X-Message-Number: 32926
Date: Tue, 12 Oct 2010 00:49:24 -0700
From: Mike Perry <>
Subject: Re: Copies
References: <>

At 02:00 2010-10-11, Robert Ettinger wrote:
> >Any attempt to have two copies of a person running in parallel would
> >surely diverge very quickly
>
>I don't see the relevance here. I was talking about an original and a
>simulation, not two copies.
>

I should have made myself clearer. In any case I don't see a problem 
if you left the original person running along with the simulation, 
and the two diverged. The simulation could still be valid in a 
reasonable sense, just as if you could make an atom-for-atom copy of 
the original and run that alongside the original. (Such a prospect 
could arguably become a reality with future nanotechnology, if , say, 
you started with a cryopreserved original with the atoms locked in 
place and used a general-purpose assembler/disassembler.) In this 
case you'd have a perfect "simulation" yet the two would diverge 
quickly and become increasingly different over time. Unpredictability 
is built into the type of system we are, and might be present in the 
system doing the simulation, but I don't see how its presence would 
preclude uploading. The prospect of more than one version of oneself 
does not pose an ontological problem for me--one person could fission 
into two or more separate individuals who have a common past.

MP

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