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Both were you, they stopped being both you the second they started diverging which is the second they came into existence.
by gnaritas 9y ago
Both were you, they stopped being both you the second they started diverging which is the second they came into existence.
- Smaug123 9y agoPer the parallel thread: the word "are" is misleading, and you should distinguish between the two things you mean by it. (I should have done that myself in the grandparent to this comment.) I am who I was five minutes ago, and I am also not who I was five minutes ago, for two different senses of the word "am" which happen to have the same word in English.
- charlesism 9y agoI think it's more accurate to say the problem is "me." We don't need to worry about it most of the time, but the only "me" around is the state of your brain at this instance in space and time. Anything else is just more or less "me"-like, but not exactly "me." So if someone recreated you in triplicate, the instant after they appeared, all four of you would all be the same amount "you," though you four would all diverge thereafter, and be more and more some other version of you.
- Smaug123 9y agoNice angle I hadn't really crystallised in my mind. I'll meet in the middle and say that the problem is the combination of "is" and "me"; one sense of "is" applies to a particular sense of "me", and the other sense of "is" applies to the other sense of "me".
- treebeard901 9y agoNow if one of the copies mysteriously grows a goatee then all bets are off.
- gnaritas 9y agoSimply put, identity and equality are different things; he's conflating them. This was already pointed out, but he didn't grok it.
- Smaug123 9y agoI'm not conflating identity and equality; I'm arguing that you mean two different things by "identity" but are using one word to refer to both, resulting in confusion all round.
- gnaritas 9y agoI was not replying to you, you're intellectually dishonest, we're done, I've made that clear.
- charlesism 9y agoI think it's all relative. Identity and equality are the same if you disregard a thing's environment. Are two USB keys with the same data on them "the same"? It depends on what you care about.
- dhimes 9y agoIndeed, this is the essence of the Buddhist denial of "self." The idea of a persistent self is a convenient abstraction for communicating things like "I'll go to the store this afternoon," but it should not be mistaken for the reality that the persistent self doesn't exist. "You" die every moment.