[ExI] Continuity of experience

[Spencer Campbell]

Stathis Papaioannou <stathisp at gmail.com>:
> I guess you are talking about M making a leap as a sort of analogy,
> but it can be a misleading one. For continuity of experience it is
> necessary *and* sufficient that the right sorts of mental states occur
> in A, B and C. M does not add anything to the explanation and does not
> go leaping.

Considering the fact that M is literally defined as, "some property
[of an individual] such that continuity [of experience] remains
unbroken as long as the individual retains that property", I would go
so far as to say that an explanation which doesn't mention M, at least
implicitly, is impossible. It's just shorthand for continuity of
experience in and of itself, really.

Your constraints do not help me at all. What are the right sorts of
mental states? Stressing once again the problem of mental clones, what
if more than one thing is in the right sort of mental state to qualify
as me? Which one am I?

Taking your statements at face value, I must necessarily be every
entity that has the right sort of mental state. I'm not sure that it
makes sense to talk about me being a bunch of individual people,
considering the fact that I would not necessarily qualify as a hive
mind.

I don't know. In practice my many brains might somehow
quantum-entangle with each other automatically and I will inevitably
become a hive mind, but that seems very unlikely to me. I'm aware that
some people here are keeping up to date on the latest findings in
psi-like phenomena research. Damien Broderick could probably tell me
with some confidence whether or not something like that is plausible.
It does border on identical-twin telepathy and the like.