[ExI] Next moment, everything around you will probably change

[Stathis Papaioannou]

On 21/06/07, Lee Corbin <lcorbin at rawbw.com> wrote:

> I admit that there is irony in the situation of a person or program trying
> to destroy instances that are identical to itself, even though it has been
> programmed to safeguard "its own existence".  But I consider the
> programs or persons acting in such a fashion to simply be deeply mistaken.
> All *outside* observers who are much less biased see them as
> identical.  Why aren't they identical?  Why should we view them as
> separate *people* or separate *programs* just because they're at
> each other's throats?

They obviously view each other as separate people if they are at each
other's throats. Conceivably they may be acting in this way because they are
actually mistaken about their twin, believing them to be a completely
different person who has fraudulently taken on their appearance. However,
suppose they are convinced that their counterpart was in fact 100% them
until the moment of differentiation, which might have been mere seconds ago,
and are still at each other's throats: what mistake would they be making in
that case? You can be mistaken about a matter of fact or of logic, but you
can't be mistaken about the way you feel. You have said in the past that you
would edit out such primitive feelings if you had the chance, and that's
fine, but it sounds not dissimilar to editing out impediments to acting on
any other ideal that you care about, such as "all men are brothers".



-- 
Stathis Papaioannou
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://lists.extropy.org/pipermail/extropy-chat/attachments/20070621/c55610df/attachment.html>