From: Lee Corbin (lcorbin@ricochet.net)
Date: Wed May 30 2001 - 23:12:05 MDT
Harvey Newstrom eloquently defends the notion that he
identifies only with one focus of perception. But my
sentence, here, spoken in the objective mode, fails
to capture his point very well:
>This perception of reality, the center of thought and conscious cognition
>is what I define as "me". I experience reality through this view port
>known as "me". This is the definition of "me" that I seek to preserve.
>...I still perceive reality through a single body portal....
>[The original] will wake up and say "I am me." The copy will also
>wake up and say "I am me." I expect both to believe that they are
>distinct individuals and will not want their own instances to die.
Yes, this is the attitude that I would also exhibit under
torture: "Do it to him! Not to me!".
Of course, I do not deny that this is how you and your duplicates
will all continue to **feel**. But then, you **feel** the Earth
to be still. Is there a fact of the matter in the case of
duplicates as there is in the case of whether the Earth is moving?
I say there is.
Your position, I think, becomes untenable in the light of certain
thought experiments. The first one is an elaboration of, "Would You
Teleport?". As said elsewhere in this thread, you would find that
indeed you would, and your philosophy (i.e. account of your actions
and prescriptions for your actions) would change accordingly.
But now consider the question of "Teleport With Delay", that is,
it turns out that there is a tenth of a second overlap between
the arrival of the duplicate at the remote station, and the
disintegration at the local station. Once again, employing,
as Emlyn calls it, "proof-by-peer-pressure", you'd still end up
teleporting, saying "Oh what the hell, this is an emergency,
maybe I've been wrong". But what if the overlap interval is
several minutes? Would you do it then? (Sorry if this question
is not to the point; I'm just guessing about where you are coming
from exactly. But that's what I want to know now.)
Additionally (and parenthetically) there were what appear to
be some errors in the remainder of your post:
>Another way to state this difference seems to be this:
>One camp is happy as long as any copy survives. The
>other camp is unhappy as long as any copy dies.
In my experience, these are not the two camps: the real two
camps are those that embrace the information (or state) theory
and those who embrace the path (or continuity) theory. As
stated, I don't know which of your two camps I'd be in. Under
some circumstances, all that matters is that a single copy of
me doesn't die, so that I can end up propagating all over the
universe. But in another way, each termination of a copy is
a tragedy, just as each cubic foot in Jupiter tragically is
not running me at this moment.
>We may be identical at first, but I don't *know* this.
>People may tell me that its thoughts are exact copies
>of mine, but I can't confirm this myself... I can't
>experience its emotions to decide if they are the same as
>mine. If it has a hidden thought or motive that it does
>not reveal, I cannot know this because this attribute is
>hidden from me and kept to its self.
But whether its thoughts are exact copies of yours
is an empirical question. You have long ago come to
rely upon instruments, and other people, and Quine's
"web of belief". You know many facts that you
cannot personally attest to. This would become
one of them.
>The question may actually be: Are we trying to achieve
>immortality or are we trying to avoid death? These may
>turn out to be different questions. My personal belief
>seems to be more interested in avoiding death rather
>than achieving immortality.
Interesting. Me too. And someone else who wrote. But the
old-time cryonicists, like Saul Kent and Mike Darwin, are
self-admittedly terrified of dying.
I agree entirely with what you wrote in your "meat-example",
just that I don't think it forces one to abandon recognizing
objective truths, like whether a certain object is Harvey
Newstrom or not, or whether a certain object is a Christmas
tree.
Lee Corbin
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