Stathis Papaioannou wrote:
On 23 June 2015 at 16:52, Bruce Kellett <[email protected]
<mailto:[email protected]>> wrote:
Stathis Papaioannou wrote:
On 23 June 2015 at 14:19, meekerdb <[email protected]
<mailto:[email protected]> <mailto:[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]>
<mailto:[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]>
<mailto:[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.
But the significant part of personal identity is subjective. If you
prove to me that during the night my body was taken apart atom by atom
and a very similar body assembled in its place with new atoms, that does
not tell me that I am deluded about surviving, it tells me that a person
can survive despite such a procedure.
True. And that would be interesting. But I don't see that it has a great
deal to do with the current debate.
Bruce
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