On Nov 1, 2008, at 7:07 PM, Brent Meeker wrote:
> We can ask how similar each one is to the Kory
> that stepped into the teleporter, but there's no fact of the matter
> about which one is *really* Kory.
I completely agree with that. But I don't agree with (and don't think
the above implies) the following:
> And there's no sense to the question
> of what "I should expect to experience" because "I" is nothing but a
> process of experiencing anyway.
I don't know what to make of this response. Forget about teleporters
and copying for a minute. Let's just talk about ordinary life. Even if
I accept that the concept of "I" is a convenient fiction (and I
essentially do, in some sense), I still mean *something* when I make a
statement like "I expect to be still be sitting in this room one
second from now", or "I just burned my finger and it's hurting, and I
expect to still be feeling pain one second from now." Our considered
views of personal identity might force us to translate those
statements into something very different than what they seem, but they
clearly still mean something.
In this mundane sense, it's perfectly sensible for me to say, as I'm
sitting here typing this email, "I expect to still be sitting in this
room one second from now". If I'm about to step into a teleporter
that's going to obliterate me and make a perfect copy of me in a
distant blue room, how can it not be sensible to ask - in that
mundane, everyday sense - "What do I expect to be experiencing one
second from now?"
-- Kory
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Received on Sun Nov 02 2008 - 18:46:00 PST