On Wed, May 31, 2006 at 03:30:00PM -0700, Brent Meeker wrote: > > Of course such cases already arise in which Alzheimers or schizophrenia > changes a person into > "someone else", i.e. we say he is "no longer himself". Just because there is > an continuum of > intermediate states it doesn't follow that there is no "fact of the matter". > > Brent Meeker >
Of course our personalities change through time - we are not the same person as the child we remeber being and the personalities in other Multiverse branches that branched from us are also different persons. These are also indisputably contiguous cases. The case in contention is something like - is it possible to go from Jesse Mazer (I think it was) and move in incremental steps through the Multiverse, stepping from "person" to "person" and end up at Bruno Marchal? It is not immediately obvious to me that this should be true. If anything, the various analogies we have point to the opposite conclusion. If two persons are contiguously linked then I would accept that Parfit's thought experiment works, and leads to a spectrum of persons between the two end points. For example, if I step into Bruno's duplicater in Brussels, and end up in Washington, then I do believe it will be possible (in theory) to perform Parfit's experiment on myself and my twin in Moscow for as long as we both live (ie years after the duplication). However, I'm not sure I can be so easily converted into a person whose origin is completely different (different birth, different childhood etc.) without passing through unconscious states. This would imply that there exist "islands" of indentity, and having limited awareness in time and multispace, we can only ever be aware of one instance from each island, but that might change with technology. BTW another analogy is the islands of geneflow within biological species. Within biology, we have such things as ring species, where two species at a location (eg Britain) cannot interbreed, yet can interbreed with neighbouring species to the east and west in an interrupted chain that circumnavigates the pole. (Sorry I may not be explaining the concept of ring species too well - look up Wikipedia). In such a case, perhaps "ring identities" such as Jesse Mazer <-> Bruno Marchal do exist - but I'd like to be surer of the analogy. Also ring species are the exception, not the rule, in Nature. Cheers -- ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- A/Prof Russell Standish Phone 8308 3119 (mobile) Mathematics 0425 253119 (") UNSW SYDNEY 2052 [EMAIL PROTECTED] Australia http://parallel.hpc.unsw.edu.au/rks International prefix +612, Interstate prefix 02 ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- --~--~---------~--~----~------------~-------~--~----~ You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Everything List" group. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com To unsubscribe from this group, send email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list -~----------~----~----~----~------~----~------~--~---