Stephen Paul King writes:
>Dear Lee and Stathis,
>
> I really do not want to be a stick-in-the-mud here, but what do we base
>the idea that "copies" could exist upon? What if "I", or any one else's 1st
>person aspect, can not be copied? If the operation of copying is
>impossible, what is the status of all of these thought experiments?
> If, and this is a HUGE if, there is some thing irreducibly quantum
>mechanical to this "1st person aspect" then it follows from QM that copying
>is not allowed. Neither a quantum state nor a "qubit" can be copied without
>destroying the "original".
>
> All of these threads so far seem to be assuming that the process that
>gives rise to a 1st person experience and the content of the experience
>itself are purely classical and can be faithfully represented by classical
>systems. It is this assumption, I believe, that underpins the entire
>classical Platonic thesis. Indications are that it has already been
>falsified, by the same experiments that unassailably imply that Nature is,
>at its core, Quantum Mechanical and not Classical and thus one wonders:
>"Why do we persist in this state of denial?"
It is true that nature is quantum mechanical rather than classical, but I am
not aware that anyone has proved that the brain is not a classical computer.
If it is, then it should in theory be possible to get a functionally
equivalent copy by copying the computational state, rather than exactly
emulating the quantum state; rather as one can transfer the operating system
and files from one electronic computer to another, without copying the
original machine atom for atom.
--Stathis Papaioannou
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Received on Fri Jun 03 2005 - 00:07:10 PDT