Duplication


Is a duplicate of you still you? And what would be the case if it were, or were not?

There has been a lot of interesting discussion on the everything-list, an email list I'm a semi-regular member of, concerning personal identity in a multiverse. The approach taken recently has been to create thought experiments using duplication in a single universe to shed light on the harder question of massive duplication in a plenitude (a multiverse where everything exists).

Example: you are in a chamber from which there is no escape. There's a button on the wall which, if you press it, will create a living, breathing, atom-for-atom copy of you outside the chamber. It will also, at the same moment, instantly vaporize everything inside the chamber. Would you push the button?

This is the basic setup, and I think anyone who's watched Star Trek would have no problem with pushing the button. But by twiddling the knobs on this thought experiment*, we can provoke some very strange intuitions.

What if instead of being instantly vaporized inside the chamber, the chamber is instead flooded with a pain-inducing nerve gas that leads to days of torment followed by death? What if nothing happens inside the chamber at all - one copy is left inside, and the one outside is just free to go? What if you get to press the button an unlimited number of times? What if you had the choice between paying $100 to exit the chamber, or pressing the button? What amount of money, and what conditions of duplication, would incite you to push the button, and why?

I think investigations along these lines have the potential to illuminate questions of personal identity in general - what do we mean when we use the word "I"? How far can the concept of "I" be stretched, and what happens when it gets stretched too far?

The one thing I can think of saying so far is -- our desire for our own continued existence is just a special case of desire for any object's continued existence. Therefore, these questions can be approached from a third person point of view, and doing so is very helpful. Replace "I" and "you" with "person A" and "person B", etc., and the problems do not seem so hard anymore.

Posted: Sun - July 3, 2005 at 09:16 PM | | | |

©