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 Rate This Message: http://www.cryonet.org/cgi-bin/rate.cgi?msg=14794