On 26 March 2014 16:30, meekerdb <[email protected]> wrote: > On 3/25/2014 8:18 PM, LizR wrote: > > 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. > > But if it's *exactly the same* then it *is* the same. >
As usual that isn't a "but" because that's just what I was saying. That is, I said that the "continuity is of exactly the same nature" (not that the states were the same - in fact the states are successor states, as I mentioned - which is something assumed to exist but still to be defined). > There is no reason to distinguish them. Distance is a relation and > there's no distance between *indentities*. So if I have a perfect illusion > of my continuity as a body and person, in what sense can it be said to be > an illusion. An illusion of what? > YOu're the one saying it's an illusion so you tell me. > That seems to be just "gee-whiz" mystery mongering. > Uh huh. -- 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.
