[ExI] Let's play What If.

Richard Loosemore rpwl at lightlink.com
Fri Oct 29 18:43:26 UTC 2010


Damien Broderick wrote:
> On 10/29/2010 12:31 PM, Richard Loosemore wrote:
> 
>> One of the two future people should be afraid, and one should not.  But
>> that is a stupid statement because before the duplication NEITHER of
>> those future entities exist.
> 
> Not so. John explicitly stated that the original would be set free, and 
> asked how the original would feel about the prospect of his duplicate 
> being tormented. Since I am the original prior to any duplicating, I 
> know I'm safe if the psychopaths keep their promise, which seems 
> unlikely). What happens in the consciousness of the duplicate *after he 
> is created* is a different matter, because the poor bastard will 
> remember everything I do.

But that interpretation implies an asymmetry between the two people, 
which (as I will explain below) is impossible to enforce when the 
question is being addressed, before the operation.

Thus:

After the duplication, the original would think to himself "Poor 
bastard, but at least I get to go free".

The duplicate will wake up and say "WAIT!  What happened?!!!  You said 
the original would be okay!"

These two will be functionally identical.  Each will claim to be the 
original, though one will have physical evidence that he woke up in the 
wrong place.

The problem, of course, is John Clark's nasty little question about what 
the *prior* version should or should not be afraid of.    The prior 
version is the exact basis for both the continuation AND the duplicate, 
so if the prior version thinks smugly "Well, it's okay, because HE is 
going to get shafted, but since I'm the original I'm going to be 
okay......" then this thought is, strictly speaking, meaningless.  The 
thought will be stored in both versions after the operation.

So if we answer the question either way ("Yes, I am afraid" or "No, I am 
not afraid because I am the original") this answer will imply something 
about which direction the original person is "in actual fact" going. 
There is just no meaning to the idea that the person before the 
operation is "in actual fact" going in one direction or another.

*********

Sidebar:

This rests on the fact that if you strip away everything physical from 
the thing that is a person, it is only the functionality that matters. 
Our physical aspect gets stripped away and totally replaced, atom by 
atom, every few years.  Nobody ever complains that "Oh my god I am going 
to die in a few years because all my atoms will be different by then!!" 
-- we all consider functional continuity to be the absolute arbiter of 
who we are.

Both the original and the duplicate, in John Clark's scenario, have 100% 
of the functional continuity.  It is just that one of them (the copy) 
has the same kind of discontinuity that is experienced by all of us 
after a few years' waiting, but compressed into one microsecond.  If it 
does not make any difference to us when we wait for a few years to get 
the normal physical replacement, how can physical replacement have a 
different significance in this case?

*********

Hey, here is the right analogy to convey the message.  In Heinlein's 
"Door into Summer" Dan is talking to his buddy Chuck about the time 
machine that Chuck knows about.  Chuck explains that there is a problem 
with time travel, because the machine sends one of its two loads forward 
in time, and one backward, and there is no way to tell which one will go 
which way.  He says "Nobody knows which way to orient the kinkin' thing! 
  Tell me:  which direction is next week?  Go ahead, point to it!"

I say, before the operation, "Tell me which direction is this 'Original 
Me' that is going to be okay?"  There is no way to do that because 
before the operation every attempt to point to the original will ALSO 
point to the copy of me.



Richard Loosemore





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