4 ms·

100% no in my book. I mean, if you made the copy, and I could go on existing, or not, how could that copy be "me." I'm an instance of an object, not a class.

• kevin_thibedeau 7y ago
  You are not immutable. Your body is already a ship of Theseus.
  • ericb 7y ago
    That's true, but that doesn't mean if you build an identical ship next to mine that your ship is "the same ship." Further, I'll be pissed if the one I'm on sinks. The identical one sailing off into the distance is cold comfort to me.
  • J5892 7y ago
    But the system of continuous electrical processes that make up your consciousness is immutable, from your perspective. If it is perfectly transferred to another vessel, as a series of direct connections (maybe some kind of neuron-based "wire"), then maybe it could be considered the same continuous consciousness. The body around it, from the perspective of the system, doesn't matter. It can be replaced forever as long as the system remains continuous.
  • AstralStorm 7y ago
    Yes, but it's a massive and complex feedback system. So every replaced piece is tuned back to be a good to perfect replacement - including thought. When that does not happen you get hallucinations or cancers, for example. You could build an empirically accurate copy of the ship in this way - not perfect but very close.
• Jach 7y ago
  I take John K Clark's perspeective: "But I am not an object. I am not a noun, I am an adjective. I am the way matter behaves when it is organized in a John K Clark-ish way. At the present time only one chunk of matter in the universe behaves that way; someday that could change." Since this thread is full of references I thought I'd throw in http://ageofem.com/ http://ageofem.com/ -- a baseline scenario book of the future that reads like history should we get brain emulation tech.
  • jodrellblank 7y ago
    At the present time only one chunk of matter in the universe behaves that way; How do you know this is true? How do you know there isn't a John K Clark-ish person in Australia or South Africa or Alpha Centauri? What does it mean to say there is a John K Clark-ish lump of matter in Alpha Centauri, why is it useful to say that matter is "you"? You can't meet it, you can't share stories with it, you can't experience what it experiences through spooky action at a distance effects, you can't feel full when it eats, you presumably wouldn't want your spouse abandoning Earth and going to live with it instead, you presumably wouldn't want it spending out of your bank account; in what useful way is it "you" just because it's a similarly patterned organisation of matter? If you relax the accuracy in the organization a little, is this any different from saying "your twin sibling is you" or "all humans are the same person"? And if you don't relax the accuracy in the pattern, where do you draw the line? Isn't that a bit of a joke to argue that all "similar enough" people are you, while carefully and deliberately excluding every candidate until nobody counts in that group?
  • imtringued 7y ago
    >At the present time only one chunk of matter in the universe behaves that way; someday that could change. This is not correct because it is possible to experience the same John K Clark from multiple different frames of reference.
• lonelappde 7y ago
  Which one is you? How can you answer that question in any reliable way?