From: Phil Osborn (philosborn2001@yahoo.com)
Date: Thu May 23 2002 - 21:43:59 MDT
Right on Doctor Logic!! Not that I necessarilly agree
with you, but thanks for identifying some of the ties
to extropy and the reasons why such questions as the
point at which an intelligence becomes a "person,"
will be of importance - assuming that we take notions
like SI's or uploading seriously.
You are not the first person I've run into - unless
you ARE that person, of course - who has advanced the
idea of there being only one ONE survivor of any given
intelligent species. That could be interpreted in a
lot of different ways, of course. Would anyone mind
merging consciousness with an exact duplicate of ones
self? What if you had the same values and would
remember everything that both of you had ever done?
Just finished reading Brin's "Kiln People," which got
some brief mention here before. Not a real
heavyweight intellectual novel, but certainly quite
enjoyable - and amusing - and full of Brin's
irreverent creativeness. Brin is capable of some real
humor, as in the ROFL great final battle scene in
"Startide Rising." In "KP," he never really gets to
that level, but he does maintain a pleasant level of
humor similar to those old '30's comedy movies
throughout - where everyone is sure they are doing the
right thing, and all have a different take on it, and
everyone is wrong. To the present point, however, the
entire novel takes this notion of identity and
uniqueness and how we think about it and kind of
spindles, folds and mutilates...
The other person, BTW, who takes the sole survivor
position is a very secretive AI researcher who used to
be one of the top programmers at JPL. He plans to survive.
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