On Fri, Sep 1, 2017 at 3:35 PM, Terren Suydam <terren.suy...@gmail.com> wrote:
> > Just trying to agree on a starting point. The only point of the teleporter > is to establish that there's an unbroken stream of consciousness as one is > physically reconstituted in another city. > Because there was no duplication for the purposes of the thought experiment the teleporter could be replaced by an airplane. And if you know that just a few miles down the road you're walking on it forks and goes to 2 different cities then the following sentence: * "What one and only one city does this road lead to?"* would not be a stupid question because it would not be a question at all, it would just be words with a question mark at the end. As far as continuity is concerned everybody, the Helsinki man the Moscow man the Washington man, absolutely everybody, always has an unbroken stream of consciousness when looking from the present into the past, and nobody, absolutely nobody, has an unbroken stream of consciousness when looking from the present to the future. That's why the future subjectively seems different than the past. And if I suddenly stopped your brain for a billion years and then started it up again your consciousness would be continuous and to you it would be as if the external world that suddenly jumped ahead discontinuously while you went along smoothly as you always did. If you had no access to information from the external world you'd have no way of knowing anything unusual had happened much less that a billion years had passed. > > > If the subject was interviewed in Barcelona, he might say, "I was in > Helsinki and entered a red room, and then I found myself in a blue room in > Barcelona". OK? > He might also say "I was in a red room in Helsinki then I got on ab airplane and now I'm in a blue room in Barcelona". There was no duplication in either case so if yesterday you said "What color room will I be in tomorrow?" that would be a legitimate question, I might or might not know the answer but the answer does exist. But if duplication is involved there is no answer because there was no question. It takes more than a question mark to make a question. John K Clark > > > -- > -- 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 post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. Visit this group at https://groups.google.com/group/everything-list. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.
