From: Damien Broderick (damienb@unimelb.edu.au)
Date: Sun Jun 29 2003 - 00:34:24 MDT
At 10:56 PM 6/28/03 -0700, Lee wrote:
>If all the questions are oriented around *action*, then
>either you will upload or you will not. Either you will
>sacrifice yourself for your duplicate or you will not.
Quite so. `Sacrifice' is it, exactly.
>But I
>also claim that people's beliefs would (and perhaps
>will) alter dramatically after they've known a few
>duplicates. When every one of their intuitions is
>telling them "this really is the same person", the
>older view will collapse.
I agree that this delusion will become common, because operationally, from
the outside, you *will* be dealing with the same person (or an improved
version), and the duplicates, from the inside, will recall the same
memories as the original. That's built in to the premise.
>"I still think that all you
>are zombies", the old guy will say, "all this teleporting
>and duplicating and what not".
Only if he's an idiot. Obviously exact duplicates are *not* zombies, any
more than new children are zombies. The only real question is whether you
will *sacrifice yourself for your duplicate*. Many people on this list,
ironically enough, have enough Rand in their memetic substrate that they
regard the idea of self-sacrifice as noxious and wicked.
You think I'm begging the question, of course. I think I'm pinpointing it.
Damien Broderick
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