3 ms·

Kaibeezy linked to Greg Egan, who's one of my favorites in this area. To my mind the latter is logically impossible. Subjective self-continuity is not intrinsi

Kaibeezy linked to Greg Egan, who's one of my favorites in this area. To my mind the latter is logically impossible. Subjective self-continuity is not intrinsic to the experience of consciousness, it is a conclusion we draw upon introspection, based on circumstantial evidence. Subjectively, all we ever have is a sequence of fleeting moments. We only have the "word" of our memory to trust that the Now Me is a descendant of Past Me. As soon as perfect replication is possible, the replicant and the original have exactly equivalent claims to identity in every sense that matters, just one will have a better claim to physical continuity. But physical continuity is not the most important aspect of identity, it's just our intuitions favor it so heavily because it has historically perfectly coincided with conscious identity.

blueadept111 7y ago
Right, and we don't even have subjective continuity ourselves. Every night we fall asleep, and our consciousness dies. Every morning it is reborn. We don't worry about it.
- TomMarius 7y ago
  Maybe you are different than me, but I really don't feel as "reborn" when I wake up - I mean I immediately feel all the time that has passed (and how much, usually to 1 hour precision), and even during the night, when I'm sleeping, I'm still there, just in a different state and not making many memories, but I am definitely not gone.
  - defertoreptar 7y ago
    A better example is going under anesthesia. I had a procedure done, and after I drifted to sleep, 30 minutes passed instantly and they were rolling me to the other room. The point is that we can lose our continuity of consciousness, yet we don't consider this "dying" in normal life. If we duplicate our exact physical brain and processes and immediately destroy the original while this happens, there is no loss of continuity, but this feels like dying still.
    - TomMarius 7y ago
      Luckily I never had that done to me. To me, there is clear loss of continuity when you duplicate a brain. The process inside has been broken/does not continue. The structure is not the key, the key is the running state of the brain. Under anesthesia, the brain still functions.
      - sooheon 7y ago
        I think you have to disambiguate two types of "breakage". One is suspending the thread, so to speak, and the other is functional destruction. I think perfectly non-destructive suspension of the process should not influence identity at all. Does an algorithm change its semantics if we pause the execution for a millisecond? This also assumes that duplication requires either type of breakage--for thought experiment purposes you may assume that cloning is possible with 0 delay and with 0 destructive change. If you care about which physical substrate the process is running on specifically, this is the bias towards physical continuity I noted.
        TomMarius 7y ago
        If I duplicate the state of a paused algorithm and then immediately unpause both of them, even if I did it with no time in between, I can't claim that the second one is the first one. If the algorithm makes up some "mind", a new one is created - and there is a new person. My point is basically that I will not magically look through someone else's eyes, even if the someone is my copy.

blueadept111 7y ago

Right, and we don't even have subjective continuity ourselves. Every night we fall asleep, and our consciousness dies. Every morning it is reborn. We don't worry about it.

TomMarius 7y ago
Maybe you are different than me, but I really don't feel as "reborn" when I wake up - I mean I immediately feel all the time that has passed (and how much, usually to 1 hour precision), and even during the night, when I'm sleeping, I'm still there, just in a different state and not making many memories, but I am definitely not gone.
- defertoreptar 7y ago
  A better example is going under anesthesia. I had a procedure done, and after I drifted to sleep, 30 minutes passed instantly and they were rolling me to the other room. The point is that we can lose our continuity of consciousness, yet we don't consider this "dying" in normal life. If we duplicate our exact physical brain and processes and immediately destroy the original while this happens, there is no loss of continuity, but this feels like dying still.
  - TomMarius 7y ago
    Luckily I never had that done to me. To me, there is clear loss of continuity when you duplicate a brain. The process inside has been broken/does not continue. The structure is not the key, the key is the running state of the brain. Under anesthesia, the brain still functions.
    - sooheon 7y ago
      I think you have to disambiguate two types of "breakage". One is suspending the thread, so to speak, and the other is functional destruction. I think perfectly non-destructive suspension of the process should not influence identity at all. Does an algorithm change its semantics if we pause the execution for a millisecond? This also assumes that duplication requires either type of breakage--for thought experiment purposes you may assume that cloning is possible with 0 delay and with 0 destructive change. If you care about which physical substrate the process is running on specifically, this is the bias towards physical continuity I noted.
      - TomMarius 7y ago
        If I duplicate the state of a paused algorithm and then immediately unpause both of them, even if I did it with no time in between, I can't claim that the second one is the first one. If the algorithm makes up some "mind", a new one is created - and there is a new person. My point is basically that I will not magically look through someone else's eyes, even if the someone is my copy.