>Brent Meeker wrote:
>
> >This just seems like semantic confusion to me. It makes no sense to
> >ask, "Where will you feel being after the duplication.?" If you ask me
> >this before the experiment the answer will be, "I don't know." or "It
> >depends on which "me" you mean, since there will be two after the
> >experiment." It seems to be implicit in your language that there is
> >only one me - hence you ask questions about where "I" will feel
> >"myself". But there will be two me's and each will feel he is in a
> >different place. My consciousness, being dependent on my body, will be
> >duplicated too. I will have split and I-Washington and I-Moscow will
> >exist, but it makes no sense to ask which one is really me.
It makes no sense to ask which is "really" the same person as
me-before-the-split. But after the split, each will have its own
identity--Moscow-me will be a different person from Washington-me.
> >Perhaps when other posters (not you) write about continuity of
> >consciousnes they mean that a persons consciousness cannot be
> >duplicated even if their physical being is duplicated - but I believe
> >you explicityl reject this view. In which case I'm not sure what
> >"continuity of consciousness" means either.
Since I'm the one who's been talking this way, I'll try to address this. I
originally brought up "continuity of consciousness" in my post about "3
possible views of consciousness," at
<
http://www.escribe.com/science/theory/m2358.html>. There, I was defining
it in contrast to the "only individual observer-moments exist" view, which
you seem to be taking here. If only observer-moments exist, of course it
would be meaningless to talk about whether I am "going to" find myself in
Washington or Moscow--all you can say is that there will be observer-moments
in Washington with memories of stepping into the replication chamber, and
also observer-moments in Moscow with identical memories.
The problem is that this way of talking doesn't match the way we actually
experience the world from the first-person point of view. If I am stepping
into the replication chamber, I will wonder what I am about to experience
next--will I suddenly find myself in Washington or in Moscow? This question
will be especially pressing if, say, the Moscow copy will be sold into
slavery and the Washington copy will be set free...in this case I'll be
holding my breath as the chamber begins to hum, hoping I'll "get lucky."
It's certainly possible that all this is an illusion, based on confused
thinking, that my sense of experiencing multiple observer-moments
successively is false. In that case "I" would just be whatever I am
experiencing now, period. This leads to a lot of counterintuitive
conclusions though--if I observe myself to be the Moscow twin and I know the
Moscow twin is due to be tortured in an hour, I have no particular reason to
feel any more concern than if it was the Washington twin who was due to be
tortured. Either way, it will not be "me" but an observer-moment very
similar to "me" who will experience the pain.
The alternative to the isolated-observer-moments view is what I have been
calling "continuity of consciousness." You could picture this as a moving
spotlight that shines on various observer-moments in succession, and can
split into multiple spotlights as it moves. This picture is
problematic--it's a bit too concrete, too "soul-like." However, we run into
similar problems when we use the so-called "copernican anthropic principle"
or the "Doomsday argument"...what does it mean to say "I" could have born at
any point in history? If I were born at a different point in history, I
certainly wouldn't be the same person...it seems we must picture a sort of
featurless spotlight-of-experience that randomly selects an observer-moment
to shine on. But the copernican anthropic principle should not be ruled out
just because it's hard to understand what it "means" philosophically, and I
think the same is true of continuity of consciousness.
In terms of a theory of consciousness, all that the continuity view says is
that we should expect our theory to quantify some kind of "conditional
probability" between any two observer-moments, which in some sense we would
interpret as the probability that the first moment will experience
"becoming" the second. The theory itself would not comment on the sort of
philosophical difficulties I mention above, which seem to be what you're
having trouble with.
In contrast, the isolated-moments view says that although we might expect a
theory of consciousness to quantify the absolute probability of being
various observer-moments, the theory will not define any notion of
conditional probability *between* observer-moments. In this case, identity
would be merely an aesthetic interpretation, much as consciousness itself is
an aesthetic interpretation to people like Dennett. Personally, I believe
that even if I convince myself of an "interpretation" in which I am not the
same person as Jesse-in-5-minutes, I am nevertheless likely to experience
what he experiences--identity-over-time is something imposed on me by
external reality (although if splitting is possible, there is probably some
nonzero probabilty of 'becoming' any observer-moment at all, even one
radically different from my current one).
Jesse Mazer
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Received on Sat Feb 10 2001 - 09:22:48 PST