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Henri Kluytmans <hkl@stack.nl> On Thursday, August 20, 1998 Wrote:
>From a rational point of view it should be no problem to
>terminate any copy of an upload as long as there is no
>information loss (or negligible information loss).
True, but several hours is not negligible, especially if it includes the most recent hours, the ones that seem the most real to us, even the very hour in which you're supposed to make a life and death decision concerning your future.
>Losing the amount of information gathered during a time period
>equivalent to 1 to 5 hours of biological human perception time
>seems to be no big deal (for humans). A concussion of the brain
>can induce such a loss.
Well, in my book a brain concussion is a pretty big deal, not something I would want to voluntarily inflict on myself.
>The reason why so many people seem to object to the termination
>of a copy (of themselves) is only of emotional origin.
ONLY of emotional origin? Certainly, but I don't understand why you say "only" as if it's a small point. What other reason could there possibly be for choosing existence over oblivion?
>However it seems very unlikely that an upload will spawn any copies
>only to do a standard working task.
I hope so. If you find the work boring your copies will find it just as dull, and if you think it's a wonderful idea to make copies of yourself to get the work done your copes will think exactly the same thing leading to an infinite number of copies.
>For example if you want to explore the galaxy within half million
>years but you want to visit every star system yourself.
>Of course then you don't want to loose the information that
>all the copies gathered so you will have to merge all the
>copies afterwards. But when all the copies have been merged
>and no information is lost in this process. Then it should
>be acceptable (from a rational point of view) to ternminate
>all the (now expendable) copies.
Agreed, except that it would the emotional part of me that would be satisfied not the rational, logic is neutral, it doesn't give a damn if I live or die.
John K Clark jonkc@att.net
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