X-Message-Number: 14750 Date: Fri, 20 Oct 2000 19:05:59 -0700 From: Lee Corbin <> Subject: Location and Personal Identity Again the subject of "location" has come up in the identity discussion. It's as if some people reason (consciously or unconsciously): "Well, I simply CAN'T be the same person as my duplicate sitting across the room. That's ridiculous! It goes against everything that I've known about myself since I was six months old. But those guys have a point: physically, the differences are minimal. But there must be a difference. Aha! Location! That must be it!" Never mind that no one before in the history of thought ever supposed that location has anything to do with personal identity. Never mind that a person changes his or her location all the time. Never mind that our best physical theories never include location as intrinsically important. Talk about grasping at straws! I can just see what people's reaction might be if some kind of space-warp wormhole technology invited them to instantly teleport from one location to another: "Hey! If there's anything that I was forced to conclude from all those identity discussions, it's that my location is central to my identity. Keep that wormhole away from me!" Of course that wouldn't happen; those folks would end up teleporting all over the place just like the rest of us----even if it were the conceptually previous idea of disintegrating you here and reassembling you there (with different atoms yet, as in Captain Kirk's teleporter). Lee Corbin Rate This Message: http://www.cryonet.org/cgi-bin/rate.cgi?msg=14750