[extropy-chat] Agency as Prime Determinant of Personal Identity

[Heartland]

Lee:
> I'm sorry to be bringing this up at this late date, but it's quite
> important to recognize the *primacy* of memories in the
> patternist view.  The author Mike Perry, in his book "Forever
> For All", who believes as firmly as do I in the information theory
> of identity, puts quite a premium on memories as do I.

[snip]

> I used
> to reiterate *memories* and *behavior dispositions* as vital to the
> patternist view.  But VBM is close enough, IMO, so long as the
> primacy of memories is understood.

I sense that you and Jef are finally beginning to steer this debate in the right 
direction. So far you've argued about the conclusions which only revealed your 
positions and how these viewpoints differ, and now you are slowly moving towards 
discovery (or acknowledgment) of underlying assumptions that motivate your 
thinking. Eventually, this process should lead you to arguments not about the 
conclusions that follow from these assumptions but to arguments about these base 
assumptions. Hopefully, you'll discover that these assumptions are not sound and 
this will cause you to reexamine the foundation of your thinking in this area.

Right now, it seems like you, Lee, claim that it is "M" in VBM (Values, Beliefs, 
Memories) that deserves the most attention while Jef insists that the "VB" part is 
more crucial. These are interesting choices and each perspective demands different 
conclusions. However, before you devote a lot of time and energy on getting tangled 
up in details, I would like to point out that these choices are completely 
arbitrary.

Choosing arbitrary criterions for what constitutes a person is a widespread 
problem. The arguments I keep seeing here and elsewhere look something like this: 
"I choose X to be the most precious thing about me. You're wrong about conclusions 
that stem from Y because they differ from conclusion that stem from X and we all 
know that X is most important." (X is assumed to be correct before it is shown it 
is correct).

I strongly believe that there should be *no room* for arbitrary choices at any 
point along the chain of logical inference. If X is more important than Y, then, 
before I can accept any conclusions *based* on X, I need to see the argument that 
comes before that which explains why X should matter most.

Would it be possible to see such an argument from you, Jef or Lee? If you continue 
to debate each other long enough, the odds are pretty good that you'll have to 
construct and show these arguments to each other anyway.

I hope you found these comments valuable.

Slawomir