X-Message-Number: 7937
Date:  Mon, 24 Mar 97 22:32:06 
From: Mike Perry <>
Subject: Perry replies to Pizer

Dave Pizer wrote (#7928),

>Mike Perry seems to me is still holding the position that a duplicate
>is the same as the original person merely if it contains all the same
>information.

With the right understanding of "duplicate," that is correct.

>Mike and I began to differ (and debate this) about 10 years ago.
>
>Mike's position was that *information* was enough to comprise the
>total needed for a person to survive.  If all the information from the
>original person was put into a new person (brain, computer-type-brain,
>big book?, long movie?), then the new person is the original person.

If you make an exact copy of a person, and activate that copy, then 
that copy is a continuer of the original person, same as the 
"original" would be. But note that neither the "original" nor the 
"copy" remain the same but both change (develop, we hope). They will 
diverge from each other but both (assuming no drastic bad events) 
will remain continuers of the same "original original," i.e. the 
person before the copy was made.

>My position was that information *AND* the part of the originial brain
>that senses self-awarness were both needed to continue to exist for a
>person to survive.  I called it the "self-awarness-continuum."

Suppose only an exact description of "the part of the original brain 
that senses self-awareness" were left, and from that we made an exact 
copy of this part, and used that in a reconstruction of the person. 
As far as I'm concerned, that version is as good as if we had used 
the original brain part.

>I think Mike's argument works against him when he points out that
>information in a present person changes over time, but we still
>continue that to be the same person surviving.

It's true that "information in a present person changes over 
time"--without such changes we could scarcely be said to be living. 
But there are different kinds of changes. Some of them do not pose 
much difficulty for my point of view and some do. One kind of
change is simple accretion: we add information, and particularly,
memories of new experiences. This I don't see as posing much
difficulty at all. We become continuers of what we were.
If only accretion is involved, then our old self could in principle be
reconstructed from our new self. Moreover, we "identify" with our
old self, while still recognizing that changes have occurred. So, 
despite "identifying," we don't think of our old and new selves
as "the same in all respects" or even "exact copies of each other."
But a continuer is far different from "just another person." 

It gets harder when you have to deal with changes that prevent an 
exact reconstruction of the past self. My way out is, in part, to 
accept an "exact survival" of a reasonable approximation of the past 
self. In many cases in fact I think this is not only "just 
acceptable" but even desirable. For example, I must have many 
things floating around in short-term memory that I don't retain very 
long, and it's no great loss, and often beneficial, that those minor 
and sometimes tedious details are not preserved.

Of course, with too many changes, the original person would not 
survive by any decent criteria. I think Dave agrees with me on this 
point.
 
>Frankly, I don't really care about if a duplicate is me.  The question
>that is crucial to any Immortalist is "how can  *I*  *survive*?"

But this begs the questions of what you mean by "I," and "survive," 
which means that whether a duplicate is "you" *is* important.

Mike Perry

http://www.alcor.org

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