From: Vladimir Nesov (robotact@gmail.com)
Date: Wed Feb 04 2009 - 05:02:30 MST
On Wed, Feb 4, 2009 at 3:44 AM, Andrew Hay <andwhay@gmail.com> wrote:
> "all sufficiently indistinguishable versions of myself are me" seems to be a
> rather strong statement without the required strong evidence/reasoning
> backing it up.
>
> Not that I'm helping, because I don't know the answer. Perhaps it is a fault
> at 'indistinguishable'? in any case, I can't be safe to assume that unless
> we have a good understanding of what the meaning behind "me" is.
>
Concepts are definitions, following regularities in the world, and
humans assign (context-sensitive) instrumental utility to the concepts
according to role of those regularities in overall structure of the
world, from the contexts in which the concepts apply. When we are
talking about "me", there is instrumental utility attached, and this
instrumental utility won't translate well to different regularities,
or to different contexts in which this regularity is placed. I say
"instrumental" in the sense of being a component in representation of
the utility over whole timelines, even though things marked
instrumental this way may be seen as terminal values.
One of the core properties of the concept "me" is that it's singular
(at any time). When the concept changes to accommodate the possibility
of multiple people, so should its instrumental utility. It doesn't
follow that when there are multiple identical people, each of them is
as valuable from your or anyone's perspective as the single original.
Maybe so, maybe not, but no easy answer. We don't need the
understanding of "me", "me" doesn't apply. We need the understanding
of values, as applied to the discussed context.
-- Vladimir Nesov robotact@gmail.com http://causalityrelay.wordpress.com/
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