On 7/24/2019 10:52 PM, Bruce Kellett wrote:
On Thu, Jul 25, 2019 at 3:16 PM 'Brent Meeker' via Everything List
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On 7/24/2019 4:28 AM, Bruno Marchal wrote:
Note that the personal identity is not a transitive notion.
Step 3 actually illustrates well this. I recall he cut and
copy itself from Helsinki (H) in both Washington (W) and
Moscow (M). With the definition of the personal identity
above, both the HW and the HM guy are, from that personal
identity view, the same person as the H person.
With a more sensible notion of personal identity, the copies are
different persons, and different persons from the original.
But that would entail that you die in step 1, which would again
just be your opinion that mechanism is false.
Why do you assume this is all-or-nothing, live-or-die? What seems
likely to me is that the copy will be necessarily different due to
information limitations of quantum mechanics...but maybe not so
different that one would still say yes to the doctor, depending on
the alternatives.
I was talking about duplication, as in step 3. But even in step 1 the
original is "cut" after copying. So the original certainly "dies"
according to the "cut" protocol. The question is whether what survives
as a copy is sufficiently like the original to count as the same person.
It seems to me that this depends on a lot of things that are left
unspecified. Of particular concern is whether the original body is
also reconstructed -- a feat that would seem to be beyond any
reasonable technology of the future.
It is even beyond theoretical possibility to copy the quantum state.
I'm not sure what implications that has for consciousness, which must be
quasi-classical, but I think at the very least it would imply a glich in
the stream of consciousness and memory.
Brent
What you could at best achieve would be to connect the mechanical
brain to some robotic body, with maintenance of essential input and
output functions. Or even have the copy live in an entirely virtual
reality, constructed within some computer. (Such possibilities are
relatively common in the Sci-Fi literature.) Then, even if memories
are preserved, it is possible that the copied person might react
negatively to his/her new substitute body (or the virtual reality
environment).. This is not unknown in practice, because sometimes
after accidents that lead to severe bodily deformations, the patient
rejects the damaged body and suffers all sorts of psychological
problems: PTSD being one of the least of their worries. So although
these are thought experiments, the practical implications for real
people are largely unknowable until it is actually tried in practice.
Whether this would ever be ethical is another question.......
Bruce
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