05-29-2009, 12:09 AM
Dustie Wrote:I guess the most practical way to approach it is in terms of the other people or things you interface with.This is where you need some Dark City tests to find out if people have souls. (In Dark City, aliens kidnapped a bunch of humans and started rearranging their memories. Their reasoning was that if you took a good person and completely swapped his memories with those of a serial killer, would he become a serial killer (no soul) or would he somehow reject his own memories and become a good person again (soul)?
1. Does this affect your relationships, i.e. with your wife, friends etc. Do they still interact in the same way with the "same old" you?
2. Can you still drive a car and do you have all the skills you had before the incident?
3. Will your life trajectory be changed? After the incident, do you tend to make different choices then you made before?
If the transporter duplication was perfect (and there is no soul), then reconstructing a person is no different than reconstructing a brick. Saying that "brick prime" is gone forever may be true, but it's meaningless. You've got a new one that's completely identical to the old one, so for every purpose, you have the original.