X-Message-Number: 3747
Date: Wed, 25 Jan 1995 19:01:44 -0500
From: "Bruce Zimov" <>
Subject: Uploading


John,

1) Getting your understanding of physics from popular books borders on
the fallacy of appeal to authority.  

2) I'm glad Max straighted you out on Parfit.

3) If you understood Bell's theorem you'd know that the 2 items influencing
each other at such a distance are "strongly correlated". This has a precise
mathematical meaning, and 2 brains across the room are not "strongly
correlated".

4) Changing the terminology from "is" to "does" doesn't solve the problem,
or allow you to continue in your duplicate in any way other than "parenting".
Even though the brains and senses could be separated by telepresence and
distributed, this is TOTALLY irrelevant to the problem at hand.

Brain 1 located at A does subjectivity A.
Brain 2 located at B does subjectivity B.
Terminating Brain 1 will cause the end of subjectivity A. 
subjectivity B is not numerically identical to subjectivity A, and is not
a possible transmigration path for A.

Brain 1 is not just the material at A, but the organization of material at
A.  The material can change, but the organization is stable enough to
continue to produce subjectivity A.  When that organization is lost, then
subjectivity A is lost. We freeze heads to stop the degradation of that
organization, the actual material involved is secondary, and will be 
repaired and swapped out somewhat in any nano-reanimation scheme. We
shouldn't forget that is not just a qualitatively identical subjectivity
that makes us survive.  As we can see from our wake/sleep cycle, it is
the organization of our brain AND its capacity to produce our numerically
identical wake states that makes the difference.  The personality traits
are secondary and as in the case of the removal of the hippocampus, can
be lost with cognitive deficit/amnesia but no disturbance to the wake/sleep
cycle that defines our subjective mental state.



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