[ExI] Continuity of experience

[Spencer Campbell]

Stathis Papaioannou <stathisp at gmail.com>:
> 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".

No, you misunderstood it. To use your terminology: in Type A
continuity there is no question of whether or not I retain M, because
(and only because) nothing unusual is happening to make us think that
maybe I don't. In Type B continuity we are doing strange things with
technology. Even if I do wake up and show all the behavior of my old
self, there will be suspicions from the pro-soul crowd: does the thing
waking up have a soul? Is it the same soul as before?

You can replace "soul" with M in both cases, in which case the answer
to the first question is obviously yes. The answer to the second
question is not so easy. If it's yes, then it seems my M must have
been stored somewhere in the interim, which means M is an immortal
soul. If it's no, which I am more inclined to believe, then we have a
big problem: uploading would appear to work for all intents and
purposes, but either (a) the thing experiencing my mind would not be
the same thing that experiences my mind right now, or (b) there has
never been anything that experiences being me.

Saying that M must have been stored somewhere in the interim is
probably going to attract more comments along the lines of "but
interrupted continuity is experienced as identical to uninterrupted
continuity", so I'll take a shot at addressing that right now.
"Interrupted continuity of experience" is an oxymoron. M is not your
conscious mind, which fades in and out; M is purely an abstraction. If
you are temporarily knocked out or dead or whatever, resulting in a
period of time in which you have no subjective experiences, you still
have M during that period. The only situation in which you lose M is
when you go to the atheist afterlife. M is, in a very literal sense,
you.

Again, nolipsism solves the problem neatly. If any of you say, "but M
is a self, and there is no such thing as a self, so M is a meaningless
abstraction of nothing", then my only possible response is: yes,
that's logical.


Stathis Papaioannou <stathisp at gmail.com>:
> I don't have a problem with simultaneously existing copies. I am one,
> and only one, of the copies at any moment.

I could ask which, but that's a cheap shot. Instead: exactly one? Why not zero?