On 8/4/2019 10:44 AM, Jason Resch wrote:
On Friday, August 2, 2019, 'Brent Meeker' via Everything List <[email protected] <mailto:[email protected]>> wrote:On 8/2/2019 1:06 PM, Jason Resch wrote:On Fri, Aug 2, 2019 at 1:40 PM 'Brent Meeker' via Everything List <[email protected] <mailto:[email protected]>> wrote: On 8/2/2019 11:03 AM, Jason Resch wrote: > It is like Saibal Mitra said, the person he was when he was 3 is > dead. Too much information was added to his brain. If his 3 year old > self were suddenly replaced with his much older self, you would > conclude the 3 year old was destroyed, but when gradual changes are > made, day by day, common-sense and convention maintains that the > 3-year-old was not destroyed, and still lives. This is the > inconsistency of continuity theories. On the contrary I'd say it illustrates the consistency of causal continuity theories. Your close friend walks into a black box, and emerges 1 hour later. In case A, he was destroyed in a discontinuous way, and a new version of that person was formed having the mind of your friend as it might have been 1 hour later. In case B, he sat around for an hour before emerging. You later meet up with the entity who emerges from this black box for coffee. From your point of view, neither case A nor B is physically distinguishable. Yet under your casual continuity theory, your friend has either died or survived entering the black box. You have no way of knowing if the entity you are having coffee with is your friend or not. Is this a legitimate and consistent way of looking at the world?Did the black box take A's information in order to copy him, or did it make a copy accidentally. Would that change the result? Incidentally, my not knowing the difference between two things is not very good evidence that they are the same.That there's no physical experiment, even in principle, that could differentiate the two cases, I take as evidence that notions of identity holding there to be a difference are illusory.
But you're thinking only of some idealized inspection of the two copies. Decoherence relies on the fact that there are implicit records of causal connection in environment. So defining identity by causal connection is not illusory.
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