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From: lewis%spider.DEC@decwrl.ARPA
Newsgroups: net.sf-lovers
Subject: Matter Transmission
Message-ID: <12402@sri-arpa.UUCP>
Date: Tue, 14-Aug-84 04:08:06 EDT
Article-I.D.: sri-arpa.12402
Posted: Tue Aug 14 04:08:06 1984
Date-Received: Thu, 16-Aug-84 02:14:30 EDT
Lines: 40

From:  lewis%spider.DEC@decwrl.ARPA  (Suford Lewis)

It seems to me that transmission of one's SELF becomes simplified if one
has a soul.  The physical part gets destroyed in one place and created in
another.  The "soul", being immaterial, is not bound by any laws to "be"
anywhere in particular and simply IS in the new place after the transmiaaion.

Mind you, I say this who once used to worry if I was the same "me" when I
woke up in the morning as I had been when I went to sleep.  I knew I had the
same memories, but that didn't mean I was the SAME.  It is the identical
problem as with matter transmission, depending on what you think "consciousness"
means, depending on what you think continuity of existance consists of.  By the
way, I never could decide whether I was the same "me" or whether I died every
night when I went to sleep and a "new" m
me with the identical memories lived through each day.  It is undecideable,
so I decided to stop worrying about it.  I gradually did.  I think I was 8 when
this problem occurred to me.  It took me a couple of years to stop worrying
about it.

Varley has an interesting description of recording/duplication of people in
Ophiuchi Hotline.  People have themselves (whatever that is) recorded every
so often.  When they die (presumably by accident) they get "restarted" from a
clone fed their most recent copy.  In the story, the bad guys need more than
one copy of our protagonist, so they make more.  Each "reawakened" person
tries to figure out what happened to their previous version so they canavoid
similar problems.  At the denoument, all the parts achieve a psychic union
and have a perception of themself as a fourdimensional treelike structure.

Nice idea.  I'ld like to believe it.  Is there a level of complexity that leads
to the "program" continuing to exist after the machine breaks down totally?
(I don't fancy the idea of God with piles and piles of old listings of every
program He ever wrote... and what good would that be to me anyway?  The
listings aren't alive, the programs have to be running - consciousness as I
know it requires the passage of time, the possibility of change, the flow of
thought.)

Well, it's all still undecideable, so we can amuse ourselves speculating to
our hearts' content...

                               - SUford