On Sat, Jun 20, 2015 Terren Suydam <[email protected]> wrote: > A physical body dies... that's part of the riddle. That's true regardless > of what the status of your personhood is. Only one body leaves the sealed > room. >
If they're identical then the number of bodies is irrelevant, there was only one person in those 2 sealed rooms before anyone opened a door and there is only one person in those 2 sealed rooms after one of them opened a door. Opening a door changed nothing important. > > After duplication the duplicated beings diverge. > If they diverge then they are no longer identical and all bets are off. And they would only diverge if there were different environmental conditions in those 2 rooms or if you waited long enough for random quantum variations to do their work, but that would take a long time. > > There are two possibilities: translation in space or translation in > time. For translation in space, the body which is result of the duplication > (call it JC2) will become manifest in a different physical location than > JC1 (the original body). > Irrelevant. Subjectively there is no way to know what physical place you are in unless you are given stimulation of some form the outside world. If you and "another" identical person were looking at each other in a symmetrical room and then I instantaneously exchanged your positions neither you nor the "other" guy would not notice a difference, and a outside observer would not notice a difference, and even the universe itself would not notice a difference. If subjectively it makes no difference and objectively it makes no difference then I think it's safe to say that it just makes no difference, and in this context the word "another" has no meaning. In fact was I even telling the truth when I said I exchanged the positions? There would be no way to tell and no reason to care. > > JC2's experience will feel like entering the duplicator, and then > suddenly shifting into a new location, > Subjectively it would be instantaneous but objectively the time interval could have been a nanosecond or it could have been a billion years, but that's OK because subjectivity is far more important than objectivity; or at least I think it is. > > whereas JC1 would not experience that. > If the two are identical then their experiences are identical too and so there is only one experience not two because the experience of John Clark being alive is a adjective not a noun. Red is a adjective and car is a noun, if there are 2 red cars there are 2 cars but only one red and if one car is destroyed red still exists. Right now only one chunk of matter in the universe behaves in a Johnclarkian way, but in your thought experiment that is no longer true. > > For time-translation, JC1 would step out of the duplicator, and then > some time later (one minute, say), JC2 would become manifest. In which > case, JC2 would experience walking into the duplicator, and then JC1 > suddenly popping into view. Whereas JC1 would just experience walking into > the duplicator, walking out, then watching JC2 appear. > Then they would form different memories and no longer be identical and all bets are off. I would only be comfortable in having my body destroyed if I knew a up to date copy of me had been made right now. How long is now? About a second, maybe two, long enough to have a last thought. And the thing I personally don't like about death is having a last thought, in your original thought experiment no thought is interrupted so I don't worry about opening that door. We don't have thoughts we are thoughts and it doesn't matter what is thinking them. John K Clark -- 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 [email protected]. To post to this group, send email to [email protected]. Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.
