From: Stathis Papaioannou (stathisp@gmail.com)
Date: Thu Dec 03 2009 - 04:47:46 MST
2009/12/3 Frank Adamek <f.adamek@yahoo.com>
>
> Experience consists of electrochemical signals conveyed to the auditory cortex, the visual cortex, etc that make up your brain, quite independently of whether similar or identical signals are traveling through a similar or identical brain somewhere else. If that brain is destroyed, no more signals reach it.
But the brain *is* destroyed in ordinary life. It gradually falls
apart and the cellular repair mechanisms create a new brain in its
place.
> If you mean to say more than "there will be an instance of me with all my memories who experienced no gap in consciousness", what is it that allows you to experience what they experience? If a few memories are changed, do you experience it a little bit less, and where is the line between that person (the future instance of everything that allows us to call you "you") and some stranger, such that you expect the experiences of one and not the other? To me an expectation for the experiences of other instances of the self seems based off a non-physical "self-ness", either a property of certain minds that allows your current brain access to them, or a disembodied self-ness that receives everything each instance of you does, surviving beyond the destruction of each.
There is no soul non-physical self, but there is the illusion that I
am a unique person travelling in the forward direction through time.
Duplication thought experiments just highlight the fact that this is
an illusion. Nevertheless, it is an illusion that I would like to
continue, and I would be happy to undergo any process that allows it
to continue in much the same way that it does in ordinary life.
-- Stathis Papaioannou
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