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

[Lee Corbin]

Heartland writes

> [Jeffrey wrote]
>>  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 [wrote]:
> "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.

Right, Jeffrey, but we'll still have to convince Heartland   :-)    I love pincer
attacks.  John Clark is coming at him from the north while we hammer
away from the west

> 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."

Yes, Slawomir, that's an interesting observation, but I don't think pertinent.

> 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.

No---I did mean *being*.  Now, first, please understand that these are
two totally and completely separate physical processes with absolutely
no knowledge of each other.  Think of one of them, you, here on Earth
and the other on a very similar Earth that lies 10^10^29 light-years
from here (much, much further away than light has had time to travel
since the BB).  But you do happen to have the same memories. (By
the way, I did not pull 10^10^29 out of my nether regions---it is a 
figure presented by Tegmark in the April 2003 Scientific American,
where he points out that one will expect an identical person at about
that range in an infinite universe.)

> However, *seeing* two places at the same time and *being* in two
> places at the same time are two different things.

Right.

> 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.

But I'm claiming (along with several other people here) that while
there are two instances, two minds, two brains, there is only one
person.  What is a person?  I'm going to be arguing against Jef
Albright shortly, but to me it's values, beliefs, and memories, which
someone began to call VBM or something here not long ago.

> 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.

Yes, but the concept of *person* that you dispute includes the
proposition that you are the same person you were ten years ago
even though we are speaking of two minds, two brains, two
spatial locations, and two temporal locations. But still *one* person.

Lee