As I read the “Anthropic Trilemma”, my response could be summed up thus:
“There is no spoon.”
So many of the basic arguments contained in it were defined by undefined concepts, if you dig deep enough. We talk about the continuation of consciousness in the same way that we talk about a rock or an apple. The only way that a sense of self doesn’t exist is the same way that a rock or apple don’t exist, in the strictest technical sense. To accept a human being as a classical object in the first place disqualifies a person from taking a quantum-mechanical cop-out when it comes to defining subjective experience. People here aren’t saying to themselves, “Huh? Where do you get this idea that a person exists for more than the present moment?? That’s crazy talk!” It’s just an attempt to deny the existence of a subjective experience that people actually do, um, subjectively experience.
Well, if you duplicate an apple (or even another person) there is never any confusion of which one is “real”. They are both identical duplicates.
However, when you talk about duplicating yourself, all these smart people are suddenly wondering which “self” they would subjectively experience being inside. And that’s pretty ridiculous.
So you need to point out that the self doesn’t really exist over time in the strictest technical sense, in order to make people stop wondering which identical copy of their subjective “self” will end up in.
These questions don’t make sense because In the same way that you can’t subjectively experience other people, you can’t subjectively experience yourself from the past or the future.
As I read the “Anthropic Trilemma”, my response could be summed up thus: “There is no spoon.”
So many of the basic arguments contained in it were defined by undefined concepts, if you dig deep enough. We talk about the continuation of consciousness in the same way that we talk about a rock or an apple. The only way that a sense of self doesn’t exist is the same way that a rock or apple don’t exist, in the strictest technical sense. To accept a human being as a classical object in the first place disqualifies a person from taking a quantum-mechanical cop-out when it comes to defining subjective experience. People here aren’t saying to themselves, “Huh? Where do you get this idea that a person exists for more than the present moment?? That’s crazy talk!” It’s just an attempt to deny the existence of a subjective experience that people actually do, um, subjectively experience.
Well, if you duplicate an apple (or even another person) there is never any confusion of which one is “real”. They are both identical duplicates.
However, when you talk about duplicating yourself, all these smart people are suddenly wondering which “self” they would subjectively experience being inside. And that’s pretty ridiculous.
So you need to point out that the self doesn’t really exist over time in the strictest technical sense, in order to make people stop wondering which identical copy of their subjective “self” will end up in.
These questions don’t make sense because In the same way that you can’t subjectively experience other people, you can’t subjectively experience yourself from the past or the future.
Well-said. Thank you.