Re: [Fwd: NDPR David Shoemaker, Personal Identity and Ethics: A Brief Introduction]

From: Bruno Marchal <marchal.domain.name.hidden>
Date: Mon, 2 Mar 2009 18:40:42 +0100

On 01 Mar 2009, at 23:48, Stathis Papaioannou wrote:

>
> 2009/3/2 Bruno Marchal <marchal.domain.name.hidden>:
>
>> All right, I understand. The question now is: are you sure it is in
>> "your" interest to be that selfish. It is not a moral question: can
>> you be coherent, take the full piece of botter "dead is not big deal"
>> of the midazolam argument, and keep that sort of selfishness.
>>
>> Do you prefer to live in a country 1 where "self-torture" is allowed
>> but only when the decision is made before the duplication (and yes
>> you
>> could be the victim indeed), or in a country 2 where "self-torture"
>> is
>> allowed after the duplication. It seems to me that your midazolam-
>> argument (I re-quote below(*)) should in fine relativize the very
>> notion of selfishness.
>>
>> I think it is preferable to live in the first country: yes I could be
>> the victim, but I can remember my consent. In the second type of
>> country, I could even more so be the tortured one ... eventually; and
>> without my consent. OK?
>
> Living in the first country is equivalent to allowing a contract where
> you agree to a gain today at the cost of suffering tomorrow, like
> selling your soul to the devil.


I would say that it is more like selling your soul to yourself, but I
admit this could be the same, in some case. You better have to know
yourself.

I think that comp practitioners will divide, in the long run, along
three classes:

A: majority. Accept teleportation but disallow overlap of
"individuals": annihilation first, reconstitution after. No right to
self-infliction. In case of accidental or exceptional self-
multiplication, consent is asked at any time.
B: a stable minority (in the long run). Accept teleportation but do
allow overlap of individuals. Some will fight for the right of self-
infliction including the consent made before the duplication, but with
precise protocol. You know the problem of the masochist: I say no,
continue, I say "no no", stop!
C: the bandits. They violates protocols and don't ask for consents.
They should normally be wanted, I mean researched by all the polices
of the universe, or already be in jail or in asylum.

Legend for the future: the A and B people will fight with each other
until the A people realize that only the B people can help them to
lessen the pain inflicted by the C people. A little bit like Orpheus
going to hell for saving the soul of his love Eurydice.

The case of the B people is an interesting case, if only because it
shows the richness of the hardly definable notion of self-consent.
With comp you can't build a paradise without building an hell. The
existence of B people can make hell partially controllable. I think.
This points to harm reduction strategies in the politics of health.
The very existence of the B people makes the C people transparently
cowards.

A masochist has much in common with a Godelian sentence, which asserts
their (true) unprovability or their (false but consistent) refutability.
They are quite different from the Löbian sentences which asserts
positively their (true) provability.

The genuine pain is not in the intensity of the flame, but in the
unfairness of the violation of the consents and protocols. Amnesia of
consent is equivalent to no consent at all. Except for ...

Masochism could be a self-referential type of Trojan Horse concept for
developing, as far as it is comp-possible, a mechanist theory of pain.
And the first easy thing you can deduce are of the negative type: pain
is not definable, pain is unavoidable (for consistent entities), but
also pain can be limited, and this even in the transfinite.

Indulge my thinking aloud. This is not published material. Yet I did
wrote, for myself, a long time ago a "A Refutation of Sade". Sade, in
his own way, showed already the danger of confusing Mechanism and
Materialism. He took Mechanism and Materialism from La Mettrie, who
already builded the seeds of person elimination philosophies.

Best,

Bruno


http://iridia.ulb.ac.be/~marchal/




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Received on Mon Mar 02 2009 - 12:41:05 PST

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