On 8 April 2015 at 05:35, John Clark <johnkcl...@gmail.com> wrote: > > On Tue, Apr 7, 2015 Bruno Marchal <marc...@ulb.ac.be> wrote: > > >> Who is traveling through time in a forward direction, Mr. John Clark or >>> Mr. John Clark The Helsinki Man? >> >> >> > We have agree that both the W-man and the M-man are the H-man. >> > > Yes but you didn't answer my question and the answer is important because > relationships are not always symmetrical; a dog is always a mammal but a > mammal is not always a dog. The W-man and the M-man encompass everything > that the H-man was, however they both have additional experiences that the > H-man knows nothing about. So although the W-Man and the M-man are the > H-man, the H-man is not the M-man, and the H-man is not the W-man, and the > M-man is not the W-man. >
I don't see that this is significant, because it's true whether there is a teleporter involved or not. Let's say that on this occasion pressing the teleport button renders H-man unconscious, and he is sent to either Moscow or Washington by conventional means, then woken up in the teleport booth at the other end. Let's assume we arrange for the experience to be identical to if he had been teleported (maybe being teleported is physically painful for some reason, and people are anaesthetised beforehand). In this scenario, M-man would STILL be (or not be) H-man to the exact same extent as he would be after genuinely teleporting. Whether or not he has a twin (who after a genuine teleportation he might never actually meet) makes no difference to him whatsoever. Now let's have the teleporter knock him out and either send him, or not send him, with or without duplication - let's also say when it sends him, he still needs a day to recover consciousness, and that's how long it takes to send him by jet. So the experiences will be identical in all cases. How does it make any difference (a) if he was teleported and (b) if he was duplicated? In each case the physical outcome, for him, is identical. Or is there some extra magic involved? Perhaps we *should* worry about whether to let each other use the same personal pronoun today as we did yesterday, but we only need to worry about it to exactly the same extent in the unteleported scenarios as we do in the teleported and/or duplicated ones (given the assumption that consciousness arises from physical computation, of course). (As I've said before, the exact same argument can be applied to duplicating AI programmes, which is something that will be feasible as soon as we have one. So if you think an AI programme is technically possible - and if you assume comp, it must be - there's no need for all this agonising over whether matter transmitters are physically possible, etc. Soon we may be able to carry this out for real.) -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Everything List" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.
