On 01 Mar 2009, at 23:48, Stathis Papaioannou wrote:
> > 2009/3/2 Bruno Marchal <[email protected]>: > >> All right, I understand. The question now is: are you sure it is in >> "your" interest to be that selfish. It is not a moral question: can >> you be coherent, take the full piece of botter "dead is not big deal" >> of the midazolam argument, and keep that sort of selfishness. >> >> Do you prefer to live in a country 1 where "self-torture" is allowed >> but only when the decision is made before the duplication (and yes >> you >> could be the victim indeed), or in a country 2 where "self-torture" >> is >> allowed after the duplication. It seems to me that your midazolam- >> argument (I re-quote below(*)) should in fine relativize the very >> notion of selfishness. >> >> I think it is preferable to live in the first country: yes I could be >> the victim, but I can remember my consent. In the second type of >> country, I could even more so be the tortured one ... eventually; and >> without my consent. OK? > > Living in the first country is equivalent to allowing a contract where > you agree to a gain today at the cost of suffering tomorrow, like > selling your soul to the devil. I would say that it is more like selling your soul to yourself, but I admit this could be the same, in some case. You better have to know yourself. I think that comp practitioners will divide, in the long run, along three classes: A: majority. Accept teleportation but disallow overlap of "individuals": annihilation first, reconstitution after. No right to self-infliction. In case of accidental or exceptional self- multiplication, consent is asked at any time. B: a stable minority (in the long run). Accept teleportation but do allow overlap of individuals. Some will fight for the right of self- infliction including the consent made before the duplication, but with precise protocol. You know the problem of the masochist: I say no, continue, I say "no no", stop! C: the bandits. They violates protocols and don't ask for consents. They should normally be wanted, I mean researched by all the polices of the universe, or already be in jail or in asylum. Legend for the future: the A and B people will fight with each other until the A people realize that only the B people can help them to lessen the pain inflicted by the C people. A little bit like Orpheus going to hell for saving the soul of his love Eurydice. The case of the B people is an interesting case, if only because it shows the richness of the hardly definable notion of self-consent. With comp you can't build a paradise without building an hell. The existence of B people can make hell partially controllable. I think. This points to harm reduction strategies in the politics of health. The very existence of the B people makes the C people transparently cowards. A masochist has much in common with a Godelian sentence, which asserts their (true) unprovability or their (false but consistent) refutability. They are quite different from the Löbian sentences which asserts positively their (true) provability. The genuine pain is not in the intensity of the flame, but in the unfairness of the violation of the consents and protocols. Amnesia of consent is equivalent to no consent at all. Except for ... Masochism could be a self-referential type of Trojan Horse concept for developing, as far as it is comp-possible, a mechanist theory of pain. And the first easy thing you can deduce are of the negative type: pain is not definable, pain is unavoidable (for consistent entities), but also pain can be limited, and this even in the transfinite. Indulge my thinking aloud. This is not published material. Yet I did wrote, for myself, a long time ago a "A Refutation of Sade". Sade, in his own way, showed already the danger of confusing Mechanism and Materialism. He took Mechanism and Materialism from La Mettrie, who already builded the seeds of person elimination philosophies. Best, Bruno http://iridia.ulb.ac.be/~marchal/ --~--~---------~--~----~------------~-------~--~----~ You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Everything List" group. To post to this group, send email to [email protected] To unsubscribe from this group, send email to [email protected] For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list?hl=en -~----------~----~----~----~------~----~------~--~---
