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