SP: 'Is there anything about how you are feeling to day that makes you
sure that aliens didn't come during the night and replace your body with
an exact copy? Because that is basically what happens naturally anyway,
although it isn't aliens and it takes months rather than overnight:
almost every atom in your body is replaced with another atom, put in
roughly the same place. If the discarded atoms were kept rather than
sloughed off, exhaled etc. you would see that your identical twin of a
few months ago had died and no-one even noticed, because it happened
gradually. Other than in the speed and scheduling of your death, how
does destructive teleportation differ from normal life?'
MP:
* I know, which here means 'believe with confidence', that aliens
didn't come because everything feels, looks, smells, etc, as
normal. I am a creature of habit just like you and there is no
evidence of radical differences anywhere that I can notice.
* I quibble about whether atoms are replaced within DNA except as
part of the normal processes of replication and repair. That
aside, it is not the atoms per se which gives my identity but
their incorporation into molecular structures, and the
incorporation of all these molecular structures holonistically
into cells, organs, and all the rest. Our bodies are held against
collapse smallwards by the robust durability of genetic structures
which embody all the patterns needed to sustain our biological
integrity against the entropy within the flow of energy and
resources through our ecological niches. Mental integrity is
maintained in analogous manner by means of the robust durability
of meme structures embodied in neural networks and whatever
emergent super-neural structures they entail.
* Destructive teleportation differs from normal life in that it
entails the [as yet unlawful] killing of a person whose body is
dismembered in a very high resolution process during the course
of a magical ceremony, after which there soon arrives postcards
and news from a person in a faraway place claiming to be the
deceased and wanting access to his/her money box. The police and
other authorities in that far away place, when asked and paid,
will provide evidence that the healthy body of the person who
turned up there during a magical ceremony matches the fingerprint,
DNA and polygraph signatures of the deceased. They will also
report that she/he is suffering from culture shock, but otherwise
seems OK. All of these facts point to our day to day experience of
survival being very much a social and cultural construct in which
we believe, no more and no less.
* It therefore seems apparent that problems and conundrums raised by
the destructive teleporter/biofax machines are based understood by
recognising that our experience of being here now and seeming to
be the same person from day to day, indeed from moment to moment,
is what it is like to be a description of a person, although I
would say that the qualia aspect is actually what it is like to be
the updating of the description. It was ever thus.
Regards,
Mark Peaty CDES
[EMAIL PROTECTED]
http://www.arach.net.au/~mpeaty/
Stathis Papaioannou wrote:
Mark Peaty writes (in part):
* Assuming that it is in principle feasible to 'copy' a person and
either store the data obtained without deterioration or transmit the
data without noticeable loss, then when that data is used to
reconstitute a medically and legally acceptable facsimile, the new
copy is NOT the original it is his/her identical twin brother or sister.
* In this scenario, if the original which is copied ceases to
exist at the place of copying, he/she has died. If the copying took
place without destruction of the original then he/she is [ceteris
paribus] the same person and unchanged. The legal status of the new
twin will be the subject of common or statute law provoked by the
invention of the new technology.
* In a discussion with one of my son's friends just now we agreed
that the 'Star Trek' version of the teleporter is a rather odd beasty
in which not just the information/data concerning the structure and
dynamics of a crew member's body was sent to a destination but the
actual atoms of the body were sent also. This might seem like a tidy
sort of solution to someone who didn't want to think too deeply about
it, but the sending of the original's atoms would add an enormous
overhead to the system, firstly the amount of energy required to
accelerate all the particles to something close to the speed of light
would be enormous, and secondly it would not change anything
significant because it is not the fact of it being those particular
atoms which is important but which kind of atoms and exactly where
should they be. So when 'Scotty' or whoever beams them up, they die
on the planet's surface and their identical twins are created in the
spaceship.
* This whole scenario actually works to support the contention of
Steven Lehar that the identity of a thing includes its location and
that this fact is a reflection of how our brains work in creating the
phenomenal reality of our experience [see
http://cns-alumni.bu.edu/~slehar/webstuff/bubw3/bubw3.html#compmech].
Is there anything about how you are feeling to day that makes you sure
that aliens didn't come during the night and replace your body with an
exact copy? Because that is basically what happens naturally anyway,
although it isn't aliens and it takes months rather than overnight:
almost every atom in your body is replaced with another atom, put in
roughly the same place. If the discarded atoms were kept rather than
sloughed off, exhaled etc. you would see that your identical twin of a
few months ago had died and no-one even noticed, because it happened
gradually. Other than in the speed and scheduling of your death, how
does destructive teleportation differ from normal life?
Stathis Papaiaonnou
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