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

Heartland velvethum at hotmail.com
Fri Nov 10 07:48:03 UTC 2006


>> 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




More information about the extropy-chat mailing list