[ExI] Let's play What If.

[Damien Broderick]

On 10/30/2010 11:57 AM, John Clark wrote:

> The copy remembers seeing a man who looked just like him appearing 2
> feet in front of him, and he's not the least bit surprised because that
> is exactly what he expected to happen. You are also not surprised when
> two very large guards with no neck enter the chamber, you wait for them
> to grab that other poor fellow but to your astonishment they go for you
> instead.

Ah, so the psychopaths lied (as they tend to do) and tortured the 
original instead. (Only the original can see his copy "appear in front 
of him," rather than feeling a visual lurch and finding himself on the 
other side of the room looking at the scanner and the original.) No 
doubt the original should have taken this untrustworthiness of 
psychopaths into account and been filled with dread the day before.

Granted, you can now retweak the conditions of your imaginary set-up 
until you make it impossible for the two to know which of them is which. 
Borrow the Algis Budrys ROGUE MOON case but discover that the original 
is always conveyed via wormhole to the distant "reassembly station" in 
Luna (although later it turns out there's been no disassembly) and 
instead a "quantum echo effect" causes a perfect duplicate to fill the 
void left by the original's absence (as in Disch's ECHO ROUND MY BONES). 
Now everyone will be sure that the I in the "scanner" is the original, 
whereas he is actually on the Moon, gloomily convinced that he is a 
copy. Then a theorist will discover what really happened, and a court 
case will return the original's rights to bank account, spouse, etc etc. 
Then another theorist will prove that actually the original has been 
disintegrated and *both* current instances are copies, created 
simultaneously. None of this will matter for long, because everyone from 
PETA to Homeland Security will force the process to be banned, until 
Halliburton's secret money-copying machine suffers a glitch (having been 
built from substandard teleportium) and starts spewing millions of 
copies of Dick Cheney, from a stored scan, all over Afghanistan, where 
most of them immediately have heart attacks and die, their rotting 
corpses dismaying the Taliban and causing millions to flee on foot into 
Iran.

Damien Broderick