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

[Heartland]

>> Jef Allbright commenting on Lee's model:
>>> 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.

Slawomir:
>> Correct. What Jef is pointing out here is that Lee's model fails with respect to
>> identity over time. If we compare two patterns of the same active brain at two
>> different times, say, 1s apart, these two patterns are almost certainly going to 
>> be
>> different.

Lee:
> Yes, for the NTH TIME, the patterns at one second apart are *slightly*
> different.  IT IS A MATTER OF DEGREE.

Yes, we fully realize that, but "slightly different" is still "different," no? If 
it's indeed a matter of degree then you need to explain what degree of change is 
allowed before someone turns into someone else and why this is important.

Slawomir