How much background do you have in the relevant nerdy stuff though?
More than your friend, but maybe not a lot more. I’m one of the least nerdy nerds I know, and probably the least educated if you normalize age. Computer games yes, hard sci fi rarely, quantum physics pretty much none.
As for why you should care, depends on how you view continuity of identity.
True. I have trouble imagining anything being “me” which does/did/will not share the same stream of consciousness which is doing the imagining.
DSimon woke up this morning. From that point on, there have been a lot of diverging universes, one of which involved DSimon going to work, one of which involved DSimon getting hit by a car, and one of which involved DSimon founding a new town called “Shinypants” where the president lands Air Force One the very same day and makes him emperor of the world on a whim. There’s also many many other divergent DSimons, but let’s not worry about them.
So we’ll call those derivatives DSimonWork, DSimonDead, and DSimonEmperor. All three of these DSimons feel that they are the same as the DSimon that woke up this morning. However, they do not feel that they are the same as each other.
So actually “the same as” isn’t quite the right concept here, because then I would be saying that A = B and B = C but A != C. “Identify with” might be better. The main point though is that this feeling of identification proceeds backwards up the divergence tree, but not sideways across it.
More than your friend, but maybe not a lot more. I’m one of the least nerdy nerds I know, and probably the least educated if you normalize age. Computer games yes, hard sci fi rarely, quantum physics pretty much none.
True. I have trouble imagining anything being “me” which does/did/will not share the same stream of consciousness which is doing the imagining.
So do you view the ‘you’ that wakes up in the morning as the same as the ‘you’ that went to bed?
DSimon woke up this morning. From that point on, there have been a lot of diverging universes, one of which involved DSimon going to work, one of which involved DSimon getting hit by a car, and one of which involved DSimon founding a new town called “Shinypants” where the president lands Air Force One the very same day and makes him emperor of the world on a whim. There’s also many many other divergent DSimons, but let’s not worry about them.
So we’ll call those derivatives DSimonWork, DSimonDead, and DSimonEmperor. All three of these DSimons feel that they are the same as the DSimon that woke up this morning. However, they do not feel that they are the same as each other.
So actually “the same as” isn’t quite the right concept here, because then I would be saying that A = B and B = C but A != C. “Identify with” might be better. The main point though is that this feeling of identification proceeds backwards up the divergence tree, but not sideways across it.
What DSimon said.