Stathis Papaioannou wrote:
On 23 June 2015 at 14:19, meekerdb <[email protected]
<mailto:[email protected]>> wrote:
On 6/22/2015 8:11 PM, Stathis Papaioannou wrote:
On 23 June 2015 at 10:05, meekerdb <[email protected]
<mailto:[email protected]>> wrote:
On 6/22/2015 2:56 PM, Stathis Papaioannou wrote:
On Tuesday, June 23, 2015, meekerdb <[email protected]
<mailto:[email protected]>> wrote:
On 6/22/2015 3:11 AM, Stathis Papaioannou wrote:
I diverge from my previous self from moment to moment in
ordinary life, but I still consider that I remain me. If
I woke up tomorrow taller because I had a growth spurt
during the night I would still consider that I was me;
yet by the "closest continuer" theory, I would stop
being me if a copy that hadn't grown was made somewhere
else.
I think waking up somewhere else would count strongly
against being the closest continuation.
What if, while both are asleep, the original is moved
to another location and the copy moved to the original's bed?
That would help, but there's an implicit assumption that
asleep=mindless. Anesthetic would make a better example. But
won't both the original and the copy find himself in a
disjoint location incompatible with where he was before?
The copy will find himself in the bed he fell unconscious in, and
the original will find himself moved. Both would feel they were a
continuation of the original, but not knowing about the switch
they might guess wrong as to which was which.
In what sense would they be wrong. They would have different
memories and be different persons.
One would be the copy and the other would be the original, but there
would be no way to tell which was which without referring to a record of
the procedure.
So why not tell them what was done?
It seems to me to be a great weakness of the memory-only account that
you are expecting people to make sensible decisions on the basis of
partial information. If we allow personal identity to have a bodily,
third person, element, then these problems do not arise.
If there is a genuine lack of information about what was done, then the
decisions are arbitrary to a large extent. This is unnecessary in
general since these obscure scenarios do not happen accidentally -- they
are brought about by the deliberate actions of some external agent. So
ask the agent and get the facts. Don't try to solve the problem on the
basis of partial data.
Bruce
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