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

From: Günther Greindl <guenther.greindl.domain.name.hidden>
Date: Wed, 04 Mar 2009 00:28:04 +0100

Hi,

> better: this is just the "usual" comp-suicide self-selection (assuming
> of course we can really kill the copies, which is in itself not an
> obvious proposition).


I have been thinking along these lines lately, in a somewhat different
context: the teleportation with annihilation experiment together with
the no cul de sac conjecture and RSSA (that is, a case not covered by
Jack's paper).

Imagine the sequence:

Scan - Annihilate - Signal - Reconstitute

Now consider that the Signal travels for 100 000 lightyears
before it hits the reconstitution chamber (just to
have a big distance, the concern is causal disconnection in spacetime).

Now, in the meantime, the reconstitution chamber has been overtaken by
aliens (coming from the other side of the galaxy) who have advanced
technology and can control the multiverse - they decide the tweak the
multiverse that the reconstitution happens in _no_ multiverse at all (by
destroying all chambers).

This would suggest that the no cul de sac conjecture implies that
annihilation in the above sequence fails.

But surely this can not depend on the decision of the aliens, who were
nowhere near the causal lightcone of the annihilation event.

This would imply one of three things (in my view in decreasing degree of
plausibility):

.) no cul-de-sac is false; no QI, even in RSSA scenarios.
.) annihilation always fails. That is, if a copying machine exists,
there will always be a version of you which feels that copying has not
succeeded and "nothing happened" (even if you said you wanted to be
annihilated after the duplication).
.) COMP obeys global super-selection rules, akin to pre-determinism;
that is, in scenarios where aliens destroy the chambers, annihilation
fails, else not. Analogously for other scenarios.


Cheers,
Günther


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Received on Tue Mar 03 2009 - 18:27:40 PST

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