[ExI] No link between original and copy? Denied!

[Mike Dougherty]

2010/10/28 Alan Grimes <agrimes at speakeasy.net>:
>> If you insist on using your above phrasing to describe this case (You
>> said "[I have forced the uploaders] to argue that no link of any kind
>> exists between the original an the copy") then you are obliged to ALSO
>> agree that there is no link of any kind between the you of now and the
>> you of a few seconds from now.
>
> WTF?
>
> Now I'm [making the mistake of] responding to this lame post, in a few
> minutes I'm going to be on the phone with the company that owes me a
> $4500 electric motor since Sept 1, then I'm might be sharing a lightbulb
> joke with the list after I finish reading a bunch of other lame posts...
> Nobody can say that any of those activities will be carried out by a
> different person. (though someone else might come up with a lightbulb
> joke). Each interval of time can be subdivided down to 10^-18 seconds or
> so. At none of those trillions upon trillions of instants of time could
> I be said to not exist. Nor will there be any other conceivable
> discontinuity between my states as nothing has stopped, nothing has been
> restarted, nothing is outside of the light-cone of where it could have
> been. The connection between myself and myself a second ago and a second
> hence is perfect and unbreakable. Furthermore I have both my memory and
> my (weak) precognitive sense forming a direct link.

There is no way to win on these identity discussions.  Using any
argument from the long and windy road back to your starting point as
support for some other serious idea will serve to undermine the
serious thought.  The identity threads (and the whole-cloth into which
they are woven) is intractable.  You/I/We are unlikely to change
anyone's opinion.

Further, I suspect that memory lends no credibility or authority to
your claim.  I could surgically remove memories and you'd still be you
- or you wouldn't.  'proves nothing.  We could drug you (or you could
drug me, w/e) and through a series of suggestions convince each other
that we're entirely unlike who we once believed ourselves to be.  I am
not the person my Facebook-friends remember, but in some cases who I
am today is within a near enough Hamming distance that we are within a
tolerable threshold of sameness to be good enough.  This may be the
direction you were heading with weak precognitive sense (assuming such
exists) that your expectation of who you will become within the
interval of your predictive power that your arrival in the new
instance is within acceptable variance.  Otherwise the snapshot of who
you were and the intention to change slightly into the snapshot's
future would not match properly with your current memory of who you
recently were.  When that happens (and you admit it to anyone) you are
likely granted audience with special doctors and they arrange for
accommodations with padded walls and a new wardrobe with jackets that
zip up the back.