From: Eugen Leitl (eugen@leitl.org)
Date: Wed Oct 30 2002 - 02:35:29 MST
On Tue, 29 Oct 2002, Lee Corbin wrote:
> But observe that you might have traveled for years via the above
It's no travel, it's a backup. It only looks like a teleport if the
scenery changes, which typically occurs when I'm looking outside into
physical reality, and the servo gets scragged, or self-terminates due to
connectivity outage. In artifical reality I can resume at the same input
frame, with no subjective discontinuity, not even a flicker.
> mechanism, and persuaded any and all of its superior accommodations.
> Then one day, unbeknownst to you, the administrators allow a small
> delay between your remote duplication and your local disintegration.
> But you continue for years just as before.
If there's a gap, even a long one, there is no problem (I would still kick
some admin ass because there was a contract violation, because I'm resumed
in a world which has moved on, which can become a big problem if the
change has been considerable). If I have time to think "SHI.." then there
is definitely a problem. If you get killed painlessly and instantly, and a
former version of you continues on you still get killed.
A perceivable fork is always bad, and the longer it gets, the worse. Would
I have forked as a baby, you'd have two people which are not even remotely
similiar.
> I hope you do not find more reason to *identify* with the
> one about to undergo disintegration than with the successfully
> duplicated remote one. They are *both* equally you.
No. It's sure easier to die painlessly and instantly than to go screaming
and cursing a blue streak, but it's still dying.
> And thus is "no longer me"? What gives you such a strange idea?
> Even though the local copy (soon to die) has harrowing experiences,
> experiences *DO NOT* immediately make us into someone else. (That
> requires years.) Remember the quasi-equation
Let's agree to disagree here. I might grow sufficiently fatalistic some
day to allow forks and their termination to occur. But not now.
> None of the three operations above alter one's identity,
> and that's why you and your duplicate are, for purposes
> of surviving, the same person.
Surviving ends as the fork prong gets terminated.
This conversation is academic, anyway, because if we make it to the upload
it will be via a destructive scan postmortem, so there's no fork. Let's
talk about it again when we meet in the virtualscape.
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