So, the graph model of identity sort of works, but I feel it doesn’t quite get to the real meat of identity. I think the key is in how two vertices of the identity graph are linked and what it means for them to be linked. Because I don’t think the premise that a person is the same person they were a few moments ago is necessarily justified, and in some situations it doesn’t meld with intuition. For example, a person’s brain is a complex machine; imagine it were (using some extremely advanced technology) modified seriously while a person was still conscious. So, it’s being modified all the time as one learns new information, has new experiences, takes new substances, etc, but let’s imagine it was very dramatically modified. So much so that over the course of a few minutes, one person who once had the personality and memories of, say, you, ended up having the rough personality and memories of Barack Obama. Could it really be said that it’s still the same identity?
Why is an uploaded mind necessarily linked by an edge to the original mind? If the uploaded mind is less than perfect (and it probably will be; even if it’s off by one neuron, one bit, one atom) and you can still link that with an edge to the original mind, what’s to say you couldn’t link a very, very dodgy ‘clone’ mind, like for example the mind of a completely different human, via an edge, to the original mind/vertex?
Some other notes: firstly, an exact clone of a mind is the same mind. This pretty much makes sense. So you can get away from issues like ‘if I clone your mind, but then torture the clone, do you feel it?’ Well, if you’ve modified the state of the cloned mind by torturing it, it can no longer be said to be the same mind, and we would both presumably agree that me cloning your mind in a far away world and then torturing the clone does not make you experience anything.
So, the graph model of identity sort of works, but I feel it doesn’t quite get to the real meat of identity. I think the key is in how two vertices of the identity graph are linked and what it means for them to be linked. Because I don’t think the premise that a person is the same person they were a few moments ago is necessarily justified, and in some situations it doesn’t meld with intuition. For example, a person’s brain is a complex machine; imagine it were (using some extremely advanced technology) modified seriously while a person was still conscious. So, it’s being modified all the time as one learns new information, has new experiences, takes new substances, etc, but let’s imagine it was very dramatically modified. So much so that over the course of a few minutes, one person who once had the personality and memories of, say, you, ended up having the rough personality and memories of Barack Obama. Could it really be said that it’s still the same identity?
Why is an uploaded mind necessarily linked by an edge to the original mind? If the uploaded mind is less than perfect (and it probably will be; even if it’s off by one neuron, one bit, one atom) and you can still link that with an edge to the original mind, what’s to say you couldn’t link a very, very dodgy ‘clone’ mind, like for example the mind of a completely different human, via an edge, to the original mind/vertex?
Some other notes: firstly, an exact clone of a mind is the same mind. This pretty much makes sense. So you can get away from issues like ‘if I clone your mind, but then torture the clone, do you feel it?’ Well, if you’ve modified the state of the cloned mind by torturing it, it can no longer be said to be the same mind, and we would both presumably agree that me cloning your mind in a far away world and then torturing the clone does not make you experience anything.