On 4/21/07, Jason <jasonresch.domain.name.hidden> wrote (quoting Brent Meeker):
> This seems to rest on an implicit idea that the OMs are "out there" and
> that "you" are a person independent of them, a person to can sample them or
> experience them. This is contrary to the idea of OMs which is that OMs are
> atomic units of persons. You are a sequence of OMs. There is no extra-OM
> "you" who can sample them or experience them.
> >
>
> This seems to be a good definition for a person, but how does the
> definition handle duplication thought experiments or the infinite
> breadth of experiences across the multiverse which connects us all?
> Personhood becomes fuzzy and a truly object treatment of conscious
> experience might do well to abandon the idea of personal identity
> altogether. I agree there is not an extra-OM that experiences OMs,
> but that seems to be what sampling assumptions imply.
I think of both personhood and personal identity as emergent phenomena. It
is necessary and sufficient for the existence of a person that there exist a
set of related moments of consciousness. "Related" normally means that they
arise in sequence as a result of activity in a particular brain, but
duplication thought experiments suggest that a stream of consciousness can
survive fragmentation of the physical substrate. A person gets into
teleportation machine A, is destroyed, and a new person is created at
receiving station B who claims to be the same individual. This is simply a
description of what would happen if the experiment were performed, and
"continuity of personal identity" is a phrase commonly used to describe the
phenomenon.
Stathis Papaioannou
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Received on Fri Apr 20 2007 - 23:52:42 PDT