On 29/06/07, Tom McCabe <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
But when you talk about "yourself", you mean the "yourself" of the copy, not the "yourself" of the original person. While all the copied selves can only exist in one body, the original self can exist in more than one body. You can pull this off without violating causality because once the original self has been copied, you can't refer to it experiencing anything as there's no longer an "it" to refer to. So while the original self exists in more than one body, it doesn't simultaneously experience multiple lives, because it doesn't experience anything at all, because it's no longer a coherent entity. Confused yet?
Ordinary life involves 1:1 copying. The half-life of proteins in mouse brain tissue ranges from hours to minutes, including structural proteins such as those in the myelin sheath. It's easy enough to imagine a situation where human metabolism is sped up to the point where you go to sleep with one brain and wake up with another brain - at least, a person wakes up in your bed who believes he is you and has your memories etc. A believer in a mystical theory of personal identity might say that the original person has died and been replaced by a copy, or he might say that he is still the same person because the consciousness has been retained in the cranium (or wherever it resides) whereas dastardly destructive duplication experiments destroy the old consciousness and create a new one which thinks it's the original person but isn't really. The only really consistent and unambiguous way to look at these questions is to acknowledge that there is no conscious entity extended through time in any absolute sense, but simply a series of moments of conscious experience (observer-moments, in the terminology I believe originated by Nick Bostrom) which associate in a particular way due to their information content. The important point is that consciousness does not "flow" from one observer-moment to the next, but only seems to do so because of our linear existence from birth to death, responsible for our psychology and for the "paradoxes" of personal identity when we try to make sense of the various transhuman situations. -- Stathis Papaioannou ----- This list is sponsored by AGIRI: http://www.agiri.org/email To unsubscribe or change your options, please go to: http://v2.listbox.com/member/?member_id=4007604&user_secret=7d7fb4d8
