From: Stuart Armstrong (dragondreaming@googlemail.com)
Date: Tue Mar 03 2009 - 03:18:40 MST
John Clark has been recently pointing out the inanity of worrying
about the Original in a copy situation, a point that Matt has been
echoing in a slightly different format.
And, of course, if perfect copying or uploading was around, this is
correct. But until that happens, we must obsses about the original! We
must worry about him, ask about his feelings, bring him drinks, and
grant him moral superiority over the copy.
Because we know the original is human/ourselves/a moral agent. He's
the scale by which we measure whether the copy really should be
granted this status. Once we are satisfied that they are trully
identical, then the whole
original-and-copy-are-indistinguishable-so-they-are-(initially)-interchangeable
argument will apply.
When talking about the moral consequences of a perfect technology
(copying, uploading), we should also consider the consequences of
imperfect versions as well, as these versions are going to come first.
Stuart
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