X-Message-Number: 19555 Date: Thu, 18 Jul 2002 09:59:23 -0400 From: Robin Helweg-Larsen <> Subject: Merging identities Thomas Donaldson points out that identical copies of a person would no longer be identical once they had had separate experiences, and that merging their personalities would be to merge two now different people. To elaborate: suppose one of them has fallen in love and is partying and doing recreational drugs (alcohol or whatever), while the other has a bicycle crash and is in pain from having stripped the skin off leg, arm and face. Not only would the memories and the moods be different, but the moods (and memories) would be influenced by the ongoing physiological response in the brain itself to the external factors, as well as varying responses in other parts of the body. Could you merge them back to a state of identical memories and personality? Or would that interfere with the body's appropriate physiological response to its physical situation? And even if you could merge them to include both events *as real*, would you want to? Or would it be better to differentiate between the memory of one's own events (which would mesh more appropriately with the body's needs), and the understood but recognisably 'other' events, which could be memories only in the sense that one understands and remembers someone else's tales - as humans have adapted to do, from the time of cavedwellers to the time of Hollywood and the many story-tellers among us. (Perhaps over-identification with the events of other bodies could lead to mental illness, or some physiological manifestation of stigmata...) Robin HL Rate This Message: http://www.cryonet.org/cgi-bin/rate.cgi?msg=19555