From: Lee Corbin (lcorbin@tsoft.com)
Date: Fri Apr 04 2003 - 01:16:12 MST
Damien writes
> Lee Corbin claims of teleportation:
>
> >if someone had ten experiences of that, I'm sure that
> >he or she would come around to agreeing with me.
>
> This is a really rotten basis for deciding whether something is the case or
> not. If Lee had ten experiences of whatever Samantha goes through during
> her mystical union with the divine, he might well be convinced that he'd
> been in contact with deity. He'd be wrong, almost certainly, but hey.
Very good point. I have overestimated the utility of experience
to be a reliable guide to behavior. Unfortunately, I now no longer
have a good understanding of exactly when experience can be trusted,
or is advisable to obtain, thanks to you. ;-)
At first one might say of a particular person's spiritual beliefs,
"well, those are not publicly verifiable, so let's throw those
out---they're unscientific".
But then, what about the "experience of being addicted to X", where
X is some substance such that if you sample X then nothing else is
ever important to you again besides sampling more X?
So now it's "if (a) the experience is publicly verifiable and
open almost to anyone, and (b) the experience does not noticeably
alter you, then undergoing the experience is a good guide as to
its value", but that's getting pretty unwieldy.
So, I'll just go back to my former claim: if you believe physics
with all your heart, and so don't suppose that the particular atoms
that you are composed of have anything to do with who you are, then
you won't mind teleporting, because the pattern of atoms will be
the same after as before.
Lee
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