On Friday, June 26, 2015, meekerdb <[email protected]> wrote: > On 6/25/2015 11:24 AM, Stathis Papaioannou wrote: > > ISTM there's an equivocation here between a continuation in consciousness >> and continuation in body. If we say "the person" is just a continuum of >> conscious thoughts, then they are both continuations of the original. If >> we take into account the physical instantiation then we can say which is >> the original (assuming he's not destroyed and reconstructed in the >> duplication process) even though they are both continuations, by different >> means, of the original. >> > > Surely continuation in consciousness is what we mean when discussing > personal identity. The atoms making up my body last year have mostly > dispersed in the biosphere, but I don't consider that a great loss. > > > That's a logic chopping answer. Sure the atoms have dispersed, but the > physical structural relations have persisted and these are not the same as > conscious thoughts. >
But the main reason we care about the physical structural relations persisting is that they ensure continuity of consciousness. If the physical structure was mostly preserved but the subject was unconscious or radically different in consciousness then we would say he had not survived, whereas if the physical structure were different, for example if the brain were replaced with a computer, but consciousness similar then we (or at least I) would say that the subject had survived. -- 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.
