On Fri, Jul 26, 2019 at 2:24 AM Bruce Kellett <[email protected]> wrote:
> On Fri, Jul 26, 2019 at 5:12 PM Bruno Marchal <[email protected]> wrote: > >> On 25 Jul 2019, at 18:44, Jason Resch <[email protected]> wrote: >> >> >> Personal identity theories based on psychological or bodily continuity >> can always be shown to break down, either by holding the body the same and >> changing the psyche, or holding the psyche the same and changing the body. >> >> >> They break down with digital mechanism. >> > > So what? I am not assuming mechanism. The everyday understanding of > personal identity was developed in a world without person duplication or > other exotic brain experimentation. The idea is to develop a theory of > identity that can deal with some of the more reasonable thought experiments > without doing violence to everyday concepts. We need continuity of concepts > as well as continuity of body and memories. > > With soma analog mechanism, or non-mechanism, we can’t conclude (but we >> can also feel that such a move is ad hoc and non convincing). >> > > Feeling that it is ad hoc is not necessarily a disadvantage -- until we > actually have experience of person duplication and the like, we cannot > reasonably expect to develop a completely satisfactory theory -- the only > data we have to work on comes from a non-duplicating world. > > >> With digital or numerical mechanism, we avoid such ad hoc move and the >> “closer continuers” can be numerous, (even infinite) like in Everett >> Relative State, indeed. >> > > MWI is irrelevant to this discussion, since the branches in MWI are > completely disjoint and form separate coherent worlds. Without overlap, > common sense notions of personal identity continue unchanged in all > branches separately. > > Can we really ignore the global view? What if we want to consider cases like Wigner's friend? Or cases where we emulate brains in quantum computers? Jason -- 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/CA%2BBCJUgFpQYNvW1wYm2te-EX_oX3snVmwWAjcinNHcExk%2B49sg%40mail.gmail.com.
