RE: A calculus of personal identity

From: Lee Corbin <lcorbin.domain.name.hidden>
Date: Tue, 20 Jun 2006 00:43:00 -0700

I have before stated my long-held opinions on this,
namely that it's best to regard one's duplicates
as self. As a corollary, the "you" that ends up
in one place is "100% you" and so is the other.

Consider this alternative experiment: we reveal to
you that every minute of the last two years you have
had one thousand duplicates created in fake rooms,
streets, passage ways, or in bed, wherever you happen
to be. At random, 999 are chosen to be immediately
destroyed, with only the 1 at the end of each minute
carrying on.

Oh, yes, you might be very philosophically upset.
But it would end up making no real difference to
you. You would find that you, as always, have more
important things to worry about, and life would go
on normally.

No important difference exists between one person
to whom this is happening, and his neighbor to
whom it is not. They both feel similarly, and
by hypothesis lead very similar lives.

For this reason, our concepts and language must
adapt to reality, not try to make reality adapt
to them.

Lee Corbin


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Received on Tue Jun 20 2006 - 03:37:42 PDT

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