On Thu, Jul 25, 2019 at 3:16 PM 'Brent Meeker' via Everything List < everything-list@googlegroups.com> wrote:
> On 7/24/2019 4:28 AM, Bruno Marchal wrote: > > Note that the personal identity is not a transitive notion. Step 3 >> actually illustrates well this. I recall he cut and copy itself from >> Helsinki (H) in both Washington (W) and Moscow (M). With the definition of >> the personal identity above, both the HW and the HM guy are, from that >> personal identity view, the same person as the H person. >> > > With a more sensible notion of personal identity, the copies are different > persons, and different persons from the original. > > > But that would entail that you die in step 1, which would again just be > your opinion that mechanism is false. > > > Why do you assume this is all-or-nothing, live-or-die? What seems likely > to me is that the copy will be necessarily different due to information > limitations of quantum mechanics...but maybe not so different that one > would still say yes to the doctor, depending on the alternatives. > I was talking about duplication, as in step 3. But even in step 1 the original is "cut" after copying. So the original certainly "dies" according to the "cut" protocol. The question is whether what survives as a copy is sufficiently like the original to count as the same person. It seems to me that this depends on a lot of things that are left unspecified. Of particular concern is whether the original body is also reconstructed -- a feat that would seem to be beyond any reasonable technology of the future. What you could at best achieve would be to connect the mechanical brain to some robotic body, with maintenance of essential input and output functions. Or even have the copy live in an entirely virtual reality, constructed within some computer. (Such possibilities are relatively common in the Sci-Fi literature.) Then, even if memories are preserved, it is possible that the copied person might react negatively to his/her new substitute body (or the virtual reality environment).. This is not unknown in practice, because sometimes after accidents that lead to severe bodily deformations, the patient rejects the damaged body and suffers all sorts of psychological problems: PTSD being one of the least of their worries. So although these are thought experiments, the practical implications for real people are largely unknowable until it is actually tried in practice. Whether this would ever be ethical is another question....... Bruce -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Everything List" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. To view this discussion on the web visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/everything-list/CAFxXSLSqJDJkVDX_7TVjO8SDr-C31tze%2BvssifffY%2B_zOm%2Bc5Q%40mail.gmail.com.
