You can still care if you die normally but something like the swampman thought experiment is just as good as ordinary survival under Parfit's view, which a reductionist I feel is forced to accept. You care that you keep experiencing but there is no self to be found that persists. Destructive uploading or teletransportation preserve everything worth preserving. That you are what once was is purely an illusion. Naive closed individualism reveals itself as deeply flawed when subjected to thought experiments.Unless you subscribe to Kolak's view you can't redeem the idea that you are in any sense the same consciousness that you remember being
On Wednesday, May 14, 2014, Stathis Papaioannou <[email protected]> wrote: > > > > On 15 May 2014 04:33, Dennis Ochei > <[email protected]<javascript:_e(%7B%7D,'cvml','[email protected]');> > > wrote: > >> But that's exactly the point. Consciousness, if construed as the >> container of conscious experience (or the surface upon which experience is >> written) has no principle of individuation--all conscious experiencers >> abstracted from their experience are identical. For this reason a >> consciousness swap is as meaningless as swapping the location of two >> electrons or shifting the universe 6 feet to the left. This is not at all >> the route Kolak takes to his conclusion, but suffices as a quick exposition >> of why one would entertain the position. In short, patterns (complex >> organisms) emerge in the universe that allow the universe to be conscious >> of itself. All consciousness is one part of the universe experiencing >> another part of itself as other. >> >> Course, one could also take the position that there is no experiencer >> independent of the experience. The experiencer and the experienced are >> one. In which case you are identical solely with yourself right this >> moment, and what will wake up in your bed tomorrow will not be you, but >> something that is merely like you in many ways. Under this view you now and >> you tomorrow are different persons. This is the view pushed by Parfit. >> > > I am sympathetic to Parfit's view, but it doesn't change the way I feel > about things. For example, to be consistent I shouldn't care if I die, > since I die anyway even if my tomorrow self seems to persist; however, I do > care if I die. > > > -- > Stathis Papaioannou > > -- > You received this message because you are subscribed to a topic in the > Google Groups "Everything List" group. > To unsubscribe from this topic, visit > https://groups.google.com/d/topic/everything-list/S5Qi3Q_2TTI/unsubscribe. > To unsubscribe from this group and all its topics, send an email to > [email protected]<javascript:_e(%7B%7D,'cvml','everything-list%[email protected]');> > . > To post to this group, send email to > [email protected]<javascript:_e(%7B%7D,'cvml','[email protected]');> > . > Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list. > For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout. > -- Sent from Gmail Mobile -- 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.
