[ExI] Continuity of experience

[Stathis Papaioannou]

On 1 March 2010 12:08, Spencer Campbell <lacertilian at gmail.com> wrote:
> 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.

In an earlier post you posited, as I understood it, that there might
be continuity of experience but no M. That if you wake from a coma M
might be preserved but not if you are resuscitated after dying, even
though your experience is exactly the same in each case. That does
imply that you think M might be something over and above continuity of
experience. Or without using M, you are saying there might be two
types of continuity of experience, type A and type B. Type A occurs
when you wake from a coma, while type B occurs when you are
resuscitated after dying. There is no subjective difference between
type A and type B, but type A is still "better".

> 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?

You are the one you feel yourself to be at the moment you consider the
question, of course. Your soul/consciousness/M/whatever does not flit
from one body to the other. At any moment you have memories of having
been a particular person, and you look forward to becoming a future
version of the same person. In a single linear time line there is no
problem with thinking that you are, in fact, the one person traveling
through time in the forward direction, but if you consider unusual
situations involving clones, parallel worlds and time travel it
becomes clear that this is just a delusion. It is nevertheless a very
important delusion, hardwired into your brain, so if you are
duplicated in two places you try to make sense of it by assuming that
you are still living linearly, which means that you expect to end up
one or other copy with equal probability. It is harder to say what you
should expect if there are multiple copies with varying degrees of
mental similarity to the original, since that is unlike any situation
your brain evolved to cope with.

> 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.

I don't have a problem with simultaneously existing copies. I am one,
and only one, of the copies at any moment.


-- 
Stathis Papaioannou