On 7/22/2019 4:37 AM, Stathis Papaioannou wrote:
On Mon, 22 Jul 2019 at 14:12, Bruce Kellett <bhkellet...@gmail.com <mailto:bhkellet...@gmail.com>> wrote:On Sun, Jul 21, 2019 at 9:55 PM Bruno Marchal <marc...@ulb.ac.be <mailto:marc...@ulb.ac.be>> wrote: On 21 Jul 2019, at 08:11, Dan Sonik <danialso...@gmail.com <mailto:danialso...@gmail.com>> wrote:<snip>Or, if you don’t die, the only way to avoid the indeterminacy is by claiming that you will feel to be at both city at once, but that will need some telepathy hardly compatible with the idea that the level of substitution was correctly chosen. So, do you die or not in the step 3? I don't know -- build a DDTR machine from all that great math and let's find out -- you go first.Let me rephrase the question: Assuming digital mechanism (YD + CT) do you die in the step 3? According to the protocol, you are scanned, and then the original is cut. The scanned data is then reconstituted; locally, or after a delay, or in several different places. The simplest interpretation of the "cut" phase is that the original disappears, i.e., dies. If you take a slightly more sophisticated view of personal identity, depending on a lot more the just memories of previous states, but depending also on bodily continuity, then the question of whether the original dies or not depends on the details of your theory of personal identity. For example, in Nozik's "closest continuer" theory, if the duplicate has an equivalent body and environment, then a single continuer is the closest continuer of the original, and can be considered the same person in some sense. Nozik's argument is that if there are two or more continuers, and there is a tie in the relevant sense of "closeness", then each continuer is a new person, and the original no longer exists (dies). So, as Dan points out, there is a lot more to this scenario than your simplistic assumptions allow: it is actually an empirical question as to whether the "person" continues unaltered or not. So rather than armchair philosophising, we should wait until the relevant brain scans are indeed possible and we perform the experiment, before we pontificate absolutely on what will or will not happen. As for assuming digital mechanism (YD + CT), it is not a matter of assuming this. It is a matter of whether the assumptions that you are building in make sense or not. And that is an empirical matter. Does any of it comport with our usual understandings of personal identity and other matters.What evidence do you think “the relevant brain scans” could provide that might have any bearing on the question of personal identity?
If the the brain scans showed the same correlations between patterns of neuron activity and behavior (like speech or problem solving) that would be evidence that it was the same person.
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