It's been almost two years you guys have been hung up on this 'I' nonsense - can't you conceive, for one moment, that there is no 'I'? Can you grasp the indisputable fact that this debate is meaningless if there is no 'I', just observer-moments without an 'observer'? Has anybody out there understood this point? (Apart from Jacques Mallah, who has long deserted the debate, and maybe Martin Marcel).
Could we start a separate list at eskimo-com for people who still want to have the pointless old consciousness debate below? James ----- Original Message ----- From: Jesse Mazer <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> To: <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Sent: Friday, February 09, 2001 5:46 PM Subject: RE: on formally describable universes and measures (fwd) > "Meeker, Brent" wrote: > > > Bruno, perhaps I'm just unusally dense today; but I dont' grasp the > >uncertainity to you write of the the Washington-Moscow thought experiment. > >It seems obvious to me that when I am reconstituted in Washington and > >reconstituted in Moscow then I am in both places. This of course assumes > >that there is no mystical, indivisble "soul" that is "really" me. It > >follows from the idea that my internal pyschological states derive from the > >physical processes of my body - and if the body is reproduced then so are > >those processes. > > After the split, though, the experience of the two copies will diverge. If > I find myself in Moscow, I am no longer the "same person" as my twin in > Washington...if I knew the Washington twin was going to be tortured my > attitude would be quite different from what it would be if *I* was going to > be tortured. > > So, if continuity of consciousness is "real" it is reasonable to expect that > our theory of consciousness should allow for the possibility of splitting, > and that from a first-person point of view, I-before-the-split would have an > X% chance of becoming one copy and a Y% chance of becoming another. That is > not to deny, though, that the split would happen both ways at once--in other > words, each copy would be correct in saying it was continuous with the > single consciousness before the split. > > Jesse Mazer > _________________________________________________________________ > Get your FREE download of MSN Explorer at http://explorer.msn.com > >
