[extropy-chat] Agency as Prime Determinant of Personal Identity

[Lee Corbin]

On Sun Nov 5 15:34:33, Jef posted the analysis we'd been looking to.
I wish to deal with it in two parts, one now and one tomorrow.

Although Jef wrote a later absolutely marvelous post that mostly skillfully
summarized differences between our various positions---and one that
I think was exceedingly accurate---it's clear (to me) that in *this* essay
here he didn't understand *my* position.

To wit, Jef writes in his Sunday Nov 5 piece,  
http://lists.extropy.org/pipermail/extropy-chat/2006-November/030329.html ,

> Lee wrote
> > I *admit* that!   Too much change kills one.  It changes you 
> > into someone else.

Notice here I did say "too *much* change".

> Lee, I presented the little story of Aging Alice in order to demonstrate
> the incompleteness of the "patternist" view...While I agree that
> this holds for any given instant (t=0), and that it supports the view
> that an identical copy of a person is essentially that same person, this
> definition appears to fail *immediately* and progressively with
> increasing  divergence of two instances of the same person.

> (1) You have stated that as change accumulates with age,
> at some point a person must be considered to have become
> a different person.

I never intended to say at *some* particular point t=t0.

> (2) You have stated that one should consider any copies of
> oneself as being exactly the same person regardless of some
> non-zero amount of space, time and accumulated experience,
> so it is clear that in your theory, personal identity
> persists through some significant amount of change.  

Yes, but only to a *degree*, which is a continuous variable.

> 3) So in your theory it seems either that there must be some t>0
> dividing point, or that your definition of personal identity is
> internally contradictory.

Why can't it be a slow continuous change?  I have always emphasized
"close duplicates" as being you more than significantly different duplicates,
e.g. ones made from you many years ago.

> (3a) You seem to claim a sort of mathematical or
> objective purity to your theory, so I would ask
> you, at what point is a person no longer the
> same person? 

And I would retort, "at what exact point during dusk does it become dark?",
or "at what point does one become middle-aged?"

> (4)Failing (3a), would you agree that personal identity
> (other than for the trivial case at t=0) can not be
> stated essentially in terms of some objective physical
> measure (ideal or practical), but that personal identity
> must necessarily be assigned as the result of some subjective
> evaluation (which of course is likely to have a strong
> correspondence with observables)?

No, I do not agree. First, it *can* be stated in objective
terms, just as in my example "nighttime" and "middle age"
are objective phenomonena. Just because some quality lacks
a *precise* point of definition does not detract from its
reality. "Hot" and "cold" have been replaced, and objectively
so, by the temperature scale. But this does not mean that
"hot" and "cold" are meaningless.

I draw your attention to *similarity*.  Similarity of state,
I contend, is objective, and metrics can be defined that
attempt to capture the degree of objective similarity
between two things. True, we may have different metrics,
but they tend to be themselves similar in the measurements
they yield.

Thus an earlier version of you, say from last month, is
objectively different from you now, and is objectively
less different from you than was your ten year old self.
(P.S. sorry if I've repeated myself too much in this post.)

Lee

> Please let me know your response to the preceding and
> of your agreement or disagreement with any of its premises
> or conclusions.