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?