2010/1/8 Brent Meeker <meeke...@dslextreme.com>: >> You've made this point in the past but I still don't understand it. If >> S1 and S2 are periods of experience generated consecutively in your >> brain in the usual manner, do you agree that you would still be >> experience them as consecutive if they were generated by chance by >> causally disconnected processes? > > No, I don't. Of course if they had durations of seconds or minutes, I > would experience much the same thing. But it is not at all convincing > to me that the experience at the beginning and end of the period would > be identical - and hence in the limit of infinitesimal duration, discrete > states I'm not sure what the experience would be, if any at all.
We should consider experiences of long duration, say a minute, before going on to infinitesimals. I think you are saying that there is a problem with the connection between S1 and S2 if they are generated by causally disconnected processes, but not if they are generated in the usual manner by causally connected processes. Is that right? Suppose S1 is being generated by a virtual reality program on machine M1, then after a minute the human operator saves the program and data to disc and shuts down M1, walks over to machine M2, loads the data from the disc and runs the program, which then generates S2. There is a clear causal connection here even though M1 and M2 are separate machines. Do you think there would be normal continuity of consciousness in this case? In a second experiment the operator finds when he gets to M2 that the data on the disc is completely corrupted. The only information he can be sure of is that the data comprised a maximum of n bits, this being the capacity of the disc. Worried that he might be responsible for the death of a conscious being, the operator decides to systematically load into M2 all 2^n possible sets of data that the disc could have contained. Do you think that this time there will be a discontinuity between S1 and S2 when S2 is eventually generated? -- Stathis Papaioannou
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