From: Francois-Rene Rideau (fare@tunes.org)
Date: Thu May 31 2001 - 03:01:31 MDT
Harvey made a great post about individual identity as a proxy-continuity
of a membrane separating an internal consciousness from an external world,
and how it made copying irrelevant to the fact that the original (or slowly
modified) body is still a precious, separate, individual, that cannot be
killed against its will, even though this will might be unexpressed.
This correctly represents my opinions on this topic. Thanks, Harvey.
However, there are a few silly things I'd like to add:
* no copy is ever perfect. If these contain hadrons, they have a disjoint
quantum state from mine; they cannot be the same as I; actually in a
curved universe, there is no way in which you can ever have an isometry
between two different objects.
* however, a copy may theoretically be "good enough" for many purposes,
including being indistinguishable from each other by third parties
through some kind of Turing test.
* still, the original body has a separate identity,
and destroying it increases entropy quite a lot, as opposed
to keeping it (all the more since every body is an extropy pump).
* a funny thought experiment, variant of that proposed by Harvey about
slow upgrade vs copy, is when you anaesthesize the patient,
slowly remove his natural cells or organs and replace them
with functionally equivalent artificial ones, and finally
reconstitute the original self with his original cells and organs,
all that while he's unconscious, and with supposedly "good enough"
technology so that it's hard to tell people apart from their behavior.
* Well, somehow, the artificial self is now the original, while the
natural self is now the copy. But note that your "functional equivalence"
cannot be perfect, so with such a full replacement,
you must at best admit that is always a very traumatized "self"
that awakes from such an experiment, and at worst admit that
you've actually killed the original individual,
replacing it with two mock copies.
* Even though they are different individuals, you might still have
some close interest in copies, since they can be a way to spread
your genes and memes beyond your individual life. However, it is true
that you can be mostly indifferent to which copies of oneself survives,
whereas one has a direct interest in being a copy that survives in as
extended (space*time*complexity integral) a life as possible.
That's funny, because since long before I was told about the extropians
(well, long ago, I was already shortly told about them, but the web page
bored me so I didn't look further), I have been preparing a novel on the
implications of copying being possible. It's still but a meta-novel, and
it's in french, but some of you might enjoy the plan...
http://quatramaran.ens.fr/~roman/lit/roman/DupExec/
Its conclusion is that the extropy pumping necessary to make a good enough
copy is such that it is likely a waste to use it to make an identical copy
of some person instead of developing its own fantastic potential as an
individual personality. Said otherwise, good enough copy seems to me to
be AI-hard, and whoever takes the decision to spend all those
free-energetic (F=E-TS) resources at copying instead of running an AI,
is likely to be making quite a wasteful, immoral, decision, of which
he should be held responsible. Or maybe not: that's just a conjecture.
Best regards,
[ François-René ÐVB Rideau | Reflection&Cybernethics | http://fare.tunes.org ]
[ TUNES project for a Free Reflective Computing System | http://tunes.org ]
God exists and I'm His Prophet. And He says: "Don't you believe in Me or in
My Prophet, least you be doomed to go to Hell, for I gave you brains not to
believe in things dogmatically and superstitiously, but to think rationally."
-- Faré
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