From: Peter C. McCluskey (pcm@rahul.net)
Date: Thu Jul 23 1998 - 11:31:37 MDT
harv@gate.net (Harvey Newstrom) writes:
>My only objection has been the killing of the original. This is not
>based on any fault in the copy. It is because I want the original to
That certainly clears up some misunderstandings.
>continue to live. I believe "Harvey Newstrom" is a viable person
>capable of great things in the future. If you duplicate "Harvey
>Newstrom", there are now two "Harvey Newstroms". I think both of them
>can be great. Left alone, they will both grow, experience and evolve.
>Killing one of them because he is "no longer required" or "not
>sufficiently unique to contribute anything new", is murder just as it
>would be to kill any person for these kinds of reasons. I think
>duplicated people have the same rights as any person.
I agree that terminating one of them without his consent is wrong in
a sense that is vaguely similar to the sense in which murder is wrong
even if the harm done is no greater than the harm done by removing
someone's appendix without his consent.
I think the important question is whether the person involved should
consider consenting to such a termination the same way we currently
consider suicide objectionable.
As cryonicists frequently point out, the word death has been used in
2 subtly different ways, one (a diagnosis) refers to a fairly easily
observable state (is the patient breathing and/or pumping blood to his
brain or likely to resume doing so real soon now) and the other (a
prognosis) refers to whether that personality will ever function again.
When technological changes make old rules for diagnosis diverge from
a good prognosis, it is invariably the diagnosis which changes to
approximate an estimate of whether a personality closely resembling
the person who existed going into the new and unusual process exists
after that process is over. Things that used to be considered killing
(e.g. stopping someone's heart) become tolerated medical procedures.
Since in the scenarios we have been discussing, the personality that
remains at the end of the new procedure is as similar to all of the
intermediate personalities as would be the case in medical procedures
which are accepted today, I expect the brief existence of a personality
that gets physically destroyed will cease to be diagnosed as death if a
sufficiently similar personality at the end of the process says it was ok.
I don't think this will seem much different from the erasure of a (just barely)
unique personality that currently happens when a person is given anesthesia
(which wipes out some short-term memories that would have made the patient
a slightly different person than the patient that wakes up after the
anesthesia).
If I now understand your position correctly, it implies that disintegrating
person X at time t and reintegrating equivalent atoms into the same pattern
somewhere else at time t+1 doesn't kill anyone, but if the reintegration
happens at time t-1 instead it does kill someone.
Is this a correct interpretation of your position?
If so, is it the temporal order that matters, or would it not amount to
killing someone if a time traveller were to bring all the data needed to
reintegrate the person's experience up through time t?
If it's the temporal order that matters, I'd like to know what happens
if the temporal order is different in the reference frames of the two
beings?
If it's the differences in experience that matter, how would my agreeing
to duplicate myself and have one copy killed a few minutes later be
any more distateful that doing something that will wipe out my short-term
memory?
-- ------------------------------------------------------------------------ Peter McCluskey | Critmail (http://crit.org/critmail.html): http://www.rahul.net/pcm | Accept nothing less to archive your mailing list
This archive was generated by hypermail 2.1.5 : Fri Nov 01 2002 - 14:49:23 MST