Tell us about your existence without telling us about your essence.
POC
On Fri, 7 Dec 2001, Mikael Johansson wrote:
> <snip>
> > > Personally, I would
> > > take the 1000
> > > rather than the 50 but I can't say that I have no attachment
> > > to the present
> > > set of molecules. I would probably take 999.5 years with the
> > > present set as
> > > opposed to 1000 as a doppelganger, which probably means I am
> > > not as pure a
> > > functionalist as I could be, but I am not sure how much more
> > > I would be
> > > willing to sacrifice.
> > >
> >
> > Why not go a step further?
> >
> > For each of us, chances are that the following statement is true:
> > There exists person X, who's utility to society* is greater than yours
> > (given that
> > we have some magical metric for measuring such).
> >
> > Which of the following would you (as a functionalist) do. Which would you
> do
> > as yourself? Why?
> >
> > 1 - Live out your 3 score & 10.
> > 2 - Be replaced** tomorrow by your exact (enough) replica, who will live
> > 1000 years.
> > 3 - Be replaced** tomorrow by an exact (enough) replica of person X, who
> > will live 1000 years.
> >
> > * Insert your personal favourite subset of all people; Nation? Village?
> > Family? The guy at the video shop?
> > ** By replaced, I mean what non-functionalists would understand as "die".
>
> As a functionalist, the obvious choice (supposing I understand the
> definition of functionalist correctly) would be (2).
>
> As myself (and the Stockholm clique of transhumanists probably already know
> this :-) the choice will be (2); I most definitely follow a functionalist
> reasoning whenever the discussion closes in on this subject...
>
> > Emlyn
>
> // Mikael Johansson
>
>
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