RE: Duplicates are Selves

From: Lee Corbin (lcorbin@tsoft.com)
Date: Thu Apr 03 2003 - 20:44:52 MST

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    Robert writes

    > On Wed, 2 Apr 2003, Lee Corbin commenting on the whole teleportation
    > debate (haven't we after a decade or more beaten this into the ground???)

    Evidently not sufficiently! You're still responding to some
    of these posts! ;-)

    > wrote :
    >
    > > I'm stubbornly still claiming that there is an answer.
    > > To get your arm broken harms you a lot more than being
    > > destructively teleported. Moreover, if someone had
    > > ten experiences of that, I'm sure that he or she would
    > > come around to agreeing with me.
    >
    > ROTFL. It is something to schedule as an experiment
    > for Extro 13 just to see if Lee is right. I'd be very
    > curious as to who lines up in the "teleportation" line
    > and who lines up in the "get your arm broken 10 times"
    > line.
    >
    > Nothing like reality to test a hypothesis.

    To be truthful, a number of people indeed *would* get in the
    "break your arm ten times" line, because they'd see the other
    line as certain death.

    There should be three (3) cases where you are given the
    experience whether you like it or not. (Credit for prior
    experience is given---if you have teleported before, you
    don't have to, and if you have suffered bodily pain before,
    you can choose not to get your arm broken.)

    I think that since teleportation is a new technology,
    if you teleported three times, some little instinct in
    you would say "Well, that didn't hurt so much." And
    when you went on with a lot of silly verbalization ("Well,
    I have to remember that I'm not the same person any more"),
    even your body would rebel.

    Worse, if some people whose ethics are below mine get hold
    of the Extro 13 operation, people might continually have
    their atoms exchanged by machinery hidden in the walls, so
    that in effect one is duplicated 10^4 times per second.

    Or we might just hold Extro 13 at L5, and the only way to
    go there is to teleport. Think it would be a large, or a
    small, get together?

    Lee

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