From: Damien Broderick (damienb@unimelb.edu.au)
Date: Sun Apr 06 2003 - 00:30:32 MST
At 09:00 PM 4/5/03 -0500, Harvey was excited by an RJB post:
>You are also in the running to get the prize for creating the most
>worthwhile stuff to talk about! (I forgot to ask what the prize was. I
>hope it is a pre-paid teleportation ticket of the kind you are describing.)
>Read further to see where you have triggered me to clarify my position
>versus destructive copies. Your version of the process may resolve my
>objections!
>> First,
>> > What happens to one copy may not happen to the other copy.
>> Oh but you can't assume this. If I can make 1000 copies of RJB
>> I think I might be quite tempted to produce a collective mind
>> (it is essential to beat the hazard function -- repeat after me
>> "distributed replicated intelligence"). The logical step beyond
>> that is a highly interconnected "distributed replicated intelligence".
>> Once one can do this all of the information and experiences
>> become "shared".
>Wow. This is an intermediate copy/transfer scenario. If the two brains
>could really work in conjunction to control both bodies with one mind, it
>would raise some new possibilities.
Yes, but not exactly *new*. Let's see. < dragging up file of THE SPIKE >:
=========
Can we find some case where duplication has no distressing consequences?
Suppose all twins were born perfectly telepathic, so that each experienced
what the other did. If one of the two died, would that really matter? You
might grieve today if one of your arms were amputated, but you wouldn't
think that you'd thereby lost one of your selves... That analogy doesn't
quite work, because even telepathic twins are differently situated as
visible persons in space, and the loss of one body would surely devastate
the other locus of their shared consciousness. Still, it undermines simple
views about identity.
Well, what if everyone were given a cloned double, with whose brain-states
he or she slowly became redundantly resonant... Sorry, it doesn't work.
It's hard to retain empathy for the subjects of these thought games. Vernor
Vinge, who's spent a great deal of time on these problems of the Spike,
went some way toward exploring the experience of a shifting group-mind in
his novel A Fire Upon the Deep. In such a disseminated consciousness, made
up of wolf-like individuals, some modules can die and get replaced by
different individuals entirely. The character of the ensemble would alter,
but a core of identity of the group-mind/bodies might prevail. Or so Vinge
claims.
The bottom line, I conclude, is that physical and general brain-process
continuity support our current sense of continuing identity. They allow us
to believe that the person who wakes up tomorrow is the same one who went
to sleep tonight. What of awakening after ten years in a coma? Nobody
denies that this case is deeply traumatic, but still we assume that the
same person has woken up. Waking after half the brain is removed to
forestall death by cancer? No one denies that this case is even more deeply
troubling.
But look-- Even if I can't tell the difference between you and your
perfect clone, you surely can, as they strip your brain down.
================
This last point was also made amusingly in Harvey's fine, caustic post
about the `duplicate' on Mars.
Damien Broderick
[Bose-Einstein condensate bah humbug]
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