Magnus and whoever After deleting some three billion emails from the MD i've decided to try my luck here. So here I am full of hope and determined to contribute. I havent sent a "bio" for the site but no doublt I'll get round to it eventually. In the meantime Magnus wrote: >I simply don't think it's enough to only copy the patterns of the four >levels. A person is more than that, but what? I guess the easy way out >is to call it DQ, but I'm not very satisfied with that either. What I'm >getting at is of course our "Quantum selves" as proposed by Danah Zohar >in "The Quantum Self" which we discussed quite a while ago. Regardless >of whether the quantum world should be considered a lower level or not, >it seems that quantum physics has made clear that we cannot make exact >copies of anything. *But*, we can transfer all information from one >quanta to another, the "killing" of the original would be implicit. The quantum self indeed, the self that cannot be copied. To quote ms zohar " The quantum world view transcends the dichotomy between the individual and relationship by showing us that people can only be the individuals they are within a context. i am my relationships - my relationships to the subselves within my own self (my past and my future), my relationships to othres, and my relationships to the world at large. I am I, uniquely myself, because i am an utterly unique pattern of relationships, and yet I cannot separate this I who I am from those relationships. For the quantum self, neither individuality nor relationship is primary because both arise simultaneously and with equal weight from the quantum substrate." A relationship requires at least two things. If you copy only the individual and not the context then you have lost the self. And as I understand it the real question underlying what happens in a transporter is where precisely does the self lie. If it is not in the biological level, then where. And actually I think we know the answer too, it lies in the consciousness, trouble is we don't really know what that is so the answer's not terribly useful. I'm certainly not getting in any transporter unless you can convince me that my consciousness will also be transported intact and if you don't actually know what consciousness is then how can I possibly believe that you know how to transport it. I hope I'm not getting off the subject here. Like I said, I think the real question is where does the self lie and the answer is the not-too-difficult 'it lies in my awareness'. I'm not sure that Pirsig has really given a good explanation of consciousness though. All he offers is that everything is conscious, seems like a bit of a cop-out to me. Bruce ----------------------------------------------- FREE! The World's Best Email Address @email.com Reserve your name now at http://www.email.com MOQ Online - http://www.moq.org
