People tend to agree that one should care about the successor of your subjective experience. The question is whether there will be one or not.And this is the question of fact.
But the question of “what, if anything, is the successor of your subjective experience” does not obviously have a single factual answer.
I can conceptualize a world where a soul always stays tied to the initial body, and as soon as its destroyed, its destroyed as well.
If souls are real (and the Hard Problem boils down to “it’s the souls, duh”), then a teleporter that doesn’t reattach/reconstruct your soul seems like it doesn’t fit the hypothetical. If the teleporter perfectly reassembles you, that should apply to all components of you, even extraphysical ones.
But the question of “what, if anything, is the successor of your subjective experience” does not obviously have a single factual answer.
Then I’d like to see some explanation why it doesn’t have an answer, which would be adding back to normality. I understand that I’m confused about the matter in some way. But I also understand that just saying “don’t think about it” doesn’t clear my confusion in the slightest.
If souls are real (and the Hard Problem boils down to “it’s the souls, duh”), then a teleporter that doesn’t reattach/reconstruct your soul seems like it doesn’t fit the hypothetical. If the teleporter perfectly reassembles you, that should apply to all components of you, even extraphysical ones.
Nevermind cosciousness and the so called Hard Problem. By “soul” here I simply mean the carrier for identity over time, which may very well be physical. Yes, indeed it may be the case that perfect teleporter/cloning machine is just impossible because of such soul. That would be an appropriate solution to these problems.
Then I’d like to see some explanation why it doesn’t have an answer, which would be adding back to normality.
I’m not saying it doesn’t, I’m saying it’s not obvious that it does. Normalcy requirements don’t mean all our possibly-confused questions have answers, they just put restrictions on what those answers should look like. So, if the idea of successors-of-experience is meaningful at all, our normal intuition gives us desiderata like “chains of sucessorship are continuous across periods of consciousness” and “chains of successorship do not fork or merge with eachother under conditions that we currently observe.”
If you have any particular notion of successorship that meets all the desiderata you think should matter here, whether or not a teleporter creates a successor is a question of fact. But it’s not obvious what the most principled set of desiderata is, and for most sets of desiderata it’s probably not obvious whether there is a unique notion of successorship.
OP is advocating for something along the lines of “There is no uniquely-most-principled notion of successorship; the fact that different people have different desiderata, or that some people arbitrarily choose one idea of succesorship over another that’s just as logical, is a result of normal value differences.” There is no epistemic relativism; given any particular person’s most valued notion of successorship, everyone can, in principle, agree whether any given situation preserves it.
The relativism is in choosing which (whose) notion to use when making any given decision. Even in a world where souls are real and most people agree that continuity-of-consciousness is equivalent to continuity-of-soul-state, which is preserved by those nifty new teleporters, some curmudgeon who thinks that continuity-of-physical-location is also important shouldn’t be forced into a teleporter against their will, since they expect (and all informed observers will agree) that their favored notion of continuity of consciousness will be ended by the teleporter.
But the question of “what, if anything, is the successor of your subjective experience” does not obviously have a single factual answer.
If souls are real (and the Hard Problem boils down to “it’s the souls, duh”), then a teleporter that doesn’t reattach/reconstruct your soul seems like it doesn’t fit the hypothetical. If the teleporter perfectly reassembles you, that should apply to all components of you, even extraphysical ones.
Then I’d like to see some explanation why it doesn’t have an answer, which would be adding back to normality. I understand that I’m confused about the matter in some way. But I also understand that just saying “don’t think about it” doesn’t clear my confusion in the slightest.
Nevermind cosciousness and the so called Hard Problem. By “soul” here I simply mean the carrier for identity over time, which may very well be physical. Yes, indeed it may be the case that perfect teleporter/cloning machine is just impossible because of such soul. That would be an appropriate solution to these problems.
I’m not saying it doesn’t, I’m saying it’s not obvious that it does. Normalcy requirements don’t mean all our possibly-confused questions have answers, they just put restrictions on what those answers should look like. So, if the idea of successors-of-experience is meaningful at all, our normal intuition gives us desiderata like “chains of sucessorship are continuous across periods of consciousness” and “chains of successorship do not fork or merge with eachother under conditions that we currently observe.”
If you have any particular notion of successorship that meets all the desiderata you think should matter here, whether or not a teleporter creates a successor is a question of fact. But it’s not obvious what the most principled set of desiderata is, and for most sets of desiderata it’s probably not obvious whether there is a unique notion of successorship.
OP is advocating for something along the lines of “There is no uniquely-most-principled notion of successorship; the fact that different people have different desiderata, or that some people arbitrarily choose one idea of succesorship over another that’s just as logical, is a result of normal value differences.” There is no epistemic relativism; given any particular person’s most valued notion of successorship, everyone can, in principle, agree whether any given situation preserves it.
The relativism is in choosing which (whose) notion to use when making any given decision. Even in a world where souls are real and most people agree that continuity-of-consciousness is equivalent to continuity-of-soul-state, which is preserved by those nifty new teleporters, some curmudgeon who thinks that continuity-of-physical-location is also important shouldn’t be forced into a teleporter against their will, since they expect (and all informed observers will agree) that their favored notion of continuity of consciousness will be ended by the teleporter.