On 3/7/07, Brent Meeker <meekerdb.domain.name.hidden> wrote:
> > How do you know that you are the same person from moment to moment in
> > ordinary life? The physical processes in your brain create psychological
> > continuity; that is, you know you are the same person today as yesterday
> > because you have the same sense of personal identity, the same memories,
> > woke up in the same environment, and so on. It is necessary and
> > sufficient for survival that these psychological factors are generated,
> > but it doesn't matter how this is achieved.
>
> How so? The Many Worlds idea seems to imply that you survive no matter
> what. The consequences of natural selection obtain only within worlds which
> are law-like - and we're back to the white rabbit problem.
You survive if a sufficiently close analogue of your mind survives. This can
theoretically happen in many ways other than the obvious one (survival of
your physical body): in parallel worlds, in a distant part of our own world
if it is infinite in extent, in the Turing machine at the end of time. The
white rabbit universes are a problem: since we don't observe them, maybe
these theories are wrong, or maybe there is some other reason why we don't
observe them.
Stathis Papaioannou
--~--~---------~--~----~------------~-------~--~----~
You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Everything List" group.
To post to this group, send email to everything-list.domain.name.hidden
To unsubscribe from this group, send email to everything-list-unsubscribe.domain.name.hidden
For more options, visit this group at
http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list?hl=en
-~----------~----~----~----~------~----~------~--~---
Received on Tue Mar 06 2007 - 20:46:57 PST