X-Message-Number: 25399 From: Date: Fri, 24 Dec 2004 10:35:54 EST Subject: twin experiment Francois writes in part: Suppose I am anesthetized and put through an atom for atom copying process. My copy and I are then placed in a room together and allowed to wake up. We are not told which is the original and which is the copy. Is there a way for us to decide simply by careful introspection? If there isn't, are the notions of original and copy still important? Many people keep getting hung up on this point. Language is tricky, and you must keep careful track of what you say vs. what you mean or what you want. If two or more copies or "instantiations" are sufficiently alike--no matter how they got that way!--then it is trivially true that they will think and feel alike, hence could not make any distinction by introspection, and if location doesn't matter they would be interchangeable from the point of view of an outside party. But that is not the issue! Even Thomas Donaldson has repeatedly referred to what some version of a person "would" feel, as though that were all that mattered. Lots of people frequently are mistaken or deluded or misled by intuition. Lots of people are satisfied by illusions, or fail to be satisfied by logic that ought to be persuasive. If Scotty's beam-me-up machine were ever built and seemed to work, with duplicates reporting "success," then undoubtedly most people would be satisfied--and their satisfaction might be fatal. Moslem martyrs are satisfied even without any reports of success. Here's a slightly different thought experiment that might be helpful in recognizing the importance of physical location and continuity: You doubtless feel that "you" would not survive merely because one of your children survives--even though you might derive some comfort from that thought. (The "comfort" means little or nothing--all kinds of notions sometimes bring comfort for no good reason.) If your twin survives--the closest possible relationship--that is still not your survival, unless you choose to think of it as partial survival, which would be an arbitrary attitude. If your twin somehow grew up almost exactly like you, much more similar than ordinary "identical" twins, that would *still* not be "you" in your estimation, in all probability. So we have another "continuum" puzzle. Again, the only likely solution I see is the quantitative view, viz., that systems at different locations are the "same" in the ways and to the extent that they are the same, and otherwise different. Thus they differ by location at least, and hence necessarily in other ways as well, although not necessarily in important ways. If we adopt my suggestion that survival requires physical continuity or overlap in matter, space, and time, then significant elements of our intuition are protected. Intuition is fallible and educable, but almost everyone tries to honor the spirit of intellectual economy--if two ideas are otherwise of equal merit, we prefer the one that requires the least change of viewpoint or that least conflicts with intuition. Patternism is in radical conflict with intuition, while the quantitative view is not. Patternism also appears to give up on scientific or logical choice and require an arbitrary stance, saying that "truth" is unprovable in this connection or possibly meaningless. The quantitative view, on the other hand, is strictly in line with traditional science, saying nothing that is not confirmable in principle. Robert Ettinger Content-Type: text/html; charset="US-ASCII" [ AUTOMATICALLY SKIPPING HTML ENCODING! ] Rate This Message: http://www.cryonet.org/cgi-bin/rate.cgi?msg=25399