X-Message-Number: 20936
From: 
Date: Tue, 21 Jan 2003 19:15:33 EST
Subject: versions of you

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A facet of Dr. Price's recent statements about "identical" objects may have 
received little notice.

If I read him and his school correctly, two objects in the same quantum state 
(if such a thing is possible) must be regarded as identical. It isn't a 
matter of degree--it's all or nothing, I believe he said. Two or more objects 
are identical or they are not. Similarity has degrees; identity does not. 

(I could wander into discussions of the Bekenstein Bound and uncertainty 
regions in phase space, but I won't get into that.)

It would seem to follow that other "identical" instantiations of "you" would 
be you, or ought to be regarded as you (by everybody, including yourself, if 
you happen to know about them), however remote in time or space--while your 
immediate successor or continuer, yourself slightly evolved in time in the 
ordinary course of events, yourself one minute from now, is NOT you. 

Far be it from me to claim that intuition must carry the day or that bizarre 
ideas can't be right. In fact, almost everything strikes me as bizarre. 

Robert Ettinger

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