On Fri, Jul 26, 2019 at 5:12 PM Bruno Marchal <marc...@ulb.ac.be> wrote:
> On 25 Jul 2019, at 18:44, Jason Resch <jasonre...@gmail.com> wrote: > > > Personal identity theories based on psychological or bodily continuity can > always be shown to break down, either by holding the body the same and > changing the psyche, or holding the psyche the same and changing the body. > > > They break down with digital mechanism. > So what? I am not assuming mechanism. The everyday understanding of personal identity was developed in a world without person duplication or other exotic brain experimentation. The idea is to develop a theory of identity that can deal with some of the more reasonable thought experiments without doing violence to everyday concepts. We need continuity of concepts as well as continuity of body and memories. With soma analog mechanism, or non-mechanism, we can’t conclude (but we can > also feel that such a move is ad hoc and non convincing). > Feeling that it is ad hoc is not necessarily a disadvantage -- until we actually have experience of person duplication and the like, we cannot reasonably expect to develop a completely satisfactory theory -- the only data we have to work on comes from a non-duplicating world. > With digital or numerical mechanism, we avoid such ad hoc move and the > “closer continuers” can be numerous, (even infinite) like in Everett > Relative State, indeed. > MWI is irrelevant to this discussion, since the branches in MWI are completely disjoint and form separate coherent worlds. Without overlap, common sense notions of personal identity continue unchanged in all branches separately. Bruce > -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Everything List" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. To view this discussion on the web visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/everything-list/CAFxXSLSdgdgbfOu2cWG8Y6FCu%2B5i4bAsemiRYQgcV55_PrmEDA%40mail.gmail.com.
