X-Message-Number: 25327
Date: Tue, 14 Dec 2004 23:21:24 -0700
From: Mike Perry <>
Subject: Re: QE Survival
References: <>

Dear Richard,

I wrote:


>One can postulate, for instance, that the *original* subjective
>life *cannot continue* if the atoms are replaced--different atoms,
>different system, original dead, as I've said before.

And you responded:

>We are not talking about the survival of a particular physical
>system, but of a set of properties of a physical system. The
>properties may survive, even while the system changes, as long as
>the system changes in ways consistent with those properties.

It strikes me that *may* is the operative word here. Yes, I agree "the 
properties *may* survive" (emphasis added). The main point I was trying to 
make is that it is not self-evident they *do* survive, to the extent that 
we are justified in asserting the original person is still present when the 
physical construct in which that person is expressed, the QE, is only a 
replica of what it was. (This of course is not a problem from the 
patternist view, but that is not what I am addressing here.) Your decision 
to allow that the original person survives in this special case of 
duplication (in which, as it happens, the original physical object is 
destroyed in the process), represents a choice as to what you consider 
important. You have no real, scientific demonstration that the soul, the 
subjective inner life or essence of the original, is *really* transferred 
this way, and not simply left behind and lost, to be replaced by another. 
And I submit there never will be such a demonstration. Or similarly, that 
the soul is *not* transmitted by some other process, such as making a 
duplicate outside the original and then destroying the original (which 
would produce the same end result physically).

Best wishes,
Mike Perry

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