X-Message-Number: 14960
Date: Sun, 19 Nov 2000 12:51:41 -0800
From: Lee Corbin <>
Subject: Duplicates Problem

In Message #14952 Mike Perry writes
>>Both you and your double are told that one of you has to
>>be destroyed.  Would one of you mind which one it was?

>In terms of a preference as to which one of the two it would
>be, I would say defininitely not--I would mind that one of us
>was to be destroyed, but I would have no preference as to which
>one it was... I would would view the situation probabilistically,
>as equivalent to "there is a 50% chance you will be destroyed."
>Such odds would worry me, but beyond that I make no distinction
>between "myself" and a double (or triple, etc.) when "I" have no
>way of distinguishing them. The different instantiations I do not
>view as separate selves but equal and interchangeable
>representatives of one self; that is to say, they form an
>equivalence class.

What exactly are you "worried about"?  Why should probability enter
into it at all?  Someone hastily reading this might suppose that
you thought that your soul, or identity, had only a 50% chance of
surviving.  I hope that I didn't cut out too much of what you wrote,
but it doesn't look entirely consistent to me.

As for me, certainly I would not care which.  In fact each of us
would definitely choose the other to survive if there was any
advantage to "Lee Corbin" to do so.

Of course, the surviving instance would deeply lament the loss of
his brother duplicate, and both would greatly strive to foster as
many surviving instances of us as possible.  I consider that I get
twice as much benefit running in two places than I do in one, even
if the two are totally identical (for one thing, they might be many,
many light years apart).


Lee

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