RE: A calculus of personal identity

From: Lee Corbin <lcorbin.domain.name.hidden>
Date: Sat, 1 Jul 2006 23:52:31 -0700

Hal writes

> What I argued was that it would be easier to find the trace of a person's
> thoughts in a universe where he had a physically continuous record than
> where there were discontinuities (easier in the sense that a smaller
> program would suffice). In my framework, this means that the universe
> would contribute more measure to people who had continuous lives than
> people who teleported.

Just out of curiosity, does a person who saw a chance TV show on Chaucer
and now reads Chaucer have less measure than if he'd been just as
influenced by a TV show about Harry Potter?

> Someone whose life ended at the moment of
> teleportation would have a higher measure than someone who survived
> the event. Therefore, I would view teleportation as reducing measure
> similarly to doing something that had a risk of dying. I would try to
> avoid it, unless there were compensating benefits

That is, you would avoid it more than you avoid crossing the street
more often than you have to (*with* the stop lights; far be it from
me to accuse you of unlawful behavior)?

> If we wanted to create a physical record where this framework would
> be compatible with saying that people die often, it would be necessary
> to physically teleport people thousands of times a second. Or perhaps
> the same thing could be done by freezing people for a substantial time,
> reviving them for a thousandth of a second, then re-freezing them again
> for a while, etc.
>
> If we consider the practical implications of such experiments I don't
> think it is so implausible to view them as being worse than living a
> single, connected, subjective life. It would be quite difficult to
> interact in a meaningful way with the world under such circumstances.

But it may be that this is a simulation, and the "destruction" amounts
to erasure of data from working memory, and the "restoration" the
retrieval from a distant part of the network bus. Thus, the interaction
of people with people left in working memory would go completely
unnoticed.

Equivalently, we could find out that the Martians operate millions of
times faster than we do, and employ something a little more advanced
than superconducting that copies my body information, stores it a
few meters away, then disintegrates my body, copies my data back from
where they stored it, and fabricates a new copy. This should not
be evident to people with such slow senses as us animals.

> However, if one were so unfortunate as to be put into such a situation,
> then it would no longer be particularly bad to teleport. You're being
> broken into pieces all the time anyway, so the event of teleportation
> would presumably not make things any worse. Particularly if you were
> somehow being teleported thousands of times a second, then adding a
> teleportation would basically be meaningless since you're teleporting
> anyway at every instant. So I don't agree with Lee's conclusion that
> in this situation people would still resist teleportation.

I meant it in the way that today many people resist air travel, i.e.,
a part of them knows that they are not being rational in a way.

Lee


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Received on Sun Jul 02 2006 - 02:47:21 PDT

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