On 7/22/2019 9:40 PM, Stathis Papaioannou wrote:
On Tue, 23 Jul 2019 at 11:50, 'Brent Meeker' via Everything List
<[email protected]
<mailto:[email protected]>> 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.
I feel that I am the same person today as yesterday because I am
pretty close to the person I was yesterday, even though if you were to
look at me in enough detail, even using simple tests and instruments,
I am quite different today. It seems unreasonable to insist that a
copy of a person must be closer to the original than the "copying"
that occurs in everyday life.
I agree. But in everyday life you /know/ that you're different than
yesterday or a minute ago. You have a perception of time and new
memories. Note this is contrary to Bruno's assumption that a brain state
is something that can be physically copied, stopped, and restarted
without being noticed. I'm not saying this is an important difference
that prevents you being copied; I'm pointing out that there is a
physical level at which there is necessarily a distinction between copies.
Brent
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Stathis Papaioannou
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