I admit that it still feels a little counterintuitive to me
Hang on to that feeling, it’s your guide to the truth.
In the situation you describe, there is no stream of consciousness which starts where you are now, and which then jumps discontinuously to the stream of consciousness subsequently occurring in the copy’s body.
At most, there is a new stream of consciousness, initiated in the newly created copy, which begins with the (illusory) feeling of a jump, because the first moment’s experience is being matched against implanted short-term memories.
To believe otherwise is to believe that a single connected stream of subjectivity can supervene on physically discontinuous systems.
Unfortunately, the way people are likely to resolve this problem is to totally deconstruct subjective timeflow and say that in reality, there is no stream of consciousness anywhere ever, there are just disconnected self-moments in the timeless multiverse, et cetera. But in that case all forms of anticipation are illusory.
(My position is that time and change are real, and there is such a thing as continuity of existence in time. Many people here have a problem with that, because of many worlds, and because even single-world physics describes space-time in a static, geometric way. But that’s just a limitation of our current conceptual tools, and not a refutation of the phenomenon of time.)
I conclude, after reading this a few times, that I don’t really know what you are labeling with the phrases “stream of consciousness,” “stream of subjectivity,” and “subjective timeflow.” I don’t know whether you mean to refer to one, two, or three different things, nor how I would recognize that thing (or those things) if I found an instance of it (them) in my oatmeal, or how I could tell if I subsequently lost it (or them).
That said, if it’s what I ordinarily understand people to mean by “stream of consciousness”, which is roughly speaking a narrative, then I would agree that after duplication there exist more of those things than existed before duplication… for example, if copy X stubs its toe then its narrative includes some analog to “ow!” which copy Y’s narrative doesn’t include.
So, yes, I’d agree that there’s a new stream of consciousness (or perhaps several, depending on how unified the mind being duplicated is) initiated in the newly created copy, though I would say that the corresponding narrative begins significantly earlier than that moment. (I am sympathetic to the claim that the narrative, instantiated in the copy, is fictional prior to that moment. That said, our narratives are sufficiently fictional in the normal case that I’m not sure it makes much difference.)
All of this seems entirely consistent with, for example, a timeless formulation of quantum physics.
Hang on to that feeling, it’s your guide to the truth.
In the situation you describe, there is no stream of consciousness which starts where you are now, and which then jumps discontinuously to the stream of consciousness subsequently occurring in the copy’s body.
At most, there is a new stream of consciousness, initiated in the newly created copy, which begins with the (illusory) feeling of a jump, because the first moment’s experience is being matched against implanted short-term memories.
To believe otherwise is to believe that a single connected stream of subjectivity can supervene on physically discontinuous systems.
Unfortunately, the way people are likely to resolve this problem is to totally deconstruct subjective timeflow and say that in reality, there is no stream of consciousness anywhere ever, there are just disconnected self-moments in the timeless multiverse, et cetera. But in that case all forms of anticipation are illusory.
(My position is that time and change are real, and there is such a thing as continuity of existence in time. Many people here have a problem with that, because of many worlds, and because even single-world physics describes space-time in a static, geometric way. But that’s just a limitation of our current conceptual tools, and not a refutation of the phenomenon of time.)
I conclude, after reading this a few times, that I don’t really know what you are labeling with the phrases “stream of consciousness,” “stream of subjectivity,” and “subjective timeflow.” I don’t know whether you mean to refer to one, two, or three different things, nor how I would recognize that thing (or those things) if I found an instance of it (them) in my oatmeal, or how I could tell if I subsequently lost it (or them).
That said, if it’s what I ordinarily understand people to mean by “stream of consciousness”, which is roughly speaking a narrative, then I would agree that after duplication there exist more of those things than existed before duplication… for example, if copy X stubs its toe then its narrative includes some analog to “ow!” which copy Y’s narrative doesn’t include.
So, yes, I’d agree that there’s a new stream of consciousness (or perhaps several, depending on how unified the mind being duplicated is) initiated in the newly created copy, though I would say that the corresponding narrative begins significantly earlier than that moment. (I am sympathetic to the claim that the narrative, instantiated in the copy, is fictional prior to that moment. That said, our narratives are sufficiently fictional in the normal case that I’m not sure it makes much difference.)
All of this seems entirely consistent with, for example, a timeless formulation of quantum physics.
It’s relevant here that Mitchell believes consciousness is fundamental to quantum mechanics and vice versa.
Mm. Can you unpack the relevance of that?
It explains your confusion: it’s not that MP is doing a poor job explaining a point, it’s that he believes nonsense.
Ah! I see.