X-Message-Number: 14794
Date: Sun, 29 Oct 2000 15:44:34 -0800
From: Lee Corbin <>
Subject: Re: Why a Person is not a Thing

In message #14790, Pat Clancy describes the teleporter in which 
there is a time delay between remote creation of the duplicate 
and the local destruction of the original, and says,

>Now you will clearly feel that the original is _you_, and the copy 
>is not you. Of course the copy will feel that it is you also. But, 
>to me, if I step into the machine, the original and real _me_ is 
>and remains the one that stepped into the machine and not the other 
>one.

That would depend on how accustomed you were to teleporting. 
If you teleport to work every day for thirty years, and the only 
surviving version each day is the remote, then afterwards, each 
day, you wouldn't remember the feelings of being the original 
just before he was destroyed. Yet the original is just as much 
you as the remote is---this experiment helps prove that both are 
you.

Robert Ettinger may have been aware of the delayed teleporter 
experiment when he wrote The Prospect of Immortality in 1964, 
which, unfortunately, I didn't learn about until much later. 
(That book contains a great number of the basic conceptual 
scenarios.)  But about a year after I became a materialist in 
1966, this delayed teleporter experiment was what I used to 
convince my friends that there really is a non-trivial problem 
concerning identity.

Even if I teleported to work for many years with the device---and 
only old fogies would resist the temptation to teleport everywhere 
---it would still come as a rude shock each day to the original 
when he saw his remote on television stepping out of the chamber
far away.  Even though I have completely internalized these scenarios
for over thirty-five years, and would never hesitate for a second in
any real choice, it still stands to reason that it would come as a
shock.  About ten years ago I published a story, "The Pit and the
Duplicate", http://www.LeeCorbin.com/PitAndDuplicate.html, that
explores the feelings of originals and duplicates and indicates why
it would be impossible to completely reconcile your memories and
your actual experiences in these cases.

You see, just because you don't remember realizing with horror 
that you are the original and are about to be destroyed, doesn't
mean that it didn't happen to you.

Lee

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