[ExI] Continuity of experience

Stathis Papaioannou stathisp at gmail.com
Tue Mar 2 00:46:05 UTC 2010


On 2 March 2010 03:26, Spencer Campbell <lacertilian at gmail.com> wrote:
> Stathis Papaioannou <stathisp at gmail.com>:
>> In an earlier post you posited, as I understood it, that there might
>> be continuity of experience but no M. That if you wake from a coma M
>> might be preserved but not if you are resuscitated after dying, even
>> though your experience is exactly the same in each case. That does
>> imply that you think M might be something over and above continuity of
>> experience. Or without using M, you are saying there might be two
>> types of continuity of experience, type A and type B. Type A occurs
>> when you wake from a coma, while type B occurs when you are
>> resuscitated after dying. There is no subjective difference between
>> type A and type B, but type A is still "better".
>
> No, you misunderstood it. To use your terminology: in Type A
> continuity there is no question of whether or not I retain M, because
> (and only because) nothing unusual is happening to make us think that
> maybe I don't. In Type B continuity we are doing strange things with
> technology. Even if I do wake up and show all the behavior of my old
> self, there will be suspicions from the pro-soul crowd: does the thing
> waking up have a soul? Is it the same soul as before?

The external observers may doubt it, but if the thing waking up is the
same objectively *and* subjectively, what is there left? Different in
the mind of God, perhaps. But we could undergo such a difference every
time we sneeze, or scratch ourselves, or every second Tuesday. That
"nothing unusual" is happening in these situations should not make us
any more confident that M isn't being messed up. By assuming that it
does you are assuming that you can know something about M from
observation, when the whole idea is that you can't. It could be the
that the probability that M changes is directly proportional to the
degree than your life seems to be otherwise normal. God could even
write down an equation describing this relationship if he wanted to.

> You can replace "soul" with M in both cases, in which case the answer
> to the first question is obviously yes. The answer to the second
> question is not so easy. If it's yes, then it seems my M must have
> been stored somewhere in the interim, which means M is an immortal
> soul. If it's no, which I am more inclined to believe, then we have a
> big problem: uploading would appear to work for all intents and
> purposes, but either (a) the thing experiencing my mind would not be
> the same thing that experiences my mind right now, or (b) there has
> never been anything that experiences being me.
>
> Saying that M must have been stored somewhere in the interim is
> probably going to attract more comments along the lines of "but
> interrupted continuity is experienced as identical to uninterrupted
> continuity", so I'll take a shot at addressing that right now.
> "Interrupted continuity of experience" is an oxymoron. M is not your
> conscious mind, which fades in and out; M is purely an abstraction. If
> you are temporarily knocked out or dead or whatever, resulting in a
> period of time in which you have no subjective experiences, you still
> have M during that period. The only situation in which you lose M is
> when you go to the atheist afterlife. M is, in a very literal sense,
> you.
>
> Again, nolipsism solves the problem neatly. If any of you say, "but M
> is a self, and there is no such thing as a self, so M is a meaningless
> abstraction of nothing", then my only possible response is: yes,
> that's logical.
>
>> I don't have a problem with simultaneously existing copies. I am one,
>> and only one, of the copies at any moment.
>
> I could ask which, but that's a cheap shot. Instead: exactly one? Why not zero?

I am the copy that is speaking. I have a self, and there is no
confusion if I specify that I am the self being generated by the
collection of matter at particular space and time coordinates.
Normally, there is only one version of me extant at a time, so I can
get away with just using my name; but if there are two copies of me I
will have to specify whether I am copy A or copy B. This is
straightforward so far. The problem comes when I try to claim that I
am a single entity persisting through time, as if there is a soul
waiting in limbo during the copying process and then entering one body
and not the other. It's what my brain is programmed to believe, but
everyone who gives serious thought to these duplication scenarios
should realise how absurd it is.


-- 
Stathis Papaioannou



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