On 6/30/2014 12:51 AM, Kim Jones wrote:
You are all of these people. You can only experience one of these people. You or God can
never know which one you will most likely experience 5 minutes from now let alone after
a year's storage before being emailed to Uranus or Washington or Scotland. Hence there
is a true randomness in the access you have to your various selves, moment to moment.
You are these computational relations. They don't cease to exist so how could you?
But not all computational relations are "you". So the ones that are "you" can cease, as
when you are under anesthesia. I put "you" in scare quotes because it refers to the
stream of conscious thoughts - which is not the usual meaning of "you". Much is made of
observer-moments and their sequence, but I just got back from my mother's 100th birthday
party. She's still relatively sharp and lives alone, but it's also clear that she's
fading. Her sensory perceptions are weak and her thoughts are slower than they once
were. I expect that one day she will just fade out altogether, as her mother did at age
99. So why imagine that the next observer-moment for her will be any different than the
observer moment of a rock?
If you want immortality, then I suppose you can imagine some ghost-in-arithmetic that will
recur in some other place and time, but without you memories why suppose it's you?
Brent
If all else fails, immortality can always be assured
by spectacular error.
-- John Kenneth Galbraith
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