On 4/21/07, Jason <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote (quoting Brent Meeker): > This seems to rest on an implicit idea that the OMs are "out there" and > that "you" are a person independent of them, a person to can sample them or > experience them. This is contrary to the idea of OMs which is that OMs are > atomic units of persons. You are a sequence of OMs. There is no extra-OM > "you" who can sample them or experience them. > > > > This seems to be a good definition for a person, but how does the > definition handle duplication thought experiments or the infinite > breadth of experiences across the multiverse which connects us all? > Personhood becomes fuzzy and a truly object treatment of conscious > experience might do well to abandon the idea of personal identity > altogether. I agree there is not an extra-OM that experiences OMs, > but that seems to be what sampling assumptions imply.
I think of both personhood and personal identity as emergent phenomena. It is necessary and sufficient for the existence of a person that there exist a set of related moments of consciousness. "Related" normally means that they arise in sequence as a result of activity in a particular brain, but duplication thought experiments suggest that a stream of consciousness can survive fragmentation of the physical substrate. A person gets into teleportation machine A, is destroyed, and a new person is created at receiving station B who claims to be the same individual. This is simply a description of what would happen if the experiment were performed, and "continuity of personal identity" is a phrase commonly used to describe the phenomenon. Stathis Papaioannou --~--~---------~--~----~------------~-------~--~----~ You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Everything List" group. To post to this group, send email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] To unsubscribe from this group, send email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list?hl=en -~----------~----~----~----~------~----~------~--~---
