On 6/25/2015 7:09 PM, Stathis Papaioannou wrote:
On Friday, June 26, 2015, meekerdb <[email protected] <mailto:[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.
Only if consciousness supervenes on the physical brain.
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,
Which is the case, depending on what you mean by "mostly preserved". It doesn't take very big changes in chemistry to produce radically different consciousness, e.g. none.
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.
We have no direct way to judge that, but I agree that if the behavior were sufficiently similar we would say the subject had survived. I think though that "sufficiently similar" would have to include some memory. I'm doubtful of idea that there is something besides memory, including unconscious memory, and body that can be said to instantiate the same person.
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