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From: dm@BBN-VAX.ARPA
Newsgroups: net.sf-lovers
Subject: matter transmission and personal identity
Message-ID: <3768@topaz.RUTGERS.EDU>
Date: Tue, 24-Sep-85 11:13:02 EDT
Article-I.D.: topaz.3768
Posted: Tue Sep 24 11:13:02 1985
Date-Received: Sat, 28-Sep-85 06:32:43 EDT
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Organization: Rutgers Univ., New Brunswick, N.J.
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From: dm@BBN-VAX.ARPA


S.F. comes closest to philosophy when dealing with artificial minds
and matter transmission.  Matter transmission is one of the gedanken
experiments philosophers engage in when dealing with the problem of
personal identity (what is it?  how does something--particularly a
living, conscious being, retain it's identity over time?).  Here is a
famous puzzle, known as the ship of Theseus:

	The ship of Theseus is a wooden ship.  One day, a wooden plank
	is replaced.  The plank is removed and left on the dock.  As
	the years go by, this happens to more and more of the planks,
	with each plank removed added to the pile, until one day, none
	of the original wood is left -- it's all in the pile on the
	dock.  Where is the ship of Theseus?  What makes that boat
	there the ship of Theseus, as opposed to the pile of wood on
	the dock?

Similarly, what makes you the same person as you were when you were 12
years old?  Probably almost all of the atoms in your body have been
replaced in that time.  Well, you REMEMBER being that 12 year old...
So is it your memory of being that 12 year old that makes you the same
person? 

Enter duplication through matter transmission.  Now you have two
copies (you can even arrange it so that both copies were created in
the same instant, and the original ``destroyed''/``transmitted''.
Both copies remember being that 12 year old.  

	let me say it one more way.  imagine that we can make the copy
	without damaging the original at all.  according to the arguments
	i'm hearing, if you shoot the original through the head, it will not
	experience death now, since there is a copy of it.  this is plainly
	ridiculous.				Don.Provan@A.CS.CMU.EDU

Well, yes, this argument is plainly ridiculous, but it isn't the
argument that people have been putting forth.  The copy which is shot
experiences death, certainly -- they started being different people
when they stepped out of the matter transmitter/duplicator.  But the
original ``person'' is still alive -- that is, there is still a
living, conscious being who remembers being that 12 year old...

The same arguement applies to recreating a person by recording their
mind and playing it back -- either into a tabula rasa clone, or into
an android or a computer.  If the mind is software, it shouldn't
matter too much what hardware it's implemented in.

This is a conundrum.  I suspect it might be a conundrum for a number
of reasons.  We don't know what identity is -- we have some intuitive
ideas, but nothing rigorous that holds at the edges of our experience.
Don't laugh at the philosophers because they  are puzzled by these
problems.  Think how far you would get in a world where quantum
mechanical phenomena were visible and tangible if all you had were
your Newtonian intuitions to rely on.  Probably in arguing about this
we're making a mistake akin to dividing by zero -- that postulating
matter transmission or person duplication OR personal identity as we
intuit it is a fallacy.  It's the role of philosophy to derive a
non-fallacious concept of personal identity, just as it is the role of
physics to derive a non-fallacious concept of the electron.

I think it was Locke who first suggested that you might be replaced
each night by an exact copy (or for that matter, manufactured from
whole cloth with memories of a past which did not exist).  Daniel Dennet
has a highly entertaining essay which captures the issues of this
problem called ``Where am I?'' in his book ``Brainstorms'' (I think it
may also appear in ``The Mind's I'' by Dennet & Douglas Hofstadter).

Rudy Rucker also has a novel (called ``Software'', which is excerpted
in ``The Mind's I'') in which a group of sentient robots kill their
creator in order to analyze his brain (his software) to reproduce his
program in hardware not susceptible to the cancer and heart disease
that's killing him.  They build a robot that looks just like him, and
which runs the same program his brain was running.  He's a bit
uncomfortable about the procedure, I might add, but the robot who
wakes up is totally convinced he is the original.  Rucker's book
introduces another interesting idea: his robots have developed an
aesthetic of minds -- they look on the ``patterns'' of people's minds
as an art form, or at least as things of beauty.  It's an interesting
book, I enjoyed it a great deal, although there is a scene early on
that's not for the squeamish...


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