Re: The Copy Question

Christopher Maloney (dude@chrismaloney.com)
Wed, 23 Jun 1999 07:50:04 -0400

I've written two short essays on this topic recently, see http://www.chrismaloney.com/seed/seed1.html#identity and http://www.chrismaloney.com/seed/seed2.html#indeterminacy. In short, my view is that at every moment in time, our next moment is selected at random from the ensemble of all existing closest continuations. Max More has written about this in his dissertation, and I wrote him some emails trying to discuss it with him, but got no reply.

Anyway, the result is this: uploading does provide a path for continuing our conscious selves. If the human is dissected and destroyed at the same time as being uploaded, then the consciousness will be transfered. But if not, then you will have two living human beings in the next instant. They will only be identical at one instant, then they immediately begin to diverge. Even if the uploaded copy were to have someone program the exact same experiences as the flesh copy was having, they would diverge. This is true because of the combined effect of quantum indeterminacy and classical chaos.

So if the original were not destroyed instantly, there would exist two humans, who each wanted to survive.

Harvey Newstrom wrote:
>
> Emlyn,
>
> ...

-- 
Chris Maloney
http://www.chrismaloney.com

"Knowledge is good"
-- Emil Faber