X-Message-Number: 14939 Date: Thu, 16 Nov 2000 22:42:55 -0700 From: Mike Perry <> Subject: Duplicate Conflict Again Dave pizer, #14929, says: >What if there was another person in another universise living a life just >like your's and thinking exactly what you are thinking from your day one to >now. What if you were to be destroyed now and you know that other person >in that other universe is not going to be destroyed. Would you still mind >being destroyed? > Once again (since this has come up before), to my thinking the very conditions described violate the requirements of a duplicate. Your double must not be different from you in any way, shape or form, in terms of what he perceives or experiences. (This, of course, is my own point of view and may not be shared by every non-Pizerist.) But here, you "know" that "I am about to be destroyed, that other guy isn't." Your double can't say this, at least in terms of "knowing," so he isn't your double. Perhaps it will be objected that your double could think he knows that he is about to be destroyed, and thus have the same thoughts as you, but be mistaken. But in that case you can't tell whether you are the one construct or the other, so really both are on an equal footing and you can't really *know* that "you" are the one to be destroyed. More generally I find strong reasons to regard a conscious person as a kind of equivalence class consisting of possibly many different processes or active constructs, rather than a single such entity. Equivalence classes are well-established in mathematics and you can work with them just as with single objects. It may take more effort sometimes, but in this case I think it's effort well spent. It does not reduce a person to a mere abstraction, as is sometimes asserted. The active instantiations (elements of the equivalence class) are not just abstractions, but it is allowed that there could be many of them. Mike Perry Rate This Message: http://www.cryonet.org/cgi-bin/rate.cgi?msg=14939