[extropy-chat] Survival tangent (was Just curious, it's not natural!)

[Heartland]

>  Lee writes:
>  "But people can be in two places at once, even though it seems uncanny
> to our evolutionarily derived notions of self. Nonetheless, once forking
> is a possibility (either after uploading or, less plausibly, via teleporters
> and copying machines), people will have to accustom themselves to the
> idea."

Jeffrey:
"Personally, I'm not ready to reject Slawomir's ideas and conceptions. But, in this
particular example, I agree with you Lee. That the intricate weave of
*consciousness* of a person can effectively "exist" at two places simultaneously.
An easy and tangible example is the binocular vision of humans; where the two
spatially separated eyes recieve separate data streams from different locations,
are processed, and "emerge" in the same "conscious moment" as standard vision,
complete with parralax and depth perception."
---

But these two streams of data are merely components in a single instance of mind. I
suspect that when Lee says that, "people can be in two places at once," he means
that, "people can *see* two places at once" which is certainly possible, as you 
say. However, *seeing*
two places at the same time and *being* in two places at the same time are two
different things. What is also important to point out is that each stream of visual
data is not equivalent to a complete mind just like a single neuron firing is not
equivalent to a full mind. In the end, all these different subprocesses that happen
inside a brain still add up to a single instance of mind. So two streams of visual
data don't produce two minds. There's still only one mind there.

Incidentally, that 2 things cannot be at the same place and time has nothing to do
with "evolutionarily derived notions of self" (what I'm saying just happens to
apply to notions of "self" as well) but everything to do with the law of
conservation of mass/energy. Two brains weighing 1.4kg cannot share the same
spatiotemporal location and still weigh 1.4kg. Two unconnected instances of mind
cannot be a single instance of mind.

Slawomir