About your analogy - quantum cloning may not be allowed by laws of nature. That would make any consciousness unique at any point in time.
Also I feel the experiment suggests split brains would most likely become 2 very different (new?) entities with different behavior after losing integrity.
> quantum cloning may not be allowed by laws of nature
It might be that the original should be destroyed, I understand. So be it, destroy the original and create N clones. But the thought experiment is an interesting one regardless.
No, nothing about destroying. It's just you cannot know something sufficiently at infinite precision due to uncertainty principle. It just depends if maximally allowed knowledge of all of person's chemical states is sufficient to reproduce consciousness "sufficiently" closely (I bet it is).
His insinuation seems that crime would immediately (eventually?) spike up once police doesnt have the same financial means. So a citation that says lower police funding correlates to higher crime (specifically at current levels of police funding) would help.
Not analogous. Sons are practically obligated by family (and indirectly by the immediate society) to marry even against their will for keeping the tradition. Also females were considered unfit to get married after a certain (very young) age creating a pressure on girl's family to find a groom as early as possible. People created pseudo scientific and religious basis for enforcing these.
It was a social evil has rightly been banned but slavery was both a social evil and individual maliciousness on part of people who partook in it - and there were a few black folk too in that group who were selling their own people. No society 'mandated' slaverer to sell people as a way of life. There were always other professions if it didn't fit well with their conscience. No one would make your life hell for not actively selling slaves by making you into a social outcast.
For 1 because your trading existence in that universe would change the future which you can't account for. Your activity influences decisions of other HFTs in real time whereas with a static history you're claiming to be able to trade without perturbing the markets.
Well not at all scales. Gravity at quantum scales is still not well understood.
Also the only way to claim it works as expected at any scale is to test it out. This allows scientists to claim that the theory checks out at this scale too.
Who is everyone that you refer to ? One thing I can certainly say is that US isn't the only one that interferes. China is a growing power with intention to dominate. We're already aware of the cyber attacks that have originated from China. It makes sense that their intervention goes beyond hacking for weapon blueprints.
Fractional reserve banking is independent of the currency. You can implement a bitcoin fractional banking system if you have trusted party available (the bank) and as long as you consider bitcoins to be homogeneous. Although it'll be funny (and borderline eco-terrorism) to use bitcoins if there exists a trusted party (like CME for bitcoin futures, bitcoin wallets, bitcoin exchanges, your ISP, your hardware manufacturer).
Limited bitcoins doesn't make it any less vulnerable to being marketed (yes, there is a lot of marketing $ behind it) as a get rich quick scheme. In fact, the growth of fiat value of bitcoin is the biggest reason people see it as an investment vehicle. Bitcoin system might be helpful in countries with oppressive governments and no trustworthy party, but I don't see largest orders of bitcoins coming from North Korea.
That's a strawman argument. Few centuries is a very reasonable timeline to worry about. I know people who have seen close to 3 quarters of a century of their decendants and are mindful of how their decisions affected their youngest.
