On 9/9/2020 12:14 AM, Bruce Kellett wrote:
On Wed, Sep 9, 2020 at 4:50 PM 'Brent Meeker' via Everything List
<everything-list@googlegroups.com
<mailto:everything-list@googlegroups.com>> wrote:
On 9/8/2020 10:51 PM, Stathis Papaioannou wrote:
On Wed, 9 Sep 2020 at 14:56, Bruce Kellett <bhkellet...@gmail.com
<mailto:bhkellet...@gmail.com>> wrote:
Be a dualist if you want to. But the closest continuer theory
is a convention designed to resolve questions of personal
identity in cases of personal duplication, absent a "soul".
Arbitrary random selections are not as satisfactory.
I'm not a dualist. I think there is no metaphysical basis for
continuity of identity, it is just a psychological construct.
Realistically (sort of) in the duplication of Bruce there will be
millions of errors in each copy. There would be no point in
trying to make them any more accurate. That would certainly be
good enough to fool his closest friends and family. So at the
molecular level there will certainly be a unique closest
continuer. But I can't see that it makes any difference. That's
just as arbitrary as denominating the first one to open his door
the REAL Bruce.
The importance of copying errors depends on the metric used to assess
closeness of continuation. If and when actual duplication becomes
possible, we can worry about the fine details of this. But if you
think in terms of AI, duplication might involve no more than running
the same program on multiple computers. Duplication errors are then
eliminated.
I think the point of taking more into account in terms of personal
identity than just psychological continuity is that psychological
continuity makes little sense when you are asleep, under anaesthesia,
or otherwise unconscious.
I don't think those are determinative. When you awake you have the same
memories and personality as when you went to sleep. So you might say
the anesthetized Bruce is a different person, but the continuity is
still between awake Bruce before and awake Bruce after. In common
parlance someone suffering a brain injury, a stroke or tumor or trauma,
is often described a "being a different person". But that's not usually
said of a person who becomes a paraplegic or loses a limb.
Brent
Do you cease to be a person when unconscious? The same person? Does
your family recognize you then or not? Since we do not doubt
continuity of personal existence even though our bodies change
continuously at the molecular level, copying errors at that level are
not relevant for bodily continuity. Our memories and emotions change
every bit as much, if not more, on these time scales. So the metric to
determine continuity of personal identity is not clear cut. It is the
sort of thing that can be sorted out if and when we can actually
duplicate persons and their bodies.
Bruce
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