[extropy-chat] Personal Identity Bis

[Heartland]

> On Wed, Apr 11, 2007 at 09:59:23PM +1000, Stathis Papaioannou wrote:
>
>>    A flat EEG that *stays* flat permanently means death. Patients can
>>    have a flat EEG due to eg. hypothermia and still recover fully.

Only copies recover. Obviously a copy will always suffer from illusion that it's 
the original but the evidence collected by an objective observer would show 
otherwise. This case is logically equivalent to a situation where you download 
patient's brain structure to a file, destroy the patient and then run many 
instances of this file. The 1000th instance would suffer from the same illusion. 
Does the fact that a 2nd instance runs on the original body and 1000th on some 
artificial hardware make any difference? I really don't think so.

Stathis:
>>    Would you say that these people have died and should attend their
>>    erstwhile selves' funeral?

How they respond to facts is entirely up to them. They might as well throw a party, 
as far as I'm concerned. :)

Eugen:
> Yes, Slawomir is religious that way. The world is full of zombies.

I'm not the one believing in afterlife here, Eugen. I don't believe in existence of 
a soul that consists of a holy collection of static data specifying person's 
memories, beliefs and values. I don't believe that installing this soul into some 
hardware brings back people to life. Now, that would be an example of a faith-based 
view. :)

H.