On 26 March 2014 15:52, meekerdb <[email protected]> wrote: > On 3/25/2014 6:52 PM, Joseph Knight wrote: > > It is trivially a theorem of COMP, since the existence of such a > substitution level is the COMP axiom itself. If COMP is true, then the > substitution level is unknowable (although it can be honed in upon > scientifically). > > I have trouble with this. How would you know if your consciousness were > different after the substitution? I generally don't know why thought A > comes to me instead of thought B. I can see that after the substitution > you could ask your friends if you seemed different and you could compare > your remembered past actions and feelings to present ones in similar > circumstances; but it seems to me it would be impossible to say with any > confidence that you had "survived" as a stream of consciousness. If your > friends said to acted similar to before, maybe a little different, couldn't > it be with quite rather different internal narrative - just as a good actor > could pretend and act like you. >
This is a general problem - how do you know you're the same person who went to sleep last night, the same person who joined the everything list a year or two ago, etc? You don't, of course, as Heraclitus (and "Memento") have pointed out. You only have memories of being those people, and what feels like a sense of continuity. But a Fred Hoyle style "pigeonhole" theory of identity would claim that all you can really say is that you exist at this moment, with the memories attached to this moment giving evidence for everything else. A reasonable hypothesis is that these memories relate to other moments that have occurred, and that this has something to do with the presumed physical continuity of the person who you see in your bathroom mirror. However, if you accept the assumptions of either comp or "Frank Tipler style quantum state immortailty" (I must think of a better name for that) then your person moment to moment continuity is of *exactly* the same nature as your comp duplication or your jumping from one copy to another across a googolplex lightyears. Otherwise, there has to be some secret sauce that marks out your current quantum / computational state from an otherwise identical state elsewhere in space-time / platonia. (Which is possible, of course, and indeed most religions posit such an extra ingredient.) -- 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 [email protected]. To post to this group, send email to [email protected]. Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.
