= 27d567bc2d48d9f40e9ccc20ea370b15)
bramflakes comments on The Restoration of William: the skeleton of a short story about resurrection and identity - Less Wrong
You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.
= 783df68a0f980790206b9ea87794c5b6)
Loading…= b715d02e85f7b3b4ae65ca3d3e450868)
Subscribe to RSS Feed
Powered by Reddit
= f037147d6e6c911a85753b9abdedda8d)
Comments (9)
Wait, who is Fred?
As I understood the story, the personality whom everyone thinks of as Bill from 30 years ago is actually some other guy, Fred, from 30 years ago, and mysteriously nobody notices, because the story depends on that to make some kind of point about identity.
The actions of the main participants are consistent with their incentives. The owners of the archiving company dodge scandal and ruin by covering up the fact that they have lost Bill's tape "That was unthinkable.". The employees of the archiving company play along with doctoring Fred-minus30's tape "with a bit of manual fixing of uncorrectable errors." and get to keep their jobs.
Fred-minus30 faces the harsh reality of the law that says "There can be only one." He has read his share of hologram-horror and hologram-thriller. He can blow the whistle on the cover-up and say "actually I'm not Bill, I'm a duplicate of some-one living." Whoops! That makes him the soon-to-be-euthanised of a hologram-horror. Or maybe he can try being the escaped hologram of a hologram-thriller by slipping away and murdering Current-Fred and replacing him. But Fred-minus30 is 30 years behind. That will totally not work. So Fred-minus30 faces strong incentives to play along and do his best job of impersonating long forgotten Bill.
In the story people notice. They notice and do some serious digging. But what are their incentives? What are they digging for? Once they have dug up interesting stuff from their personal histories that they can chat about with their friends, they stop digging.
Thinking about the above some more...
How did Fred know the names and phone numbers of Bill's close friends from 30 years ago to call them, especially when they themselves didn't remember knowing Bill back then, and why was it distressing to him when they denied knowing Bill? Under the circumstances, I should think he'd be relieved.
Ah. I'd thought the idea was that everyone (including Fred) thought Fred was Bill, which seemed implausible. But sure, if instead Fred is simply lying, then given the discontinuity in Fred's social life, it's not implausible that none of Fred's friends notice. (If Bill had been a hermit for the last 30 years and interacted with nobody at all, similar things are true.)
It is hard to convince somebody of something when their survival depends on them not getting it.
The fraudulent restoration company had edited the mind of Fred-30 so that he thought that his name was Bill, and that some other publicly known information was what it would have been if he was Bill instead of Fred, and then they had put the edited mind in a body that resembled Bill-30 to whatever degree restored people were supposed to resemble their previous selves. But his not easily edited memories, such as any memories of experiences, were those of Fred-30.
Or to be precise they were confabulations reconciling what Fred actually remembered 30 years (or however old that tape actually were) ago with the information that had been added later. But that is how all our memories work anyway, so it would be weird if he noticed that.
Oh.
OK, thanks for clarifying that.