On 3/25/2014 6:50 PM, Stathis Papaioannou wrote:
On 26 March 2014 12:45, meekerdb <meeke...@verizon.net <mailto:meeke...@verizon.net>> wrote: On 3/25/2014 6:34 PM, Stathis Papaioannou wrote:On 26 March 2014 12:15, meekerdb <meeke...@verizon.net <mailto:meeke...@verizon.net>> wrote:An infinite universe (Tegmark type 1) implies that our consciousness flits about from one copy of us to another and that as a consequence we are immortal, so it does affect us even if there is no physical communication between its distant parts.That seems to imply that one's consciousness is unique and moves around like a soul. There's no dodgy metaphysical mechanism involved. If there are multiple physical copies of you, and each copy has a similar consciousness to you, then you can't know which copy is currently generating your consciousness. I think the idea is that the "stream of consciousness" is unified so long as all the copies are being realized identically, in fact they are not "multiple" per Leibniz's identity of indiscernibles. When there is some quantum event amplified enough to make a difference in the stream of consciousness then the stream divides and there are two (or more) streams. An implication of this is that if one of the streams terminates your consciousness will continue in the other.But it will, at best be *similar* to the deceased "you", just as I am quite different from Brent Meeker of 50yrs ago. And there is no quarantee that some stream will continue.Similar is good enough. There is a guarantee that some branch will continue if everything that can happen does happen.
That's a to casual reading of "can happen" there are many things in quantum mechanics that can't happen. Just because we can imagine something happening, it doesn't follow that it is nomologically possible.
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