Stathis Papaioannou wrote:
> Tom Caylor writes:
>
> > Without really getting into your thought experiment, I want to ask a
> > question. What does it mean to "experience a minute of continuous
> > consciousness"? OK, we have a biological clock that gives us a rough
> > sense of relative passing of time. But I don't think you maintain that
> > our personal identity is tied to that, do you? In order to really be
> > sure we are going through time, I think we have to get discrete input
> > from the external world every once in a while to see how much time
> > (roughly) has passed. If we are annihilated and duplicated with a
> > delay, I think we would be interested in how much time actually *did*
> > pass, in order to continue to live our life (identity) in the most
> > effective way.
>
> This is already the case in everyday life. We have alarm clocks to tell us
> how much time has passed in the "real" world because our subjective
> sense of time is distorted when we are asleep. However, our sense of
> personal identity is necessarily subjective, tied to events in the real
> world only insofar as these events influence our subjective experience.
>
> Stathis Papaioannou
I wonder if our sense of identiy is more dependent on the world than we suppose. I recall reading
somewhere, in the 1960's when sensory deprivation experiments were "the new thing", that people who
stayed in the sensory deprivation tanks more than an hour or so found that their thoughts sort of
went into an endless loop and they then lost all sense of time and self.
Brent Meeker
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Received on Tue Jun 20 2006 - 21:23:42 PDT