Pierz wrote:
On Tuesday, June 23, 2015 at 11:31:26 AM UTC+10, Bruce wrote:The point is that one should capture as much of the notion of personal identity that we use everyday as is possible. In particular, it should take account of those difficult cases where memory is lost or impaired in one way or another. Bruno's definition is just too restrictive to be of any use in the real world.Any use in the what?? I suppose the practical applications for "closest continuer" theory are manifold?
Yes. And I have given a few of them in recent posts.
The point is that if computationalism is true, then identity can be defined in terms of the state of a computing device (brain or its replacement device) at some level of substitution - the theory does not need to specify what that is.
But the question is whether computationalism *is* true? One way that you can test a theory is to see if its predictions are in accordance with real world data. That is what we are doing here.
For the purposes of the early steps of UDA it's enough to agree that a duplication is in principle possible. This seems to follow unless you add some magical ontological property of self-ness over and above the mere physical/computational configuration of a person.
That is your level of obfuscation. There is no ontological property of selfness over and above the physical manifestation in closest continuer theory. If anything, the dualism resides in computationalism.
Arguing about whether closest continuer is a better theory of personal identity just seems to muddy the waters AFAICT. Closest continuer seems to be a theory about semantics - like the old argument about removing planks from one ship and putting them on another - at what point does identity become exchanged? That is a silly, pointless argument to have because it's just a matter of definition.
So you seek to end the discussion by proposing your own arbitrary definition? Which definition, moreover, does not accord with many common experiences in the real world.
If comp is true then *something in the computational state of the observer* must account for the continuity of observer moments. That's all you need to know,
Great. So its a "shut up and calculate theory"? Also, note the implicit dualism in your statement above! "Something in the computational state....". What, exactly?
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