You haven’t shown that at all, nor have you responded to my question:
If they both have trouble, perhaps it is because they are individually insufficient. Maybe both conditions need to obtain.
This seems to accord with how we treat personal identity in practice. Humans aren’t just bodies, nor are they just minds, they are embodied minds.
Non sci-fi examples can show how we treat each of these conditions as inadequate in practice. Mere bodily continuity is not enough, as seen in the extreme case of brain death. Nor is mere psychological continuity enough; if a stranger had a mental disorder such that they behaved like me, thought like me, even had my memories, their existence would be a cold comfort to me if I was dying.
I have. You just disagree.
I dis respond. Murder is murder. It doesn’t matter if you are murdering a clone, the original, or you don’t. It doesn’t matter if they are identical and indistinguishable. Killing any of them is still killing them.
Where does this quote mention murder?
This is your original scenario. This is what I was responding to.
You changed things considerably. I will look at that now.
The best choice is for the original to agree to have the clone get $1M. Then they split it. Which is the clone will be revealed when one is handed $1M. But it won’t matter, because the clone will go along with the plan.
You are just trying to sidestep the scenario so it comes out the way you like. That isn’t how this works.
So, per the terms of the contract, any such sharing is prohibited. If the company discovers this, they reserve the right to sue both original and clone for the full award.
Now what?
You accused me of sidestepping the scenario. I accuse you of changing the scenario. This is now your third version.
My answer is the same in all scenariod. The clone and the original are identical, in body, mind, and consciousness. There is no way to tell them apart. Neither is “better” than the other, in even an insignificant way.
They are, of course, still two separate beings. They will grow to be more and more different as time goes by, as they have different experiences. But they will always both be versions of the same person, neither “more” that original person than the other, no matter the differences.
And they both want to live, and have the right to live. Your first scenario is preposterous. Why would the fact that there is another who is as much me as I am make death less undesirable?
What makes sense to me is that consciousness is the perspectival presence of the physical. More exactly the presence of a boiling pot of water or pair of muddy boots. Or some math formula in a textbook.
For me a problem in lots of talk about consciousness is that the “physical” is discussed as if obviously well-understood. We might speak instead of the hard problem of the physical. I call a fire hydrant “physical” because I see you walk around it, and you call a “fire hydrant” too, etc.
But I don’t see it through your eyes. This gives rise to the idea of an “inside stuff.” But that means the “being” of the fire hydrant, as it is actually there for me, is “magically” transformed from “physical” to “mental.”
Basically a “view from nowhere” is taken for granted by many, when all we know, from our own experience, is the view from here. And of course we treat other humans as having a view from there. This to me is the given. Or this is not a real conversation.
Fair enough ! But would it be comforting if you had a twin who continued on, expressing the beliefs that you would express, enjoying things as you would enjoy them ?
I ask this because it’s an old belief that those facing death can find comfort in others living on who are “essentially” them.
I think you have a misconception about what these terms mean. “Bodily continuity” means continuation of the self based on the mental substrate; most people who believe in BC would trivially say that someone brain dead is dead (for now).
And psychological continuity doesn’t mean someone vaguely acting like you; it means a perfect copy* of your mind; like for example if you could copy your mind into a digital space.
* Although, the strongest counter-arguments to PC concern situations where I make a near perfect copy of someone’s mind. The proposition of PC fails to make an unequivocal prediction.
Cool, so you’ve made it completely clear that your position is the bodily continuity position. So I can put to you some of the main counter-arguments.
For example, why does it need to be the same atoms? You were clear before that if I die, and then a perfect copy of my brain is made from new atoms, that isn’t me. So what is special about my atoms? Do you think they are holding something tied to my self?
And yet you’ve just taken the position that I can be dead, for any amount of time, and then be alive again at a future time or date.
This is why, as I say, advocates of PC would often say that advocates of BC are engaging in magical thinking, or believing in souls. But advocates of BC say the exact opposite.
I’m not accusing you of engaging in woo. Just asking you to at least consider the possibility that physicalism does not in itself entail BC. It doesn’t entail either PC, BC or NC. There’s insufficient information right now.
Maybe this suggests that there isn’t an unequivocal answer? Could it be that PC doesn’t require an absolutely perfect copy - just sufficient similarity?
Maybe to some degree. But it is not the right kind of comfort. Not the same as the knowledge of my continuance. It is not, “I will survive”, it is, “someone else will succeed me”.
In this way, parents take comfort in their children succeeding them. But they seldom imagine that it is literally themselves continuing in their children’s bodies.
And yet, they would still say it is the same brain. If brain death is too extreme, consider injury. Suppose a brain injury, while the damage is not complete, obliterates the personality of the victim, replacing it with a completely new one. Many people would say that this is a new person, that the old one “isn’t there anymore”. If you believe that this is due to biological continuity being interrupted, then consider a second injury, which is identical in magnitude to the first, but this one renders the victim paralyzed. Here, everyone would say this is the same person, just injured. And so it cannot be BC that people judge this case by, it is PC.
I doubt PC entails a perfect copy of our minds. After all, our minds change year by year, day by day. We can imagine that your mentally ill doppelganger acts like you, thinks like you, to the nth degree. But the point is, it doesn’t matter how close we make him, he will never be you, and he is not you because BC is unsatisfied.
Right. So a big part of that feeling would come from no longer much identifying with the little details of one’s self.
Mach discusses this in The Analysis of Sensations.
The primary fact is not the ego, but the elements (sensations). What was said on p. 21 as to the term " sensation " must be borne in mind. The elements constitute the I. s have the sensation green, signifies that the element green occurs in a given complex of other elements (sensations, memories). When I cease to have the sensation green, when I die, then the elements no longer occur in the ordinary, familiar association. That is all. Only an ideal mental-economical unity, not a real unity, has ceased to exist. The ego is not a definite, unalterable, sharply bounded unity. None of these attributes are important; for all vary even within the sphere of individual life; in fact their alteration is even sought after by the individual. Continuity alone is important. This view accords admirably with the position which Weismann has reached by biological investigations. (“Zur Frage der Unsterblichkeit der Einzelligen,” Biolog Centralbl., Vol. IV., Nos. 21, 22; compare especially pages 654 and 655, where the scission of the individual into two equal halves is spoken of.) But continuity is only a means of preparing and conserving what is contained in the ego. This content, and not the ego, is the principal thing. This content, however, is not confined to the individual. With the exception of some insignificant and valueless personal memories, it remains presented in others even after the death of the individual. The elements that make up the consciousness of a given individual are firmly connected with one another, but with those of another individual they are only feebly connected, and the connexion is only casually apparent. Contents of consciousness, however, that are of universal significance, break through these limits of the individual, and, attached of course to individuals again, can enjoy a continued existence of an impersonal, superpersonal kind, independently of the personality by means of which they were developed. To contribute to this is the greatest happiness of the artist, the scientist, the inventor, the social reformer, etc.
The ego must be given up. It is partly the perception of this fact, partly the fear of it, that has given rise to the many extravagances of pessimism and optimism, and to numerous religious, ascetic, and philosophical absurdities. In the long run we shall not be able to close our eyes to this simple truth, which is the immediate outcome of psychological analysis. We shall then no longer place so high a value upon the ego, which even during the individual life greatly changes, and which, in sleep or during absorption in some idea, just in our very happiest moments, may be partially or wholly absent. We shall then be willing to renounce individual immortality,’ and not place more value upon the subsidiary elements than upon the principal ones. In this way we shall arrive at a freer and more enlightened view of life, which will preclude the disregard of other egos and the overestimation of our own. The ethical ideal founded on this view of life will be equally far removed from the ideal of the ascetic, which is not biologically tenable for whoever practises it, and vanishes at once with his disappearance, and from the ideal of an overweening Nietzschean “superman,” who cannot, and I hope will not be tolerated by his fellow-men.
If a knowledge of the connexion of the elements (sensations) does not suffice us, and we ask, Who possesses this connexion of sensations, Who experiences it ? then we have succumbed to the old habit of subsuming every element (every sensation) under some unanalysed complex, and we are falling back imperceptibly upon an older, lower, and more limited point of view. It is often pointed out, that a psychical experience which is not the experience of a determinate subject is unthinkable, and it is held that in this way the essential part played by the unity of consciousness has been demonstrated. But the Ego-consciousness can be of many different degrees and composed of a multiplicity of chance memories. One might just as well say that a physical process which does not take place in some environment or other, or at least somewhere in the universe, is unthinkable. In both cases, in order to make a beginning with our investigation, we must be allowed to abstract from the environment, which, as regards its influence, may be very different in different cases, and in special cases may shrink to a minimum. Consider the sensations of the lower animals, to which a subject with definite features can hardly be ascribed. It is out of sensations that the subject is built up, and, once built up, no doubt the subject reacts in turn on the sensations.
If the original body remains intact, and you make an exact replica out of different atoms, you’ll have two bodies, identical, atom-for-atom, standing side-by-side. How can it be the same body?
Same scenario, but you disperse the atoms of the original body after the two are standing side-by-side. Just because the original body is no longer there, doesn’t mean the replica is the original body. I don’t know how that can be.
And now, the process of making the replica requires dispersing the atoms of the original, and building the replica out of different atoms. Just because the original and replica never stood side-by-side, doesn’t mean we aren’t talking about two different bodies. I don’t know how it could be viewed that they are the same body.
A different topic is about identity. Different atoms are unimportant for this question. Both are you. There is no way to distinguish between them. Thought, emotion, memory, everything is identical. Nobody would be able to tell them apart by any means. And, as I’ve said in other posts, if you put the original in a booth, turn off the lights and jumble up the booths so that nobody - audience, original, or replica - could know which booth was which, both would come out thinking they were the original. The physical operations of the two are identical, so the subjective experience is of two identical things.
In what way is one not you? Different atoms? Who cares? That has no bearing on any of it.
Yes. There is no immaterial soul or anything that is your “true self”, that left when your atoms were dispersed, and will not be present when the atoms are reassembled. When the atoms are reassembled, that which made you you before will make you the same you again.
The trouble is, that whether you are alive or not is binary.
Before you object, let me be clear on what I am saying: a person can have brain damage or other qualitative changes, but still be alive; still having subjective experiences. There’s no binary when it comes to qualitative changes.
But whether you exist at all, whether you are still having any subjective experiences, versus just gone, that’s binary.
And this is problematic for PC and BC; they can’t account for either the existence of an abrupt cutoff, nor how we could ever test or know where it is.
Hopefully you get what I am saying with this because I’m often misunderstood (yes, probably my fault) and people will respond with “It’s not binary – people can have brain damage”.
I’m not talking about brain damage vs undamaged. I’m talking about alive vs dead.
Once again, that’s not the hypothetical that is being put to you. If we were talking about the hypothetical of duplicating someone, and we wanted to make it difficult for the BC position, we’d talk about using some of your atoms in both new bodies.
But that isn’t the hypothetical. We’re talking about reforming your brain after your death. If your position makes a clear prediction you shouldn’t need to switch to talking about something else.
Are you aware of the distinction between being numerically identical and qualitatively identical? Because you are talking about the latter, and seem to believe it solves the problem, when being qualitatively identical is part of the premise for most of these hypotheticals.
I suspect we’re talking past each other. I understand PC to be a proposed criterion for the persistence of personal identity. There is no objective measure of what might constitute ‘true’ Psychological Continuity. I’m suggesting that imperfect copying may still produce a mind that we would recognise as an example of the original persisting/surviving.
Sure; I think few people would disagree, given that we are acquiring some damage right now as we speak. That is to say: given PC as a premise, it’s pretty trivially true that some imperfect copying should preserve identity.
My interest is more with the cases and questions that test the different positions. The question where, under PC, the line is drawn between “imperfect copy, but you survive” and “new instance of consciousness; it’s not you, so you remain dead” is a very tricky one. Both from how/why the universe decides, but how we could ever know where that line is – there’s nothing qualitative that could ever tell us.