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

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