Poke: . It seems like you want to equate my awareness of changes to myself with my identity; so any change that’s imperceptible to my awareness of myself would not change my identity.
As Charles says, many real cognitive processes are not accessible to introspection, or are real and substantial without rising to the point of producing an immediate effect on the internal narrative. Maybe, as you were reading just now, your brain forgot some small fact about your thirteenth birthday. That would be a real change to your personal identity; if enough such changes accumulated, you would cease to exist; and you didn’t notice it as it happened.
Albert’s reply is that we aren’t talking about a small change here; Charles has just postulated that your personal continuity was absolutely interrupted—one person died, another person was born, and neither of them noticed. This is what Albert thinks the GAZP prohibits, on account of it strongly resembling the notion that consciousness can be eliminated entirely without your internal narrative noticing; in other words, if you don’t notice yourself dying and being born, you probably didn’t—that what makes Albert think that something epiphenomenal is being postulated.
As a side note, Bernice might say that you don’t notice the change because the area responsible for noticing it has been damaged (destroyed, actually) like an anosognosic patient who can’t believe that their left arm is paralyzed. But Albert and probably even Charles would agree that this kind of specific functional brain damage to awareness-areas, is not occurring here.
Poke: . It seems like you want to equate my awareness of changes to myself with my identity; so any change that’s imperceptible to my awareness of myself would not change my identity.
As Charles says, many real cognitive processes are not accessible to introspection, or are real and substantial without rising to the point of producing an immediate effect on the internal narrative. Maybe, as you were reading just now, your brain forgot some small fact about your thirteenth birthday. That would be a real change to your personal identity; if enough such changes accumulated, you would cease to exist; and you didn’t notice it as it happened.
Albert’s reply is that we aren’t talking about a small change here; Charles has just postulated that your personal continuity was absolutely interrupted—one person died, another person was born, and neither of them noticed. This is what Albert thinks the GAZP prohibits, on account of it strongly resembling the notion that consciousness can be eliminated entirely without your internal narrative noticing; in other words, if you don’t notice yourself dying and being born, you probably didn’t—that what makes Albert think that something epiphenomenal is being postulated.
As a side note, Bernice might say that you don’t notice the change because the area responsible for noticing it has been damaged (destroyed, actually) like an anosognosic patient who can’t believe that their left arm is paralyzed. But Albert and probably even Charles would agree that this kind of specific functional brain damage to awareness-areas, is not occurring here.