On 3/25/2014 8:18 PM, LizR wrote:
On 26 March 2014 15:52, meekerdb <meeke...@verizon.net
<mailto:meeke...@verizon.net>> wrote:
On 3/25/2014 6:52 PM, Joseph Knight wrote:
It is trivially a theorem of COMP, since the existence of such a
substitution level
is the COMP axiom itself. If COMP is true, then the substitution level is
unknowable (although it can be honed in upon scientifically).
I have trouble with this. How would you know if your consciousness were
different
after the substitution? I generally don't know why thought A comes to me
instead of
thought B. I can see that after the substitution you could ask your
friends if you
seemed different and you could compare your remembered past actions and
feelings to
present ones in similar circumstances; but it seems to me it would be
impossible to
say with any confidence that you had "survived" as a stream of
consciousness. If
your friends said to acted similar to before, maybe a little different,
couldn't it
be with quite rather different internal narrative - just as a good actor
could
pretend and act like you.
This is a general problem - how do you know you're the same person who went to sleep
last night, the same person who joined the everything list a year or two ago, etc?
You don't, of course, as Heraclitus (and "Memento") have pointed out. You only have
memories of being those people, and what feels like a sense of continuity. But a Fred
Hoyle style "pigeonhole" theory of identity would claim that all you can really say is
that you exist at this moment, with the memories attached to this moment giving evidence
for everything else. A reasonable hypothesis is that these memories relate to other
moments that have occurred, and that this has something to do with the presumed physical
continuity of the person who you see in your bathroom mirror. However, if you accept the
assumptions of either comp or "Frank Tipler style quantum state immortailty" (I must
think of a better name for that) then your person moment to moment continuity is of
/exactly/ the same nature as your comp duplication or your jumping from one copy to
another across a googolplex lightyears.
But if it's *exactly the same* then it *is* the same. There is no reason to distinguish
them. Distance is a relation and there's no distance between *indentities*. So if I have
a perfect illusion of my continuity as a body and person, in what sense can it be said to
be an illusion. An illusion of what? That seems to be just "gee-whiz" mystery mongering.
Brent
Otherwise, there has to be some secret sauce that marks out your current quantum /
computational state from an otherwise identical state elsewhere in space-time /
platonia. (Which is possible, of course, and indeed most religions posit such an extra
ingredient.)
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