[extropy-chat] Cryonics and uploading.

[Bret Kulakovich]

I am saying this from two standpoints:

1. If I am myself making the copy, and the copy is a success, and  
assuming that the two objects do not occupy the same location in  
space-time, and that for my convenience the locations they occupy are  
close to me and one another.

The one on my left, is the original. On my right, the 'copy'. I could  
mark one with a Sharpie, so I don't mix them up.

If you shuffled them when I wasn't looking, then of course I can't  
tell them apart, ever again, assuming they were not conscious entities.

If they were conscious entities, then their 'exacting perfection'  
would fall gradually out of coherence as they each gather their own a- 
prioi experience. And that is how I could tell them apart - assuming  
the technology to perfectly copy two living things assumes the  
technology to tell them apart, doesn't it?

2. Right now, being unaware that I was or was not copied last night,  
I cannot possibly know. I could be buried in the yard, and this me is  
a perfect copy, who interprets the experiences recorded as my own,  
just like a replicant, transporter user in previous example, victim  
of the Outer Limits, etc. But we also lack the technology and tools  
of my example above right now.


Apologies in using you in examples without prior consent in previous  
emails!

Bret K.


On Jan 26, 2006, at 1:32 PM, John K Clark wrote:

>
>> even though it is a duplicate of the original,
>> it is not the original, no matter how perfect
>
> How do you know? If the copy is perfect then how do you know it is  
> not the
> "original", how do you know somebody didn't copy you last night and
> destroyed the "original", how do you know that you are not a "copy"?

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