On Monday, February 28, 2022 at 10:37:32 PM UTC+1 Jason wrote: > On Mon, Feb 28, 2022 at 2:23 PM Tomas Pales <litew...@gmail.com> wrote: > >> >> On Monday, February 28, 2022 at 2:48:48 PM UTC+1 Jason wrote: >> >>> >>> >>> On Sun, Feb 27, 2022, 11:43 AM Tomas Pales <litew...@gmail.com> wrote: >>> >>> >>> Since reality is a mess of everything possible we might expect that the >>>> regularities (laws) of our world may change or disappear any second, which >>>> apparently doesn't happen. >>>> >>> >>> Or you don't remember it happening: >>> >>> "When we die, the rules surely change. As our brains and bodies cease to >>> function in the normal way, it takes greater and greater contrivances and >>> coincidences to explain continuing consciousness by their operation. We >>> lose our ties to physical reality, but, in the space of all possible >>> worlds, that cannot be the end. Our consciousness continues to exist in >>> some of those, and we will always find ourselves in worlds where we exist >>> and never in ones where we don’t. The nature of the next simplest world >>> that can host us, after we abandon physical law, I cannot guess." >>> >>> -- Hans Moravec in “Simulation, Consciousness, Existence” (1998) >>> >>> https://frc.ri.cmu.edu/~hpm/project.archive/general.articles/1998/SimConEx.98.html >>> >> >> I am not sure that my consciousness would continue to exist in a >> different world after it ended in this one. A copy of me might continue in >> another world but it wouldn't be me, just someone who looks like me and has >> the same history as me until the point of my death. >> >> > 1. If you lose consciousness tonight and wake up in bed the next morning, > despite being in a different time, place, and slightly different atomic > make up via metabolism, have you survived and is it still you? (why or why > not?) > > 2. If you are resuscitated after falling into a frozen lake and drowning > after 40 minutes have you survived death, would it still be you? (why or > why not?) > > 3. If half of your head is blown up in a lab accident, and advanced > medical technology restores you to your original self by healing your > wounds and replacing missing tissues have you survived? (Does it matter to > your survival whether your original body's atoms are used in the > reconstruction?) (why or why not?) > > 4. If you are transported in a destructive teleportation machine which > breaks down and scans you at a molecular level and reassembles you on Mars, > have you survived? (why or why not?) > > 5. If your mind is uploaded into a computer, which lasts until near the > heat death of the universe, and some compassionate aliens in another > universe having vastly more computational resources than our own, which > simulated our universe from the big bang until the heat death, chose to > copy your uploaded mind state at the time of the heat death into their own > universe so that it could continue, have you survived? (why or why not?) > > I am interested at which numbered stage you cease to believe in your > survival. > > Jason >
Ok, it depends on how we define "you". If we define "you" as on object that only exists at a certain moment of time, then the "you" at this moment is not the "you" at the next moment. You die instantly and never survive. But in a world of time we experience objects as persisting or extended in time and we *care* (a positive emotion) about a definition of "you" as an object persisting or extended in time, and we identify survival with the extension of this object in time. Would we also care about a definition of "you" as an object that is extended in time until some point, then is destroyed and restored to the previous state at a later time? (this object would be a collection of objects that are extended but not continuous in time) In some I cases, I think yes. We care about the object being continuously conscious but we are willing to let the conscious object be destroyed every night if we can expect with a high degree of certainty that it will be restored in the morning. But even then, we would not want the object to be destroyed or restored in a painful way or to be restored in an alien world to which it would have difficulty adjusting or have its social bonds from the previous day severed (the severing of social bonds would occur also if you were to die in this world and your consciousness would be "restored" in an exact copy of you in an exact copy of this world, because the bonds would be severed in the original world). So if a restoration happens (and we may not always be as certain of it as when we fall asleep at night) we can always define the restored "you" as a continuation of the destroyed "you" but we may not like being such a "you". -- 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 everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. To view this discussion on the web visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/everything-list/f6c2ad21-72d5-4f4a-9c51-b6690ed950c5n%40googlegroups.com.
