X-Message-Number: 11159 From: Thomas Donaldson <> Subject: More about duplication versus replacement Date: Sat, 23 Jan 1999 23:52:56 +1100 (EST) Hi everyone (Bob and Mike Perry among them): Yes, I said that a duplicate would diverge almost immediately, and in a previous posting I explained why. Mike Perry shrugs off the problems of property, for instance, in a way which I sincerely doubt he would do if he were duplicated. His property includes his savings, his life insurance policies, his PhD degree, even the right to live at Alcor's facility and work to protect patients there. Besides these things, it includes whatever books (or even copyrights to books he's written) and other property he may own. If he sincerely believes that the loss of all of these things would not affect him very strongly, I'll be blunt: he's fooling himself. His duplicate, among other things, would have no life insurance policy and no savings, and not even a job. So if something happened to the duplicate at that time or soon afterwards, THE DUPLICATE WOULD NOT EVEN BE FROZEN. As yet, of course, I haven't even mentioned any friendships Mike may have. Sure, his friends might also CHOOSE to be friends with his duplicate, but whether they would be willing to do very much for the duplicate in terms of helping him out, that's another question entirely. And if he were married, I doubt very much that his wife would happily remain married to both copies, even if that were legal. This isn't the whole of it, either. It is one thing, and perhaps someday may even be a simple thing, to physically duplicate a person. But to duplicate their property, their human relationships, and all the rest makes the task much much harder. Do we duplicate your wife when we duplicate you? Your house, your car, your life insurance policies, your savings, all the other things? (Naturally if we duplicate your wife, we must duplicate HER property, job, etc too). And just who is it that pays for all this duplication? Legal relationships are easy to "duplicate" now: they exist only on paper. But that duplication still costs MONEY. And if you've been duplicated and know it, then your duplicate is going to think of all these thinks almost instantly. And so, your duplicate ceases to be a duplicate at all, very rapidly. To Bob Ettinger, and his comment that a duplicate occurring after the destruction of the original would incur similar problems, I'd simply say that merely waking up in a different location does not make someone cease to be a version of you. That's exactly what might happen if you had an episode of amnesia, from which you awoke. The duplicate does not have to be identical to count as a continuation of you, but as a continuation all the problems I have raised with duplicates simply do not exist. There is no other claimant for your property and all the other relationships you had before. Your wife may be worried by your loss of memories, but never has to choose between you and someone else apparently identical. That duplicate would basically take on whatever relationships, personal or in terms of property, which you had before. (And even any loss of property due to cryonic suspension would not be an issue: you chose cryonic suspension and expected that you might well revive without many things you had before --- so you would be EXPECTING it beforehand, and thus not have the same relation to it as a duplicate might). As for my basic reasons for believing that even an approximate duplicate, in the case of cryonic suspension, would constitute you, they come from a belief that so long as all externally observable (observable not just by present technology but by future technologies) facts about the physical you remained the same, then that subjective you must have continued also. It's possible that we do not have a complete understanding or even a list of those externally observable features (though from my reading of current work on how brains operate, I'd say we're coming close --- even to an understanding of how consciousness works, not to mention memory). Still, we're not actually there. For the sake of argument, I am claiming that if we ARE there, then that replacement of you will BE you. Other than to claim some permanently unobservable feature that must necessarily go with YOU, I know no other way to think about this situation. (Basically I am saying that the subjective you follows from the objective you, and if one is the same so is the other). But everything still falls to pieces if you remain living while a duplicate of you is somehow created. Sure, it does not fall apart solely by logic: if you have no human relationships, no property, no rights or copyrights, no attachments of ANY kind to anything else, then we might well make a duplicate of you. But I doubt that anyone on Cryonet is so stripped of relationships that they are in such a condition. (Among other relationships, after all, is your relationship to your cryonic society). Best and long long life to all, Thomas Donaldson Rate This Message: http://www.cryonet.org/cgi-bin/rate.cgi?msg=11159