On 5/23/2020 11:38 AM, Jason Resch wrote:
On Sat, May 23, 2020 at 1:35 PM 'Brent Meeker' via Everything List <everything-list@googlegroups.com <mailto:everything-list@googlegroups.com>> wrote:On 5/23/2020 1:42 AM, Jason Resch wrote:On Friday, May 22, 2020, 'Brent Meeker' via Everything List <everything-list@googlegroups.com <mailto:everything-list@googlegroups.com>> wrote: On 5/22/2020 1:48 PM, Jason Resch wrote:On Fri, May 22, 2020 at 3:27 PM 'Brent Meeker' via Everything List <everything-list@googlegroups.com <mailto:everything-list@googlegroups.com>> wrote: On 8/4/2019 10:44 AM, Jason Resch wrote:On Friday, August 2, 2019, 'Brent Meeker' via Everything List <everything-list@googlegroups.com <mailto:everything-list@googlegroups.com>> 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 <everything-list@googlegroups.com <mailto:everything-list@googlegroups.com>> 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. It's a thought experiment. Do you think the quantum state is relevant? One typically doesn't track of the quantum state of their friend's atoms and use that information as part of their recognition process.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. If Holebo's theorem remains fundamental problems, then let's move everything into virtual reality, and repeat the experiment. In one case your friend's mind file is deleted and restored from a backup, and in another he continued without interruption. Do not the same conclusions I suggest follow?So you're postulating that your friend has been duplicated but in a way that you have no way of knowing. And then you ask, "Is this a legitimate and consistent way of looking at the world?" I guess I don't understand the question. If you have no way of knowing, then you don't know...ex hypothesi. Brnet My point is that identity is an intrinsic property of what something is now. The history of the of the constituent particles have no affect on the behaviors or operation of those particles. To say the history is relevant to identity is to add an arbitrary extrinsic property which can be of no physical relevance. This is a direct consequence of QM, you can't distinguish two electrons, from each other.But they still have locations and histories, c.f. Griffiths consistent histories interpretation of QM or Feynmann's path integral QM. When electrons make spots on the film in an EPR experiment the electron that made this spot is not identical with the electron that made that spot in the sense of being the same electron. And in any case I don't see how the sameness of particles implies the sameness of complex structures made of particles, i.e. persons.The indistinguishability of two electrons, means there's no detectable difference between Person A assembled from *this* pile of atoms, and Person B (of a same structure to Person A) made from *that* pile of atoms. The history of the atoms is of no importance to their function.
And you and I might be made from exactly the same set of atoms which have, over time, switched which of our bodies they constitute. But that wouldn't make us the same person. So I don't understand your point about personal identity. The fact that the history of the particles is irrelevant doesn't make the history of complexes like persons irrelevant to their identity.
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