X-Message-Number: 16148
Date: Sat, 28 Apr 2001 08:41:12 -0700
From: Lee Corbin <>
Subject: Re: Important question for the isomorphists

James Swayze's response to the spectre of duplicates haunting the future

> Would you have sex with your duplicate?

exemplifies the anxieties created in the social body by our incipient
transformation to the posthuman, and the frightening (to many) preservation
and reassertion, not to say, apotheosis of the liberal humanist subject
freed from atavistic dependence upon the privileged and privileging present
gendered human form.  Threats to spatial, temporal, and symbolic
continuity, unmediated by ritual rites of passage to the postcorporeal,
portend promiscuous intermingling and anxiety producing symbols of
fantastic and monstrous shapes, signifiers, and organic sensorial
transformations most alarming.  The key questions, as James explicitly
brings to the foreplay, are the ways in which libido production will be
transferred to the arena of computer codes, and in which cybersexual
performance, either with duplicates or uploaded entities will take its
usual priveledged position in the transformed psyche, which will
necessitate radical protheses, of more than merely the cyborg kind, to
substitute for the explicitly amputated organs discarded during
neuro-suspensions and/or uploading.  The penetration into this body of
discourse of the erotic reassures in a self-fullfilling, mastubatory
hallucinatory reflex the needed complacency to avert anxiety to the point
of trauma that will otherwise, in "normal" individuals, irredeemably
inflict wounds of massive proportions on the post-organic personality,
including, of course, identity neuroses.  See my book, "The Duplicate as
Liberated Posthuman", 1998, pp. 841-902, for a more explicit description of
subconscious dependence on sexual continuity in narrative-cyberspace, and
how ecstacy gradually overcomes the anxiety provoked by symbolic
dissolution.  So, in brief, yes.

Louis Epstein pointed out that an original isn't the same as a duplicate
because an original is only an original, whereas a duplicate is a
duplicate, which demonstrates that the original is not a duplicate.  A very
similar argument proves that a duplicate isn't the original either: because
if the duplicate WAS the original, then it wouldn't be a duplicate, or, in
other words, a duplicate cannot be the original because a duplicate *is
only* a duplicate, whereas the original is an original.  I don't have time
right now to get into the slightly trickier question of when the original
is the original, which takes far more careful handling.  While Louis's
simple argument had never occurred to me before, and certainly does cut
though a lot of the conceptual difficulties behind uploading, copies, and
transformations to the posthuman, it hardly damages the account rendered by
the information theory of duplicate identity (Ibid. pp. 1066-1131) as it
pertains to whether a duplicate IS a copy or for that matter whether a copy
IS a copy (it's not! -- "is" and "is only" mean two entirely different
things), and where I explicity define "is" so carefully that even President
Clinton would have been able to understand (quite independent of any erotic
penetrations into the body Lewinsky).

Lee Corbin

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