The question nobody wants to answer clearly because is would just sound
too stupid is this:
Question: I've been making and destroying a billion Harvey Newstroms
every second since you were a one celled zygote, so who is the original
Harvey Newstrom?
Lee Daniel Crocker <lee@piclab.com> says this:
>OK, then: an "original" is that instance of a thing which existed at the
>point in time at which the process of "copying" commenced, where "copying"
>is understood as the process of creating another instance of a thing that
>shares as many properties with the existing thing as physically possible.
A keen grasp of the obvious. I've given up trying to getting a straight answer from
Harvey but I've only asked you twice so perhaps there is still some slight hope; in the
example I have given who is the original Harvey Newstrom? I don't want to hear
"In general the original is [...], don't want any more useless generalities and vapid
definitions, I want a clear unambiguous statement about this specific example.
I know why you've been hesitating and maybe I'm a little sadistic for pushing
so hard but I want to see if you can really say with a straight face that the only
true original is that one celled zygote.
>>Me:
>> Harvey Newstrom needs no such definition [of self], he has something much much
>> better, an example. Definitions are seldom important in life and certainly
>> not in this case.
> But he doesn't have an example
All human beings who are not in a coma have a sense of identity, the reason we
fear death is we fear it will be lost and it's the only part of us that's important. I know
of no good definition of "the self" but I know of a real good example and I know this
has nothing to do with atoms, people felt this way long before they even suspected
atoms existed. I might add that my thought experiment is not really that far fetched,
every second trillions of atoms leave out body and trillions more take their place.
John K Clark jonkc@att.net
This archive was generated by hypermail 2b29 : Thu Jul 27 2000 - 14:11:23 MDT