Telmo Menezes wrote:
On Thu, Apr 16, 2015 at 2:53 AM, Bruce Kellett <[email protected] <mailto:[email protected]>> wrote:LizR wrote: On 15 April 2015 at 10:15, John Clark <[email protected] <mailto:[email protected]> <mailto:[email protected] <mailto:[email protected]>>> wrote: Yes but I'm confused, I though you were the one arguing that Bruno had discovered something new under the sun, a new sort ofuncertainty That's hardly what Bruno is claiming. Step 3 is only a smallstep in a logical argument. It shows that if our normal everyday consciousness is the result of computation, then it can be duplicated (in principle - if you have a problem with matter duplicators, consider an AI programme) and that this leads to what looks like uncertainty from one person's perspective. You only get that impression because in Bruno's treatment of the case -- the two copies are immediately separated by a large distance and don't further interact. You might come to a different conclusion if you let the copies sit down together and have a chat.The conclusion of the UDA is that comp and materialism are incompatible. Can you formulate a protocol where the copies sit down for a chat and arrive at a contradiction of the UDA's conclusion? Separating them geographically was meant to mimic the differentworlds idea from MWI. But I think that is a bit of a cheat.It's just a simple way to label the two duplicates: Moscow man and Washington man. You could have the two reconstructions in the same room and label them as machine-A man and machine-B man and let them interact immediately. It wouldn't change the conclusion, because the conclusion does not depend on the copies having a chat or not. It would just make the argument harder to follow.
No, the argument is that both copies are equally the same person as the original. It is that illusion that is hard to maintain if they have a chat and realize that they are different people. The real issue is personal identity through time, and in the case of ties for closest follower, as in this case, it fits better with the notions of personal identity to say that the copies are both new persons -- inheriting a lot from the original of course, but the original single person has not become two of the *same* person.
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