Seconded, I made an independent post topic about the tight relation between brain and behavior. If you are talking "substitution level," you may as well include the entire goddam universe if you are going to get a guy to go from A to B in some teleporter, let alone even just "replicate" his consciousness.
Mathematical reasoning can be very deceptive because it totally sums over any possibility that the replication is identical - in the strong sense. And if the assumption is already smuggled in that "the copy is identical to the original," then we may as well just be arguing about a tautology. Mathematics is useful to the extent that it abstracts from particulars. But empiricism is needed to show what particulars can't be abstracted. On Monday, July 22, 2019 at 8:50:04 PM UTC-5, Brent wrote: > > > > On 7/22/2019 1:35 PM, Stathis Papaioannou wrote: > > Brain scans might have some bearing on whether not your brain can be >> replaced by some equivalent digital device. Once you can do this, questions >> about personal identity become an empirical matter, as has been pointed out >> several times. >> > > The substantive problem is a philosophical one, since by assumption in > these debates the copied brain is identical by any empirical test. > > > But what if, as seems likely to me, it is theoretically impossible to copy > a brain to a level that it undetectable, i.e. it will necessarily be > possible to distinguish physical differences. Now these differences may > not matter to consciousness, or they may imply only a brief glitch at the > conscious/classical level, but we know from Holevo's theorem that the > duplicate can't be known to be in the same state. > > Brent > -- 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 view this discussion on the web visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/everything-list/40e86edf-1888-4baf-8eb3-a74b96f383f5%40googlegroups.com.
