From: hal@finney.org
Date: Fri May 19 2000 - 11:46:28 MDT
What if you could reproduce by fission? Every cell in your brain (and
body) splits into two, then they separate, each set of cells maintaining
their relative cohesiveness and connectivity even as the cells from the
other set slip past them.
(Sounds like you'd really need a fourth dimension to do this cleanly.)
In the end you would have two individuals, each of whom could have an
equal claim to being the original.
Is the original dead? Is one of the two "progeny" the original and one
a copy? Or are both, in some sense, the original?
Is the physical impossibility of this (in our three dimensional universe)
important in understanding the implications of this thought experiment?
I.e., would consciousness be fundamentally different if we lived in a
universe where this was physically possible?
Hal
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