From: Lee Corbin (lcorbin@ricochet.net)
Date: Mon Jun 04 2001 - 21:53:48 MDT
Eugene Leitl wrote
>Of course, if you can restart a process from a state,
>I'm a stateist, too. But a state is not a process, which is
>a sequence of states. Personhood is a process, but one which
>can be resumed from a state, if plunged into proper context.
Do you think that Max's "The Luckiest Man in the Universe",
i.e., an accidental molecular copy of Sir Francis Bacon, is
really the same person? If you do, then, once again,
you are a statist (the right spelling).
>The monkey in me happens to think that terminated forks
>are evil, especially unhealed forks, and it's a valid
>enough reason to not to do it. With time I might grow
>more enlightened, or more fatalistic, but right now I
>find forks an abomination.
>
>Thou shalt not have a fork with my name on it.
This can only be attacked by thought experiment. For ten
million dollars would you agree to enter a black box by being
disintegrated and copied to one thousand different locations
in the black box, where your duplicates will all look at
each other for one second before 999 are disintegrated?
You can then vary the parameters, e.g. time, and whether
or not the one to survive is illuminated by an orange
spotlight, and so on. Surely your admonition against
forks is not absolute.
>Sure, but please let me apply this cattleprod here, and that
>hot iron there, and that hammer here, but hey, there's no need
>to scream, you'll be perfectly allright in a couple of minutes,
>I'm just having a little fun, albeit admittedly at your expense.
Now you realize, of course, that these are not to the point.
Although perhaps I should state that I completely agree: if
I am to be prodded 999 times (in different duplicates) you
will have to pay a lot of money to do this, :-)
whether they are to survive or not.
>Hah, I would like to see the 1000 of you with the plastique
>turban detonators wired to a random number generator trying
>to keep your calm. My god, this is going to be such a mess.
More "proof by revulsion"? But to answer, I don't anticipate
any suffering, because the plastique is so fast. And the
ten million will easily enable me to call in some people
to help clean up.
>> we have here, this guy whose going to survive, as opposed
>> to me who is going to die? That guy is the same as me
>> a minute ago, but with some extra memories added. Big
>> deal. One minute's memories mean nothing. The state is
>
>Big deal, killing a few people means nothing.
Under the right circumstances, this is correct. If
100,000 people were copied somewhere, and then the copies
disintegrated 1/1000 second later, it really is no big deal.
Conceivably, I could be being killed 1000 times per second,
re-copied after each murder.
Lee
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