Duplication poll

[jack]

Amongst people who would teleport:

Suppose you can duplicate yourself somewhere you want to be, and then destroy yourself instantly and painlessly; or we live in a matrix and you can duplicate your process and shut down the old one; or your brain has a perfect back up which can be brought back if you die; would you?

Yes
Yes, but I don't know if I'd have the nerve
No
I would in theory, but in practice there'd be too great a risk something would go wrong.
I can't answer because I think any teleporting or backup wouldn't contain my soul. I may have checked another answer as what I would do if I didn't.
Comments:

Comments

[hmmm-tea.livejournal.com]

there different questions though. The last one doesn't (necessarily) involve suicide for the original you.

[cartesiandaemon.livejournal.com]

Oops, sorry, my punctuation confused me. That should be, if you had a perfect back-up, would you die for a good reason? The plot I remember had his mind infected with a virus, and to prevent that overwriting his backup he shot himself, so the backup would be restored. And then wondered why he shot himself :)

[hmmm-tea.livejournal.com]

Yes, but even then they're different questions.

You may be willing to kill yourself for a good reason without a back-up.

You may be willing to distroy yourself and create a copy elsewhere to teleport even if you have no other strong reason to distroy your original.

Not many people would purposefully distroy themselves for no reason at all without creating a copy.

[cartesiandaemon.livejournal.com]

A meaningful reason, but not one worth suiciding over then?

[hmmm-tea.livejournal.com]

But shooting yourself is suicide...

[cartesiandaemon.livejournal.com]

Sorry, I was still trying to define the question. Shooting yourself would normally be suicide. Whether shooting yourself in that circumstance would be called suicide, and whether it would have the same moral weight, is the question at hand.

[hmmm-tea.livejournal.com]

However strong the reason, I still feel that

- To be copied and distroyed to be recreated elsewhere
and
- To die for a good reason and be replaced by a copy

are two very different issues. They're both being distroyed to get recreated, but the later has additional reasoning behind it.

[cartesiandaemon.livejournal.com]

I wondered if anyone would disagree with my questions, but didn't want to pre-empt that.

I think I see where we're going with this, but I'm not sure. Could those two be brought in to line? Would it matter if I made the backup knowing I would almost certainly die and the backup be used?

[minipoppy.livejournal.com]

Eeek, university flash back! We spent a lot of time discussing the issues involved in a 'faxing the body' during the philosophy half of my degree. If I remember correctly, I was the only person who thought that it would be impossible. Trying to avoid the rather emotive word soul, surely there is a spark of life given to inanimate objects that we can't provide? Are you saying that if you could build a good enough body it would come to life? Have we really found Frankenstein's spark? I can't remember any of the discussions particularly now, but I think they mostly involved worms, twins and rivers.
Otherwise, yeah, I'd be up for that, it sounds like a laugh.

[cartesiandaemon.livejournal.com]

surely there is a spark of life given to inanimate objects that we can't provide?

I would say this spark is "being arranged the right way". Take a jumble of transistors and nothing happens. Connect them up right, they're an ELIZA. We're that, but rather more complicated, and can make more of ourselves automatically.

So you might *not* be able to make a perfect copy, because of quantum. But you might be able to make one accurate enough, depending on how much we depend on quantum levels. But if you ddid, and it didn't, I'd say it would have that spark as much as the original.

[icantcarenemore.livejournal.com]

When you say quantum, are you referring at all to the uncertainty principle?

[cartesiandaemon.livejournal.com]

That was the general idea, but I don't understand it well enough to say anything for sure, so I feel I have to include the disclaimer to avoid misleading anyone or getting sidetracked, but want to avoid getting into the details and head off any discussion on that subject toward one of the physicists.

[vyvyan.livejournal.com]

Have you read any Greg Egan, especially his short stories? This sort of topic is something he has explored extensively - one might say strip-mined!

[cartesiandaemon.livejournal.com]

Just one, but yes, I was drawing heavily on that in my imagination here.