Cosmin Apreutesei

Thanks for the pointers. I'll have to read more about NXT and Etherium.

I'm following them closely for a while now. I think they're going to be incredibly disruptive, even more so than bitcoin, because they aim at completely decentralizing storage and communications along with an integrated ledger-less currency. Very exciting project, strongly rooted in libertarian principles (D. Irvine, the founder is very active on their forum and he speaks openly about that).

Hi everyone, I'd like to propose an experiment. Here's the story. Stef is recording a podcast in his podcasting room. The room has really good blinds, so that no light comes in from the outside, and it's well sound proofed. The internet at his house was down all day. Also, there's nobody home right now - we want to make sure that nobody can come in the room for the next few minutes while we conduct the experiment. We use a super power to freeze all the atoms in this room, including Stef itself (Stef's made of atoms, so this should work, right?). I'm talking a really good freeze, like we freeze all the atoms positions, and their electrons, and even bosons, if we find any. Somewhere nearby we rebuild Stef's room identically, and Stef itself, atom by atom. We could use a super power for that or a reanimator, or we could borrow a teleport device from a friend, and replace its move(atom) function with an illegal copy() function. Anyway we do it, we get this second room with Stef in it, frozen with a funny face like when we pause one of his youtube videos. We now give the atoms in both rooms their momentums back (we can record those before the freezing with a freezemometer) so that we can unpause the rooms, Stef included. This is the crucial part of the experiment. What would happen next? Would Stef's clone even be alive? Or would he (it?) fall on the floor like a bunch of marbles? If life is a purely physical phenomenon, his atoms well into place should have their relationships to one another preserved, still forming the molecules, cells, tissues and finally the organism that we call Stef. When the electrons would start spinning again, and jumping from atom to atom like they do, electrical impulses would continue their flow through the brain, thought will continue to form, and if physics is right, Stef #2 would just finish off his sentince, with the exact same motions as the real Stef. In fact, if physics is right, the two Stefs would continue to podcast the exact same podcast. The two physical systems called Stef would behave identically until the moment they try to leave the room or open the blinds because that's when the environment around Stef changes. Science says that physical systems tend to behave identically in identical environments and their behavior can only diverge when their environments diverge. So, what do you think it would happen?