[ExI] No link between original and copy? Denied!

[Richard Loosemore]

Alan Grimes wrote:
>> If you insist on using your above phrasing to describe this case (You
>> said "[I have forced the uploaders] to argue that no link of any kind
>> exists between the original an the copy") then you are obliged to ALSO
>> agree that there is no link of any kind between the you of now and the
>> you of a few seconds from now.
> 
> WTF?
> 
> Now I'm [making the mistake of] responding to this lame post, in a few
> minutes I'm going to be on the phone with the company that owes me a
> $4500 electric motor since Sept 1, then I'm might be sharing a lightbulb
> joke with the list after I finish reading a bunch of other lame posts...
> Nobody can say that any of those activities will be carried out by a
> different person. (though someone else might come up with a lightbulb
> joke). Each interval of time can be subdivided down to 10^-18 seconds or
> so. At none of those trillions upon trillions of instants of time could
> I be said to not exist. Nor will there be any other conceivable
> discontinuity between my states as nothing has stopped, nothing has been
> restarted, nothing is outside of the light-cone of where it could have
> been. The connection between myself and myself a second ago and a second
> hence is perfect and unbreakable. Furthermore I have both my memory and
> my (weak) precognitive sense forming a direct link.

Oh dear, do I have to spell it out in words of one syllable?  ;-)

I thought you were smart enough to understand the elementary linkages 
between these (very old) chains of argument.  Apparently not.

When you (in your words) forced your opponents to admit "that no link of 
any kind exists between the original and the copy" you were winning a 
hollow victory, because the LACK of that linkage is the same lack of 
linkage between the you of tonight and the you that wakes up after a 
period of unconsciousness (i.e. sleep).

In both the duplication case and the sleep case, there is a 
discontinuity of consciousness.  The other continuities and 
discontinuities, which are not the same between the two cases (i.e. the 
fact that the sleep case involves the same hardware before and after, 
whereas the duplication does not) are, ACCORDING TO THE CLAIMS OF YOUR 
OPPONENTS, of no consequence at all.  Your opponents are saying "Sure, 
there is no tangible link between copy and original .... but that is 
because all the supposed links that exist between, say, the you before 
and after you go to sleep, are not meaningful or relevant.  As far as 
consciousness is concerned, going to sleep is the same as being 
destroyed and then recreated as a duplicate:  it is the same "you" 
before and after in both cases, because the only meaningful concept of 
"you" that can be defended is one in which mere physical continuity 
means nothing.

So your opponents are not conceding anything, because when they say that 
there is no significant link between original and duplicate, they would 
say the same between a person before and after sleep.

The extension to the non-sleep case is trivial.  We can imagine a 
micro-sleep of arbitrary duration inserted into your regular waking 
consciousness.  (In fact we do not have to go that far:  your regular 
waking consciousness has lots of peculiarities that make it not a 
unitary thing anyhow... but I digress).  With that extension in place, 
we can say that actually when you think that you are continually 
conscious from one moment to the next, you are perceiving a continuity 
that would look the same even when micro-sleeps are inserted, so in 
effect there is no meaningful connection between the you of now and the 
you of a few seconds from now.

QED.



uuuuuh!  Thanks for playing.


Richard Loosemore