Lee Corbin writes:
[quoting Stathis]
> > These are not trivial questions. The basic problem is that our minds
>have
> > evolved in a world where there is no copying and no memory loss (memory
>loss
> > may have occurred naturally, of course, but evolution's answer to it
>would
> > have been to wipe out the affected individual and their genes), so there
>is
> > a mismatch between reason and intuition.
>
>Well, it's time to at least be verbally able to prescribe what
>one would do. The flat, linear model suggests that more good
>runtime for me is good, less is worse, and bad runtime is worst
>of all.
>
>I think that if it is given that either you or your duplicate
>must die, then you should willingly sacrifice yourself if it will
>enrich your duplicate.
>
>Either way, I think you wake up the next morning very satisfied
>with the outcome.
How do you wake up the next morning if you're the one who died? Unless you
can effect some sort of mind merge just before dying, you lose all the
experiences that you have had since you and your duplicate diverged, and you
will never have any more new experiences or knowledge of the world. That's
the problem with dying!
I still don't really understand why you are so insistent that your duplicate
is you and should be considered on a par with yourself when it comes to
deciding what is in your self-interest. You have arrived at this conclusion
from the fact that you and he were physically and mentally identical at the
moment of duplication, and will remain more similar than a pair of identical
twins despite diverging post-duplication. However, I don't see why it is any
less valid or less rational if I say that I find the idea of having a
duplicate around disturbing, and would prefer not to be duplicated,
especially if there is a chance the two of us might meet.
--Stathis Papaioannou
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Received on Fri Jul 01 2005 - 12:41:05 PDT