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On 20/01/2024 05:48, Jason Resch wrote:<br>
<blockquote type="cite"
cite="mid:mailman.12.1705729717.9638.extropy-chat@lists.extropy.org">
<pre><div dir="auto">... one of the questions of personal identity is "which experiences are had by which persons?"</div><div
dir="auto">
</div><div dir="auto">However we might define "person," I hope you agree that this question is meaningful.</div><div
dir="auto">
</div><div dir="auto">Experiences are something we as persons have. So the question: which experiences
are mine? Which ones will I experience? Leads to the three-way split in
theories of personal identity. That is, how do we assign which observer
moments, are experiences that will be had by which persons?</div></pre>
</blockquote>
<br>
I don't think the question is very meaningful at all.<br>
<br>
It's treating 'experiences' and 'people' as separable things. I
don't think they are (I don't see how they could be).<br>
<br>
You have to have a person before they can have an experience. It's
like coloured blocks. You can have a blue Block and a yellow Block,
but you can't have 'a Blue' or 'a Yellow'. And experiences are
inherently personal. No-one else can possibly know what your
experiences are, so "which experiences are had by which persons?"
only has one answer: You have your experiences. I have mine. Each
person has their own.<br>
<br>
'The experiences' is just a label that we use in our heads so we can
think about these things (remembering that the thoughts don't have
to be true or accurate, or even make any kind of sense). It would be
more accurate to say 'I experience', 'you experience'. Saying 'you <i>have</i>
experience X' tempts us to think of X as a thing that is possessed
(and could therefore also be possessed by someone else). It's not. X
is a label that we use to represent our experience, and we assume,
for convenience, that other people experience something like it that
they also call X (I strongly suspect that my X and your X could be
completely different, but lead to the same behaviour. It's the old
question about colours: "Is my blue the same as your yellow?" There
is no way to know).<br>
<br>
Apart from the label that we use to communicate (assuming we speak
the same language), there is no other link between my X and your X.
There is certainly no known mechanism that could implement such a
link. Your X is yours alone. We might agree that putting our fingers
into a fire causes us both to shout, withdraw the fingers, do a
little dance and never do that again, but we each can't know what
the other is actually experiencing. The likelihood is that our
shouts and dances are different in some ways, which does kind of
hint that there are going to be differences in our experiences. Even
if, by some ridiculous freak chance, the experiences were exactly
the same, there's no way to possibly know, and no actual link
between them.<br>
<br>
There is no such thing as 'the experience of being happy' as a thing
in itself. John Smith being happy is not something that you can
separate into the John Smith and the Being Happy, as if they were
buckets and frogs. You can meaningfully ask which other buckets can
hold these frogs, but you can't meaningfully ask which other people
can experience this (John Smith's) happiness, because it's unique to
him, and inherently unknowable to anyone else.<br>
<br>
So the way I see it, this whole concept of 'theories of personal
identity' is built on a misconception of the nature of
'experiences'.<br>
<br>
Ben<br>
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