X-Message-Number: 25586 Date: Wed, 19 Jan 2005 07:37:16 -0500 From: Thomas Donaldson <> Subject: CryoNet #25577 - #25584 Hi again to all! The problem of duplication seems to follow the problem of identity (ie our QE) like a dog. They are not the same. And while I have no problem at all with the notion of recreating a damaged brain well enough that its QE will be the "same" as the one before, I would say that if I were duplicated only one of me could remain as me. Almost by definition, if you duplicate an identity (a QE?) then at least one of the duplicates no longer has the same identity. I may even feel that my own identity has been modified by the creation of a duplicate, though I would not think of myself as having been destroyed in any way. At one point in this discussion I pointed out that "continuity" needed much more scrutiny before we could go off and say that we would be destroyed if we were read off into an exact record, which was then much later used to recreate us. In the sense that the QE of that recreation was identical to the QE of the original me before I was read off, there has been continuity between them. The lapse of time means nothing for this continuity, because it's measured not with respect to some clock but with respect to the changes taking place in my QE between its read-off and destruction, and the recreated QE. Of course, one will consist of different atoms etc, but that can hardly cause such continuity to cease... it doesn't when we don't do that readoff and recreation operation, so why should it occur when we do? For Peter Merel: Instant computing will not change mathematics in any special way, because most of mathematics does not concern algorithms at all (I admit to wondering whether or not mathematics may cease to exist because of work done in computing, but that's a different question entirely and does not require any instant computers). I say this as someone who trained as a research mathematician, moved over into a branch of computing which could use knowledge of math (parallel computers, for which the best algorithms in single computers easily turn out to be worse than others for a parallel computer), and even now think of math problems which aren't really computer problems at all. There is one major class of math problems which give a simple example of this phenomenon: working out the asymptotic behavior of a (complex) function: in short, what happens as you approach infinity in one or more variables. In particular cases such math can be and has been used to verify particular algorithms, though it also has more general implications. Often it's an easy problem to do, but not always. And it's quite clear that even if we program a particular function and get a computer to compute it with larger and larger numbers, we'll never be able to know from the computer what happens as those numbers ---> infinity. Best wishes and long long life to all, Thomas Donaldson Rate This Message: http://www.cryonet.org/cgi-bin/rate.cgi?msg=25586