On 27 April 2004 Bruno Marchal wrote:
>But you will be dead in the same sense that you will
>be dead in the next instant, at least with what I understand
>when you quote Parfit. In THAT case you shouldn't care at
>all in the presence of any possible threats, no?
Yes, you could say that we die every moment and are replaced by near-exact
replicas. You could imagine a situation where this is made more explicit:
alien scientists stop the world every second, make copies of everyone, kill
all the originals, put the copies in their place, and repeat the procedure
in another second. They could have been doing this for years, without anyone
suspecting anything unusual was going on. If you are suddenly given this
information, and you know that the aliens are going to continue doing this
indefinitely (and there is nothing anyone can do to stop them or escape),
would you suddenly stop caring about anything that happens in the future,
because you'll be dead in one second anyway, and so will everyone you have
ever known?
There is a single idea underlying much of the confusion in discussions of
personal identity: the belief in a soul. I use this term for a quality or
substance which resides in a person throughout his life and is somehow
responsible for his identity, and which (here is the problem) is not
captured by a complete description of the person's physical and
psychological state. Often, it is a hidden assumption.
--Stathis Papaioannou
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Received on Wed Apr 28 2004 - 11:12:01 PDT