"Meeker, Brent" wrote:
> Bruno, perhaps I'm just unusally dense today; but I dont' grasp the
>uncertainity to you write of the the Washington-Moscow thought experiment.
>It seems obvious to me that when I am reconstituted in Washington and
>reconstituted in Moscow then I am in both places. This of course assumes
>that there is no mystical, indivisble "soul" that is "really" me. It
>follows from the idea that my internal pyschological states derive from the
>physical processes of my body - and if the body is reproduced then so are
>those processes.
After the split, though, the experience of the two copies will diverge. If
I find myself in Moscow, I am no longer the "same person" as my twin in
Washington...if I knew the Washington twin was going to be tortured my
attitude would be quite different from what it would be if *I* was going to
be tortured.
So, if continuity of consciousness is "real" it is reasonable to expect that
our theory of consciousness should allow for the possibility of splitting,
and that from a first-person point of view, I-before-the-split would have an
X% chance of becoming one copy and a Y% chance of becoming another. That is
not to deny, though, that the split would happen both ways at once--in other
words, each copy would be correct in saying it was continuous with the
single consciousness before the split.
Jesse Mazer
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Received on Fri Feb 09 2001 - 09:48:54 PST