I dunno… I feel being essentially same as me from 18 years ago. I have terabytes of that person’s memories, at any rate, and no-one else does until you go so far from here as to start encoding those memories into the spacetime coordinates.
The personality changes may very well be down to some change to levels of hormones; few hundred bits worth of change, some terabytes worth of extra memories, and learned skills.
That should make me the closest match, much closer than anything else. There’s continuity to data inside your computer; you write an essay, you copy it around, you edit it, the file system may move file around to close gaps, you may store it in google docs which will store it in really odd ways and move it around outside your knowledge, but there is a causal chain.
If your personhood definition requires there to be only one of you, I think it already fails.
but there is a causal chain.
You have not made a case that a causal chain is necessary or even a little bit relevant. I don’t think it is. If an algorithm appears twice at distances so disparate they could not possibly be causally related, they’re still the same algorithm.
Your comment is one of those philosophical confusions that, unbeknownst to its author (that’d be you), puts its conclusion in its premise.
If your personhood definition requires there to be only one of you, I think it already fails.
The full quote was, “and no-one else does until you go so far from here as to start encoding those memories into the spacetime coordinates.” . Don’t quote out of context.
It is a physical fact of reality that within ridiculously huge volume, I am the only one who remembers what I thought about on a train ride in the year 2000 or so on the way back home from work, err, i mean school. It’s only when you get extremely far, where the memory of this and other thoughts can be encoded into the coordinate, that you begin to see instances that hold this memory.
(subject to there being a zillion of mes comparatively ‘nearby’ if the MWI is true, of course)
edit: and okay, i was thinking about electrical aircraft propulsion, using electric arc to accelerate the air. I can remember in vivid details what I imagined then because I committed it to memory (the train was packed and I had to stand, so I couldn’t write it down). I have terabytes of such stuff in the head, and while someone on earth can have approximately similar memories, the edit distance is huge.
I dunno… I feel being essentially same as me from 18 years ago. I have terabytes of that person’s memories, at any rate, and no-one else does until you go so far from here as to start encoding those memories into the spacetime coordinates.
The personality changes may very well be down to some change to levels of hormones; few hundred bits worth of change, some terabytes worth of extra memories, and learned skills.
That should make me the closest match, much closer than anything else. There’s continuity to data inside your computer; you write an essay, you copy it around, you edit it, the file system may move file around to close gaps, you may store it in google docs which will store it in really odd ways and move it around outside your knowledge, but there is a causal chain.
If your personhood definition requires there to be only one of you, I think it already fails.
You have not made a case that a causal chain is necessary or even a little bit relevant. I don’t think it is. If an algorithm appears twice at distances so disparate they could not possibly be causally related, they’re still the same algorithm.
Your comment is one of those philosophical confusions that, unbeknownst to its author (that’d be you), puts its conclusion in its premise.
The full quote was, “and no-one else does until you go so far from here as to start encoding those memories into the spacetime coordinates.” . Don’t quote out of context.
It is a physical fact of reality that within ridiculously huge volume, I am the only one who remembers what I thought about on a train ride in the year 2000 or so on the way back home from work, err, i mean school. It’s only when you get extremely far, where the memory of this and other thoughts can be encoded into the coordinate, that you begin to see instances that hold this memory.
(subject to there being a zillion of mes comparatively ‘nearby’ if the MWI is true, of course)
edit: and okay, i was thinking about electrical aircraft propulsion, using electric arc to accelerate the air. I can remember in vivid details what I imagined then because I committed it to memory (the train was packed and I had to stand, so I couldn’t write it down). I have terabytes of such stuff in the head, and while someone on earth can have approximately similar memories, the edit distance is huge.