[ExI] simulation as an improvement over reality.

[John Clark]

On Jan 2, 2011, at 12:55 AM, Damien Broderick wrote:

> you keep skittering off into abstractions 

I keep taking common superstitions about personal identity and use nothing but simple logic to expose the absurdity within; you haven't even tried to counter my arguments, instead you simply say its all "blah blah" and continue to restate your tired old beliefs which comes from your gut not your brain. If my views are just skittering abstractions it should be easy to expose them for what they are but instead you just come off sounding like Samuel Wilberforce in the great Evolution debate in the 19'th century.

>  the question is NOT "will the copy feel as if it's me?"

So apparently you feel that you will feel like you but you will not be you while you want to feel like you feel today and feel like you and you are you. Huh?

> The strongest form of the evaded question remains: if you, here and now, have to be destructively scanned

Destructively? I don't have to read any more, if I am to be destroyed then I most certainly would not agree to anything, but I want you to explain very clearly what is being done to me and how that action results in my destruction.

> in order to build a replica who will feel just like you, will you happily agree to dying in order that this copy will go on afterwards?

Dying means having a last thought, if your action resulted in that then I would never agree to it, but you're not talking about that; in fact agreement is not even an issue because what you're talking about is so inconsequential I wouldn't even know it had happened unless you told me and even then I probably wouldn't believe you. 

By the way, I'm not even a big fan of definitions yet I have an exact definition of death. Do you?
 
> 
> what is MY stake in being destroyed in order that HE will be created?

I cannot answer the above query because in this context the symbol "MY" and the symbol "HE" mean the exact same thing rendering the question gibberish. 

> I realize that your extremely reductive scientism will reply that this is a meaningless question

Give that man a cigar! But if you have an alternative to "scientism" that you think is better at discovering the true nature of things I would very much like to hear about it.

> because all hydrogen atoms are identical, blah blah, and I can only gaze at this specious response with astonishment and a bit of indignation.

So we are reduced to this lowbrow state, scientific arguments deserve our anger because by their very nature they are false and we should all just think with our gut. I disagree, I see no reason why Evolution would endow us with intuition that was correct in a matter like this because up to now it would have given an animal no survival advantage. But times change and biological Evolution is far too slow to keep up, so if we expect to survive we must use our brain not our intestinal tract.

> it seems to me likely that your libertarianism might have something to do with how you abstract away from any social context to your thought experiment.

The existing social, economic, or geopolitical structure of our culture has zero relevance to the issues we are talking about.

> Your spherical cows seem to inhabit a world empty of any history, honesty, trust, reliable records, mutual observation, any of the practices by which real humans recognize each other diachronically and tell each other apart, even if they are identical twins whom other people have trouble distinguishing.

So in the past people have viewed the nature of identity in a certain way thus we must continue viewing things that same way even though the world is radically changing. I disagree. And stop with the silly identical twins business, my sisters are identical twins and I know full well they have different personalities, and even as a kid I could always tell them apart even if few others could.

 John K Clark



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