On 6/10/2015 3:59 pm, Stathis Papaioannou wrote:
On 6 Oct 2015, at 11:48 AM, Bruce Kellett <[email protected]
<mailto:[email protected]>> wrote:
I agree that duality is a bad idea. Local copies are one thing.
Remote copies with no possible connection are another. I do not know
what it means to say that such things reproduce the same
consciousness. That is a claim that can never be checked, and has no
possible consequences. So Occam's razor comes into play.
Do you doubt that mental states can be duplicated by duplicating the
physical configuration of a brain? Do you think the duplication would
work if information is transmitted from original to copy but not if
the copy was made without such information, even though the physical
configurations are exactly the same? That would imply that two brains
could be exactly the same physically but differ mentally, which
contradicts the physical supervenience thesis. This would be a dualist
position.
It is possible that you might be able to make copies -- you certainly
can for AI. A copy means that information from the original was used to
construct the copy.
If there are, by chance, other persons who happen to have,
instantaneously, the same brain configuration as you do, then there are
simply two people who share a momentary psychological similarity. Since
the environments are different, these two individuals will have had
different histories, and will rapidly diverge. So calling one the
continuation of the other is a bit arbitrary -- neither is a
continuation of anything other than themselves. If the similarity is
such that the universes are identical, as well as chance brain states,
then it may take a little longer for the divergence, but you still
always have two separate individuals with only chance similarities.
Neither is a "copy" of the other.
So I am saying that two brains could be the same physically, and
mentally, but still be different people. There is no duality here. The
physical supervenience thesis requires that physical and mental
processes track each other one-for-one. But similar mental states do not
mean identical persons.
This is a consequence of the theory of personal identity. If you have a
tie for closest continuer, you have created two new persons. And it does
not matter what these persons think, or what conclusion they reach by
introspection. Physical factors are more important in such cases than
psychological factors.
One trouble with the idea of copies of you in other parts of the
multiverse is that most such copies will not be identical -- they may
pass through the same conscious state at a particular moment, but
because they are in different environments, they will immediately
diverge. The only sensible interpretation of such a situation is that
there are other independent beings who are similar to you in some
ways. That is the case anyway, and we do not necessarily believe in
panpsychism. If there are identical copies, then they necessarily
exist in identical environments, and anything that happens to you
will also happen to them. So they do not provide a means for your
consciousness to continue -- if you die, your identical copy also dies.
Copies that start off identical diverging does not present a problem.
There is a chance that you will experience any of the possible worlds
branching from your present one, and if you die at one location you
will only experience the worlds where copies of you survive.
No *you* won't. Other persons who resemble you to a greater or lesser
extent might. But if there is another identical with you, they
necessarily die when you do. Quantum suicide is a no-brainer!
Recall that in quantum many worlds, the different worlds are different,
by construction. So continuations in the different worlds are always
different - they get different results from the quantum experiment.
Bruce
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