Re: Can I kill the "original"?

From: John Clark (jonkc@worldnet.att.net)
Date: Wed May 17 2000 - 11:14:02 MDT


Harvey Newstrom <mail@HarveyNewstrom.com> Wrote:

>You only call these things "the same location" because your resolution is
>not accurate enough to detect that they are inches apart.

As I've already said if consciousness even has a location (and that's doubtful in
most cases) it's where its sense data originated. There is no reason two very
different brains (and I don't give a damn about brain location) could not receive
identical sense data, hence two consciousness exist at the same place.

> Where did you get the plan for building a Harvey Newstrom? From the original.

I've been making and destroying a billion Harvey Newstroms every second since
you were a one celled zygote, so you tell me, who is the original Harvey Newstrom?

Yea yea, "smoke and mirrors", but just calling it a trick is not good enough unless
you can explain how the "illusion" works. You haven't done that.

> Do you have another term you want to apply to the first copy besides "original"?

Mythical.

>If you create a body and destroy it so fast that it doesn't have time to have a single
>thought, then you have failed to recreate my consciousness in a copy. You have
>changed the definition of the copy from being a functional mind copy to a nonfunctional
>body copy.

Not at all, the brain functions as well as ever, it's just that any single copy can't think
much in 10^-9 seconds. And yet you think, you're conscious, something survives
that is bigger and more important than any one copy.

>If the copy cannot think a single thought, then this is clearly
> not the thought-synchronized copy you were discussing earlier.

No they're synchronized, you can't think about much in 10^-9 seconds either.

>You're not going to claim that the Platonic god-form qualia of "redness"
>is co-existing in both fruit, are you?

Certainly not! I'd never say such a thing, a tomato is a vegetable not a fruit.

>Is your whole claim of duplicates being a single object based on quantam
>many-worlds, qualia, Platonic forms, mystic souls, or anything else that
>can't be defined by atoms and energy?

I do claim that some things are very real but are neither atoms nor energy, like
redness or thought or 17 or consciousness or any adjective.

> I don't see where we disagree on any objective facts.

We disagree on subjective facts, I think they can probably be deduced pretty
well by studying objective facts, you don't.

       John K Clark jonkc@att.net



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