system is
similar to LINUX in some ways, but not in others. It will
be a matter of degree. But if there is a high degree of
similarity, I shall rightly be accused of plagiarism. Even
if I call it something else, people will rightly see that
it's LINUX.
It's the same with personality changes. If Napoleon became
the "Luckiest Man in the Universe" (Max's phrase), and he
suddenly appeared back on St. Helena, then there would be
a fact of the matter to what extent he really was Napoleon
(i.e., the degree to which he resembled Napoleon at some
stage of N's life). Now *we* might have trouble instrumenting
this, i.e., determining the truth of the matter, but that
doesn't change the fact that there is a truth to the matter.
Likewise, someone in an insane asylum may truly believe that
they are Napoleon, but unless they studied his campaigns and
his life incredibly thoroughly, then they aren't Napoleon.
(Although it's currently impossible, if someone *did* manage
to incorporate Napoleon's memories, then they would be
Napoleon.)
Lee
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