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?
Holevo's theorem says it's impossible to copy A's state.
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 haven't postulated a case in which it is impossible to
differentiate the two cases. It's not clear what degree of
differentiation is relevant.
Brent
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