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On 20/01/2024 15:11, Jason Resch wrote:<br>
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where does one person begin and end? If someone steps into a
transporter that destroys their body and reconstructs it
elsewhere, do we draw a terminating border at one end and say the
person died here, and a new separate person began elsewhere? Or do
we draw the borders such that there is a continuous link bridging
then, such that it is all the same person, and the experiences of
the person who emerges on the other side of the teleporter, *are*
experiences that will be had by the person who stepped into the
transporter?</blockquote>
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Depends on what you need, and what point of view you adopt. There is
no single correct answer (which is not to say that there are no
answers).<br>
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'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.</div>
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<div dir="auto">I agree they aren't swappable or tradable like
playing cards. There is a tight kinky between each experience
and a particular mind state.</div>
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Not sure what a 'tight kinky' is. Presumably a typo, but I'm not
sure what you meant to write. A tight link?<br>
<br>
I suppose you could say that, being careful to recognise that the
experience does not exist on its own, and is then 'linked' to the
mind. The experience is produced by the mind, so talking about a
'link' is unnecessary and potentially misleading.<br>
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<div dir="auto">That said, we acknowledge that for a given
person (here I mean the common sense understanding of the
term), has a life which spans and includes many different mind
states, and many different experiences.</div>
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<div dir="auto">It is this many-to-one relationship that creates
the problem of assignment.</div>
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I don't know what that last sentence means. What do you mean by
'assignment'. Assignment of what?<br>
Again, I take issue with the language used as well. A person doesn't
really 'have' a life which includes many different mind-states. I'd
rather say a person consists of many different mind-states. If those
didn't exist, there would be no person.<br>
<br>
This is the same difficulty caused by the common habit of referring
to 'our minds'. We don't <i>have</i> minds (which implies a
duality), we <i>are</i> minds.<br>
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<div dir="auto">To do so, we must be able to define the
boundaries of a person's life:</div>
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<div dir="auto">Is it a matter of their body being maintained?</div>
<div dir="auto">Is it a matter of their brain being maintained?</div>
<div dir="auto">Is it a matter of their psychology and
personality being preserved?</div>
<div dir="auto">Is it a matter of their memories being
preserved?</div>
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<div dir="auto">If so to what extent? How much perturbation can
be tolerated before we say, "that's no longer the same, or
that person is dead" ?</div>
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This is a philosophical question, with different answers depending
on your assumptions.<br>
<br>
To me, the mind is the important thing, and the mind is an embodied
dynamic pattern of information. How much can that pattern change,
and still claim to be 'the same person'? I don't have any single
fixed answer. But you could take the attitude that I'm the same
person that I was since I was born (because of a common genome,
continuity of physical body, etc. My mind didn't even exist then,
really, so I don't subscribe to that view. I'd say that I didn't
exist yet), or you could say that I'm a different person each day,
or even from moment to moment. I don't really care. If I feel that
I'm the same person, then I am. There's a sense in which I am the
same person that I was a few decades ago, and a sense in which I'm a
different person to who I was when I started writing this email.
Again, no single 'correct' answer. There are as many answers as you
can think up different ways of looking at it.<br>
<br>
I can't say for sure, but I suspect that the experience of [anything
you like] is different as my mind changes over time. That each
experience is unique not only to a mind, but to a mind at a specific
time. It could be that someone's experience of eating a cheese
sandwich on a rainy afternoon in March 2019 is different to the same
person's experience of the same thing in the same place, on a rainy
afternoon in March 2029. Actually, thinking about it, I'd be
surprised if this wasn't true.<br>
<br>
...<br>
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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>
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<div dir="auto">To this I would say, and I hope it clarifies,
that personal identity isn't so much trying to answer "should
put this frog in that bucket or this one?", but rather, it is
about trying to define the borders of the buckets themselves.</div>
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My point was that the frogs in buckets analogy doesn't apply.<br>
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<div dir="auto">What circumstances are necessary for a person to
arise, survive, or die, etc.</div>
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<div dir="auto">There are easy, conventional answers to such
questions, based on the presence or maintenance of some
attribute.</div>
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<div dir="auto">But I think if you seriously consider the
problems that arise in those cases you will understand the
difficulties of the conventional view and it's inability to
handle a host of situations.</div>
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<div dir="auto">In the end, belief in the necessity of some
attribute that is needed for "you to be you" is both unfounded
and uneccessary. It's a purely metaphysical assumption which
Occam would remind us to dispense with.</div>
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<br>
You're assuming that being able to use different attributes,
according to what you find important, is equivalent to not using
any. The fact that there may be 10 different paths to get from where
you are to where you want to go, doesn't mean that you don't need
any path at all. Some attribute <i>is</i> necessary, but there are
many choices, depending on your point of view and what you want to
achieve. The conventional view (that there is one correct answer)
just needs to be widened to acknowledge that there are many correct
answers, all valid, that do cover a host of situations.<br>
<br>
Consider planetary motion. What gives the correct answer, Kepler's
laws or Relativity?<br>
<br>
I still don't see any reason to assume that there's some kind of
mental connection between myself and that Maori dude 200 years ago.
Or anybody else.<br>
<br>
Ben<br>
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