X-Message-Number: 16148 Date: Sat, 28 Apr 2001 08:41:12 -0700 From: Lee Corbin <> Subject: Re: Important question for the isomorphists James Swayze's response to the spectre of duplicates haunting the future > Would you have sex with your duplicate? exemplifies the anxieties created in the social body by our incipient transformation to the posthuman, and the frightening (to many) preservation and reassertion, not to say, apotheosis of the liberal humanist subject freed from atavistic dependence upon the privileged and privileging present gendered human form. Threats to spatial, temporal, and symbolic continuity, unmediated by ritual rites of passage to the postcorporeal, portend promiscuous intermingling and anxiety producing symbols of fantastic and monstrous shapes, signifiers, and organic sensorial transformations most alarming. The key questions, as James explicitly brings to the foreplay, are the ways in which libido production will be transferred to the arena of computer codes, and in which cybersexual performance, either with duplicates or uploaded entities will take its usual priveledged position in the transformed psyche, which will necessitate radical protheses, of more than merely the cyborg kind, to substitute for the explicitly amputated organs discarded during neuro-suspensions and/or uploading. The penetration into this body of discourse of the erotic reassures in a self-fullfilling, mastubatory hallucinatory reflex the needed complacency to avert anxiety to the point of trauma that will otherwise, in "normal" individuals, irredeemably inflict wounds of massive proportions on the post-organic personality, including, of course, identity neuroses. See my book, "The Duplicate as Liberated Posthuman", 1998, pp. 841-902, for a more explicit description of subconscious dependence on sexual continuity in narrative-cyberspace, and how ecstacy gradually overcomes the anxiety provoked by symbolic dissolution. So, in brief, yes. Louis Epstein pointed out that an original isn't the same as a duplicate because an original is only an original, whereas a duplicate is a duplicate, which demonstrates that the original is not a duplicate. A very similar argument proves that a duplicate isn't the original either: because if the duplicate WAS the original, then it wouldn't be a duplicate, or, in other words, a duplicate cannot be the original because a duplicate *is only* a duplicate, whereas the original is an original. I don't have time right now to get into the slightly trickier question of when the original is the original, which takes far more careful handling. While Louis's simple argument had never occurred to me before, and certainly does cut though a lot of the conceptual difficulties behind uploading, copies, and transformations to the posthuman, it hardly damages the account rendered by the information theory of duplicate identity (Ibid. pp. 1066-1131) as it pertains to whether a duplicate IS a copy or for that matter whether a copy IS a copy (it's not! -- "is" and "is only" mean two entirely different things), and where I explicity define "is" so carefully that even President Clinton would have been able to understand (quite independent of any erotic penetrations into the body Lewinsky). Lee Corbin Rate This Message: http://www.cryonet.org/cgi-bin/rate.cgi?msg=16148