[ExI] [tt] Identity thread again

[William Flynn Wallace]

On Thu, Apr 9, 2015 at 2:32 PM, Anders Sandberg <anders at aleph.se> wrote:

> John Clark <johnkclark at gmail.com> , 9/4/2015 6:18 PM:
>
>
> On Wed, Apr 8, 2015  William Flynn Wallace <foozler83 at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> > Is there now or will there ever be a perfect hard drive/storage device?
> No.  Then, no perfect copy.
>
>
> If perfection is required then "you" become a completely different person
> every time "you" drink a cup of coffee and the entire idea of personal
> identity, as well as personal pronouns like "you", become meaningless.
>
>
> Bateson said "Information is the difference that makes the difference". A
> lot of questions about whether two things are the same can only be answered
> by looking at what makes a difference.
>
> Also, thanks to Shannon's work on coding theory, we know that information
> can be transmitted down noisy channels in ways that result in it having
> arbitrarily low probability of being distorted. We do not need perfect hard
> drives to make storage that doesn't lose a single bit over the history of
> the universe. RAID for the win.
>
>
>
> Anders Sandberg, Future of Humanity Institute Philosophy Faculty of Oxford
> University
>

​Even Mother Nature doesn't make identical twins genetically identical, and
it does make a difference, though the idea that drinking a cup of coffee
makes me an entirely different person is a bit over the top, isn't it?

http://www.scientificamerican.com/article/identical-twins-genes-are-not-identical/
bill w​


>
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