[extropy-chat] Personal Identity Bis

[Eugen Leitl]

On Wed, Apr 11, 2007 at 09:14:23PM -0700, Lee Corbin wrote:
> Excuse moi for butting in, but I may be misunderstanding something in
> the arguments here.  It sounds as though several people are criticizing 
> Heartland for claiming that "dead people are walking around".  I 

Slawomir thinks that a few seconds of flat EEG will kill the
original person. This means there are lots of zombies walking
around (or at least brand new people, here's a great idea to
to create ones which doesn't take a few decades), which are 
completely indistinguishable (no measuring procedure will help, 
assuming the lacune was short enough to not cause observable deficits).
Strangely enough these zombies claim to be the original people,
prepostorously claim access to dear loved ones of the freshly
departed, his bank account, his job, his entire life. Surely,
there must be a law against these uppity zombies?

Why just a few seconds of flat EEG? Why not anesthesia?
Why not a boink on the head? Why not a really strong cup of coffee?

Calling this "death" does sound a bit ridiculous, doesn't it?

> thought that his claim was merely that when you bring someone back
> from a flat EEG, or you teleport them, or you restore them from
> back up, hardly being zombies they're merely *different* people
> that those who died.

How can you tell they're different? What's the measurement
principle (not access to an external record) -- just the system
itself? This implies that histories cling to physical systems,
forever, amen, and can be queried.

I would call this superstition. It's certainly not science.
 
> This is similar to the refusal of several people on this list---who otherwise
> would not agree with Heartland in the least---to teleport. They are
> materialists in every other respect: cryonics is fine, for example. But
> the destructive property of teleportation, to them, kills someone and
> replaces him with an entity who only *believes* that he was the 
> original. (Of course I heartily dispute this myself.)

I don't. Location doesn't matter.

-- 
Eugen* Leitl <a href="http://leitl.org">leitl</a> http://leitl.org
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