X-Message-Number: 14689
Date: Thu, 12 Oct 2000 20:48:18 -0700
From: Lee Corbin <>
Subject: Choose yourself... or yourself!

In message #14673 Dave Pizer wrote

>I have devised a quick test to see if you do or do not
>think that a duplicate is you.

and went on to describe the thought-experiment in which
one must choose between one's self and one's duplicate.

>Only if you are willing to shoot yourself do you show
>that you believe the duplicate is you.

Why, you aren't even sweetening up the offer!  The usual
case, that I've talked about (for over thirty years), is

"You enter a room and discover a duplicate of you frozen
in ice.  The duplicate was created a few minutes ago.  On
top of the slab of ice is a briefcase containing ten
million dollars.  Only you or your duplicate is permitted
to survive.  If you allow that the duplicate is to be 
disintegrated, then the ten million goes away.  But if you
agree that you yourself are to be disintegrated, then your
duplicate gets to be defrosted, and can proceed to the
bank with the cash."

More menacingly, in one variant there is a pistol and you
must shoot yourself---but I stopped using that formulation
because squeemishness deterred some people, not their
attitude about personal identity.

I would unhesitatingly accede to disintegration (or being
shot), if that's the only way that I was going to get the
ten million dollars!  And friends who watched the whole 
episode would know that I had survived, because of the
enormous grin on my face when I returned from the bank
the next day.

Arguments that Lee Corbin had somehow not survived would
be laughable.

And I would simply say that my duplicate had made the
same logical decision that I would have (and did!).

Lee Corbin

Rate This Message: http://www.cryonet.org/cgi-bin/rate.cgi?msg=14689