> > Hal Finney writes:
> > >God creates someone with memories of a past life, lets him live for a
> > >day, then instantly and painlessly kills him.
> > >
> > >What would you say that he experiences? Would he notice his birth and
> > >death? I would generally apply the same answers to the 10^100 people
> > >who undergo your thought experiment.
>
>Keep in mind that I was just trying to answer your question very
>directly and literally, about "the person" would experience in your
>thought experiment. I wasn't trying to get all moralistic about it.
>Maybe he minds about being killed, maybe he doesn't. I think most people
>would mind, in which case I think God is being pretty cruel. But all
>that morality is pretty much irrelevant to the simple question of what
>he would experience. I have tried to answer that as straightforwardly
>as I can, above.
>
> > Before continuing, it is worth looking at the definition of death. The
> > standard medical definition will not do for our purposes, because it
>doesn't
> > allow for future developments such as reviving the cryogenically
>preserved,
> > mind uploads, teleportation etc. A simple, general purpose definition
>which
> > has been proposed before on this list is that a person can be said to
>die at
> > a particular moment when there is no chance that he will experience a
>"next
> > moment", however that experience might come about. Equivalently, death
> > occurs when there is no successor observer moment, anywhere or ever.
>
>That definition doesn't make any sense in the context of "everything
>exists",
>because by definition every possible observer moment exists.
Yes; hence, everyone is immortal. But leaving that much-debated issue aside
for now, I'm not sure that I understand what, if anything, you would accept
as a method of surviving the death of your physical body. Would you consider
that scanning your brain at the moment of death and uploading your mind to a
computer constitutes survival? What about the Star Trek teleporter: is that
a method of transportation or of execution? If you can accept the
possibility that you can survive the death of your physical body at all,
then I think you have to accept that the people in my thought experiment are
*not* killed, despite the death of their physical bodies, just as in the
case of mind uploading or teleportation.
--Stathis Papaioannou
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Received on Sun Jun 19 2005 - 09:26:44 PDT