Hmm, you’re right I did a lousy or non-existant job of refuting that idea. Okay let’s try a thought experiment then. Your brain got instantly-frozen close to absolute zero and could be thawed in such a way that you’d be alive after say 100 years of being completely frozen and perfectly preserved. I think it’s fair to say here your brain “stopped working” altogether during that time, while the world outside changed. Would you really expect your subjective experience to end at the moment of freezing, while some kind of new or different subjective experience suddenly starts its existence at the time of being thawed?
If you wouldn’t expect your subjective experience to end at that point, then how is it possibly any different from a perfect copy of yourself assuming you truly accept reductionism? In other words yes, for that reason and others I would expect to open MY eyes and resume MY subjective experience after being perfectly preserved in the form of stone tablets for 20 million years. It sounds strange even to me I confess, but if reductionist assumptions are true then I must accept this, my intuitions that this is not the case are just a consequence of how I model and think of my own identity. This is something I’ve grappled with for a few years now and at the beginning I came up with tons of clever reasons why it “wouldn’t really be me” but no, reason trumps intuition on this one. Also yes, destructive teleportation is a kind of “death” you don’t notice, but its also one you don’t care about because next thing you open your eyes an everything is okay you are just somewhere else, nothing else is different. That’s the idea behind the drunk analogy, it would be the same experience minus the hangover.
Hmm, you’re right I did a lousy or non-existant job of refuting that idea. Okay let’s try a thought experiment then. Your brain got instantly-frozen close to absolute zero and could be thawed in such a way that you’d be alive after say 100 years of being completely frozen and perfectly preserved. I think it’s fair to say here your brain “stopped working” altogether during that time, while the world outside changed. Would you really expect your subjective experience to end at the moment of freezing, while some kind of new or different subjective experience suddenly starts its existence at the time of being thawed?
If you wouldn’t expect your subjective experience to end at that point, then how is it possibly any different from a perfect copy of yourself assuming you truly accept reductionism? In other words yes, for that reason and others I would expect to open MY eyes and resume MY subjective experience after being perfectly preserved in the form of stone tablets for 20 million years. It sounds strange even to me I confess, but if reductionist assumptions are true then I must accept this, my intuitions that this is not the case are just a consequence of how I model and think of my own identity. This is something I’ve grappled with for a few years now and at the beginning I came up with tons of clever reasons why it “wouldn’t really be me” but no, reason trumps intuition on this one. Also yes, destructive teleportation is a kind of “death” you don’t notice, but its also one you don’t care about because next thing you open your eyes an everything is okay you are just somewhere else, nothing else is different. That’s the idea behind the drunk analogy, it would be the same experience minus the hangover.