From: Lee Corbin (lcorbin@tsoft.com)
Date: Mon Nov 18 2002 - 09:09:43 MST
gts writes
> > > The idea of fellowship and mutual identification among
> > > separate individuals has been around for centuries,
> > > Lee. It is as old as the hills.
> >
> > And I certainly do *not* mean any of this in that
> > pedestrian sense.
>
> The only difference I see is that you would have people use the first
> person singular in reference to other members of the "copy collective"
> to which they belong. Rather than have them say "Someone with whom I
> identify closely has done thus and so," you would have them say "I have
> done thus and so."
Well, there is a difference. The "collective" (shudder) that you
refer to is characterized by all instances of me that are formally
obtained by operations that do not significantly change me. Here
is a partial list of things that can be done to me that don't
threaten my survival:
1. I can be called unpleasant names.
2. I can ride in a vehicle going more than sixty miles per hour.
3. I can forget how a certain complicated mathematical formula goes.
4. ...be sued
5. ...move to Australia
6. ...join the Army (though after a few years I might not be me anymore)
7. ...temporarily undergo weightless ness
8. ...temporarily stop processing memories from short term to long term
9. ...have memories of how to play the clarinet excised by some
future technology
Here is a partial list of things that cannot be done to me without
threatening my survival:
1. I cannot be close to the center of a nuclear explosion
2. I cannot have my cerebral cortex removed
3. I cannot be molecularly replaced by a copy of gts
4. I cannot be molecularly replaced by Lee Corbin age 3
and so on. What must be added to the list of operations that don't
IMO threaten my survival is to be molecularly replaced by the
person I was a second ago or an hour ago. Why, even if a whole
day were elided and I woke up on Wednesday in the very state that
I had awakened on Tuesday, my survival would not be threatened.
So again, this "collective" is a very special set, and it
certainly does not include what we ordinarily think of as
other people.
> That is collectivism taken to an extreme beyond anything even Karl Marx
> would have dreamed of. Marx subjugated the individual; you would
> obliterate him entirely.
No, that's an entirely different meaning.
> Is that really your vision for the future, Lee? Mine is quite the
> opposite. I envision greater empowerment of the individual, including
> those individuals who may have been spawned as clones or duplicates.
Me too.
Lee
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