Re: Can I kill the "original"?

From: John Clark (jonkc@worldnet.att.net)
Date: Wed May 17 2000 - 22:51:58 MDT


Harvey Newstrom <mail@HarveyNewstrom.com> Wrote:

> I was referring to the location of the brain, not the consciousness.

Why? Who cares about that?

>>Me:
>>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?

>The thing that you copy *from* is the original. The thing you copy *to* is
>not the original.

I see, well that's all very nice but I do have just one question, who is the original
Harvey Newstrom?

> I have pointed out many fallacies in your logic.

Strange, I can't recall you doing that.

>You redefine terms half-way through an example.

Name one.

>You claim to make a second and third copy, and then later claim that
>there is only "one" copy.

I was talking about second and third copies of bodies having the same
consciousness, but of course you already knew that. I detect desperation
on your part, and that's consistent with your readily apparent rising anger.
I've found that people rarely get angry when they're winning an argument.

>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.

Yes. That was exactly my point, the fate of the copy can not be the entire
story because you, the sum total of all the trillions of copies, is alive and
conscious.

>You have changed the definition of the copy from being a functional
>mind copy to a nonfunctional body copy.

I've done nothing of the sort, all I did was start talking about a different thought
experiment. I didn't realize that was illegal.

>It's a fruit!

Fruit grows on trees, tomatoes grow on vines.

>If you try to ignore the atoms and energy, and just try to have "redness"
>exist by itself without any reliance on the real world, you are defining a
>mystical soul.

Nonsense. Redness is not light waves, if I sit in a dark room and put a little
pressure on my eyeball I can see red flashes. I don't even need to do that,
I can just remember what redness looks like. Beethoven's ninth symphony
is not air pressure graph either, it's a brain state.

              John K Clark jonkc@att.net



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