Russell Standish wrote:
Thanks Bruce, that was quite illuminating. I know Bruno will say that these other notions of personal identity contradict COMP - and I can see that considering the original copy as dead, and two new persons being created directly contradicts the "Yes, doctor" postulate. But I can see it may be pertinent to discuss these alternate notions of personal identity in a computationalist setting.
I have found Nozick's discussion in 'Philosophical Explanations' quite helpful. For instance, he points out that the notions of a 'closest continuer' clearly depends on the parameters and metric used. He floats the idea that different people could differ about this, so one person's closest continuer may not be the same as another's. I think this might be interesting in the comp situation. As I have said elsewhere, I do not think that a complete reading of my current brain state is possible, since the brain would be destroyed before the reading could be completed. Thus my ideas of personal identity might well not apply to the notions of a native AI being.
If AI is created, not simply as a copy of existing humans but from scratch, as it were, then their consciousness may not be the same as ours, and their ideas of closest continuers might well be different. How can we easily think about this when we cannot actually go out and ask a functional AI what (s)he thinks?
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