From: Smigrodzki, Rafal (SmigrodzkiR@MSX.UPMC.EDU)
Date: Fri Jun 01 2001 - 01:36:30 MDT
When discussing the question of personal identity and copies of humans we
(humans) tend to get tangled up quite frequently. I would think that this is
due to our use of disparate neural and psychological mechanisms for
addressing different aspects of this problem.
We have an extensive array of circuitry used to answer questions about what
is "true" - the logical, mathematical and scientific reasoning, which leads
many of us to conclude that an upload, or spawn, or copy is, for all
practical purposes, the same as the original, except that its spatial
coordinates are different. Then there is the "personality" part of our brain
which tells me to keep a cookie for the "myself-tomorrow" but avoid giving
it to a perfect copy of myself, if he was sitting next to me right now. Both
reasoning subsystems are important but they evolved (in both the genetic and
social sense) to work in different spheres and using them interchangeably
can lead to difficulties. Additionally, new ideas (the multiverse
interpretation of QM, for example) and technologies (mostly as yet
nonexistent) may be exceeding the limits of applicability of our traditional
self-recognition subsystems (for their technical details try reading "A
Feeling of What Happens" by Antonio Damasio).
I could imagine a future where humans with radically different attitudes
about self-identity might coexist - with some persons continually spawning
and yet maintaining a sense of group self (by frequent memory exchanges),
while others would stay with a spatiotemporal continutity-defined selfhood.
Neither attitude would be "false" or "true" (this is a different sphere of
reasoning), or even "right and "wrong" - just different. Although, of
course, certain models of identity could confer an evolutionary advantage
which might change with societal and technological developments. Just as
keeping food for yourself frequently resulted in a better ability to pass on
your genes throughout most of human history, a willingness to die if you
know your perfect copies survive might result in better survival of such
copies, sometime next century.
The only sure prediction I could derive from these musings is that the
future is likely to be mighty interesting to live in, as all Extropians know
anyway.
Rafal Smigrodzki MD-PhD
Dept Neurology University of Pittsburgh
smigrodzkir@msx.upmc.edu
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