On 05/07/07, Heartland <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
At this point it might be useful to think about why we lack access to subjective experience of a different person. (Yes, I'm assuming my neighbor is a different person. If you don't agree with this assumption (and if you don't please tell me why), this will not work.) There is an overwhelming temptation that so many succumb to to think that lack of access to subjective experience of another person is due to differences between types of two brain structures (patterns). In reality, it's *all* due to the fact that any two minds (regardless of whether they share the same type or not) are two instances of a physical process. Your life does not end when your neighbor dies and vice versa. This is understandable, verifiable and obvious. What's missing is the realization that your instance of subjective experience (process) is as isolated from your copy's instance as it is isolated from your neighbor's instance.
Agreed so far.
This is why I don't expect *this* life to continue through a different instance even though the next instance might occur on the same mindware a minute after the previous instance expires.
But different moments of existence in a single person's life can also be regarded as different instances. This is strikingly obvious in block universe theories of time, which are empirically indistinguishable from linear time models precisely because our conscious experience would seem continuous in either case. The same is the case in the MWI of QM: multiple instances of you are generated every moment, and while before they are generated you consider that you could equally well "become" any of these instances, after they are generated all but one of the instances become "other". This time asymmetry of self/other when it comes to copies is mirrored in duplication thought experiments, where before the duplication you can anticipate the experiences of either copy but post-duplication the copies will fight it out among themselves even though they are identical. As you suggest, it is only possible to be one person at a time. However, when your copy lies in your subjective future you expect to "become" him, or at random one of the hims if there is more than one. If you could travel through time, or across parallel universes, you would come across just the sort of conflict between copies that you describe, because you can only be one instance of a person in time and space.
There's no such thing as pause in execution of a single instance of process. There can only be one instance before the "pause" and another one after the pause. Create and destroy are only operations on instances of processes.
You have just arbitrarily decided that to define an instance in this way. That's OK, it's your definition, but most people would say that it therefore means a single person can exist across different instances. Moreover, it is considered possible that time is discrete, so that the universe "pauses" after each planck interval and nothing happens "between" the pauses. Would this mean that you only survive for a planck interval?
> I also believe you cannot consistently maintain that life continues > through replacement atoms in the usual physiological manner but would > not continue if a copy were made a different way. Why should it make a > difference if 1% of the atoms are replaced per year or 99% per second, > if the result in each case is atoms in the correct configuration? If > 99% replacement is acceptable why not 100% instantaneous replacement? If 100% *instantaneous* replacement doesn't interrupt the process then we're dealing with the same instance of life and I see no problem with that. Also, as I had pointed out to you few times before, any process is necessarily defined across time interval >0 so counterarguments based on cases where time interval = 0 are not valid. In other words, it takes some time to kill the process.
In real life, atoms are replaced on the fly and this takes some time. So I will rephrase the question: does it make a difference if 1%, 99% or 100% of the atoms in a person are simultaneously replaced at the same rate as single atom replacement occurs in real life? Given that these replacements can be expected to result in partial or complete (temporary) disruption of physiological processes, what percentage of replacement results in a new instance being created? What about the case where one hemisphere of the brain is replaced while the other is left alone, giving two instances communicating through the corpus callosum: do you predict that they will consider themselves two different people or will there just be one person who thinks that nothing unusual has happened, even though he is now a hybrid? -- Stathis Papaioannou ----- This list is sponsored by AGIRI: http://www.agiri.org/email To unsubscribe or change your options, please go to: http://v2.listbox.com/member/?member_id=4007604&id_secret=12026607-191d22
