On Mon, Apr 27, 2015 at 12:05:31AM -0700, Dennis Ochei wrote: > The argument weak point detector is quite strong with this one :). Well, I > was leaning on Parfit's reasoning that on a Reductionist view of identity, > such distinctions would be arbitrary. But we could for instance divide > memories into essential and superfluous categories and pretend we could > divine the difference between the two. Addition or loss of an essential > memory changes identity, while the same for a superfluous memory does not. > It does seem that without sophisticated brain scanning equipment you could > not know the facts of your identity--a body might lose or gain an essential > memory without the resulting person *realizing* it. The facts of identity > might not follow the phenomenology of identity. Of course, the fact that a > simple change of one memory could alter identity makes all these law > enforcement evasion strategies by memory transfer that much easier. >
Yes - I find myself in quite a bit of disagreement with Parfit on this. He seems to assume that the components of a person interact in simple additive ways, whereas from what we know of real biological organisms, the interactions tend to be complex and close to criticality. A single change _can_ cause an avalanche that causes the whole system to unravel. Not every change of course. For example, one can usually remove quite a number of species from an ecosystem without it changing much. But remove a "keystone" species, and the ecosystem colapses. I am rather taken by Marvin Minsky's "Society of the Mind" idea, which also fits into this notion that one's person (or identity) may be robust to the removal of some elements, but then catastrophically collapse when the wrong bit is removed. Cheers -- ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- Prof Russell Standish Phone 0425 253119 (mobile) Principal, High Performance Coders Visiting Professor of Mathematics [email protected] University of New South Wales http://www.hpcoders.com.au ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- -- 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.
