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

From: Stathis Papaioannou <stathisp.domain.name.hidden>
Date: Wed, 4 Mar 2009 17:13:07 +1100

2009/3/4 Günther Greindl <guenther.greindl.domain.name.hidden>:

> 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.

The no-cul-de-sac hypothesis is false if you allow that there is some
means of destroying all copies in the multiverse. But there is
probably no such means, no matter how advanced the aliens.


-- 
Stathis Papaioannou
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Received on Wed Mar 04 2009 - 01:13:21 PST

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