[ExI] [tt] Identity thread again

William Flynn Wallace foozler83 at gmail.com
Fri Apr 10 15:16:41 UTC 2015


On Thu, Apr 9, 2015 at 9:00 PM, Stathis Papaioannou <stathisp at gmail.com>
wrote:

> On 10 April 2015 at 07:05, William Flynn Wallace <foozler83 at gmail.com>
> wrote:
> >
> >
> > 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
>
> You're different from moment to moment and yet you still feel you are
> the same person, so any duplicating device would just have to match
> the level of fidelity of ordinary life.
>
> --
> Stathis Papaioannou
>

​I think the idea of 'you can't cross the same river twice' applies here.
Any copy of you is a unique slice of time that will never be completely the
same again.  As for what you feel you are, well, humans are the poorest
judges of themselves, as we have found.  Can you really say that you will
or will not do something until the moment arrives?  Sgt. York - pacifist.
Experiments show that a person is a poor predictor of what they will or
won't do.  So many therapies (not to mention Socrates and others) devote
tons of time to 'getting to know yourself', 'getting in touch with your
inner self' and so on.  And that's not to say that the therapies are
successful in doing those things.  Maybe we are just under the
reinforcement contingencies of the therapist.  We do like people to agree
with us, and so we say and maybe even feel, those things the therapist
urges.  Is that our 'true' self?  Or maybe there isn't one at all.  "I
would never do that" - wrong.  "I wish I'd never done that.  That's just
not like me."  Etc.

Bill W

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