X-Message-Number: 7895
Date:  Wed, 19 Mar 97 14:35:50 
From: Mike Perry <>
Subject: duplicates

Joseph Strout, #7883, wrote:

>The upshot of it is that if one
>system is functionally equivalent to another, then it must have the
>same conscious experience as the other as well.  So you know an
>emulated you will feel just like you; it will have the same conscious
>experience you have.
>
>The only remaining question, then, is whether it is you, or a new
>person with your memories.  And whether the latter option even makes
>any sense depends on your definition of personal identity.  To me, it
>makes no sense; any creature with your mental structure IS you. 
>That's what you are; you're a being with a certain mental structure
>(and other attributes, like shoe size, which are not important).
>
With this I completely agree. I would identify "you" with all 
"instantiations" of you--any specific constructs wherever they may 
be--that could be said to exhibit mental activity--or more 
specifically conscious experience--that is
the same as yours or "appropriately isomorphic." A 
person's "identity" must then be regarded as distributed over any of 
these identical instantiations. This is what I refer to, in the book 
I'm now writing, as the prinicple of Interchangeability. (It is a 
version of what is called the pattern or form theory of identity.)

I extend this principle to the totality of existence, and not just to our 
present but to past and future times. "I" have no way of knowing, beyond 
my conscious experience, which time I'm even living in, let alone 
which "world" (or for example, whether I'm an emulation in some 
intelligent being's computer, or just present in the "real" world). I 
don't even know which *direction* time is running, beyond my own 
experience. In theory, two of my instantiations could be running 
counterclockwise to each other, yet as far as I'm concerned my 
identity would extend over both equally. But in the event that any two 
instantiations begin to have different experiences, a split 
occurs and we then have two persons where before we had one. I see 
no problem with two persons having their past in common. One 
could become two, or many, by a straightforward process.

These thoughts, it might be complained, are remote from what is 
likely to be meaningful in our lives. Perhaps there is no likelihood 
of another "instantiation" of a person existing anywhere--the odds 
being just too small for the necessary coincidences to occur. But with 
many-worlds physics that is not so. (I think that growing evidence 
favors many-worlds, including the progress with quantum
computing.) And there are powerful philosophical consequences
of Interchangeability as I've described 
it--one: that it should be logically possible to raise the dead, by 
creating appropriate duplicates.

Nevertheless, there are good reasons to be signed up for cryonics, 
even if one is highly confident about Interchangeability and the 
eventual resurrection of the dead. These I'm also trying to cover in the 
book.

Mike Perry

http://www.alcor.org


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