[extropy-chat] Personal Identity Bis

[Eugen Leitl]

On Thu, Apr 12, 2007 at 11:48:23AM -0400, Randall Randall wrote:

> It's true that being absolutely sure of an object's history
> is impossible.  However, that just means that identity is

You can't know anything about the object without making
measurement about the object. If the information is not
encoded in the object, it must be encoded in the observer.
Since space is (usually) not labeled, information about
the object trajectory are present in the observer.

If you remove that information from the observer (by
inserting an observation block, or by terminating the
observer) that information is no longer present.

> impossible to be completely sure about.  Like everything else,
> when you get down to it.
> 
> But that's no surprise, because the question of "is this
> the same as that" is, by its nature, a question about the
> history of the object or process.  I don't care if this
> DVD is exactly like mine -- I can see that it most likely
> is.  What I care about is whether this is *my* DVD, and
> that's a question only answerable by reference to the
> history of the object in question!

Here's two DVDs from the same batch. Can you tell me which
belongs whom, by just looking at the DVD? Assume that
all identifying labels, scratches, etc. are not there.

-- 
Eugen* Leitl <a href="http://leitl.org">leitl</a> http://leitl.org
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