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This is a blog on why we believe and do what we do, why we pretend otherwise, how we might do better, and what our descendants might do, if they don't all die.
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On who is who when people are copied, see John Weldon’s excellent short film “To Be.” A while back I saw it on YouTube, but couldn’t find it a few months later; it had violated copyright. So I actually bought a $15 dvd of it from the National Film Board of Canada. But as Nathan Cook informs us, it is now on YouTube again, here. Enjoy it while you can.
See “To Be”
The scene with Tesla implies that "they" would never permit such a profoundly disruptive development to see the light of day.
(Of course, the world of the late 19th century had a throng of different "they"s all maneuvering against each other, so it's hard to see why the Tesla of the film didn't consider pulling up stakes and peddling such a spectacularly militarily useful technology elsewhere.)
The key moment in the film comes when she asks the scientist to go through the device with the doors open.
When she sees the look of shock on the originals' faces in the split-second before the disintegrator fires she realizes that the scientist, while grudgingly willing to admit the device's true nature to her, has not really admitted it to himself.
In delaying the destruction she made him (them) confront the reality of what was happening head-on. By getting the original and copy to see themselves as two different people in the agreed five minutes, she made them appreciate that whoever went back into first booth wouldn't be "going" anywhere afterward.