3 ms·

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 ot

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.

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.