As I write, call it a play on words; a question of naming terms—if you will. But then—and this is just a proposition plus a hypothesis—try to provide a reasonable way to objectively define what one ‘ought’ to care about in cloning scenarios; and contemplate all sorts of traditionally puzzling thought experiments about neuron replacements and what have you, and you’ll inevitable end up with hand-waving, stating arbitrary rules that may seem to work (for many, anyhow) in one though experiment, just to be blatantly broken by the next experiment… Do that enough and get bored and give up—or, ‘realize’, eventually, maybe: There is simply not much left of the idea of a unified and continuous, ‘objectively’ traceable self. There’s a mind here and now and, yes of course, it absolutely tends to care about what it deems to be its ‘natural’ successors in any given scenario. And this care is so strong, it feels as if these successors were one entire, inseparable thing, and so it’s not a surprise we cannot fathom there are divisions.
What I give up on is the outré thought experiments, not my own observation of myself that I am a unified, continuous being. A changeable being, and one made of parts working together, but not a pile of dust.
A long time ago I regularly worked at a computer terminal where if you hit backspace 6 times in a row, the computer would crash. So you tried to avoid doing that. Clever arguments that crash your brain, likewise.
As I write, call it a play on words; a question of naming terms—if you will. But then—and this is just a proposition plus a hypothesis—try to provide a reasonable way to objectively define what one ‘ought’ to care about in cloning scenarios; and contemplate all sorts of traditionally puzzling thought experiments about neuron replacements and what have you, and you’ll inevitable end up with hand-waving, stating arbitrary rules that may seem to work (for many, anyhow) in one though experiment, just to be blatantly broken by the next experiment… Do that enough and get bored and give up—or, ‘realize’, eventually, maybe: There is simply not much left of the idea of a unified and continuous, ‘objectively’ traceable self. There’s a mind here and now and, yes of course, it absolutely tends to care about what it deems to be its ‘natural’ successors in any given scenario. And this care is so strong, it feels as if these successors were one entire, inseparable thing, and so it’s not a surprise we cannot fathom there are divisions.
What I give up on is the outré thought experiments, not my own observation of myself that I am a unified, continuous being. A changeable being, and one made of parts working together, but not a pile of dust.
A long time ago I regularly worked at a computer terminal where if you hit backspace 6 times in a row, the computer would crash. So you tried to avoid doing that. Clever arguments that crash your brain, likewise.