I’m guessing a part of the point is that nobody had noticed anything (and indeed still can’t, at least in any way they could report back) until the arrangement was pointed out, which highlights that there are bits in the standard notion of personal identity that get a bit tricky once you try to get more robust than just going by intuition on them. How do you tell you die when a matrix lord disintegrates you and then puts together an identical copy? How do you tell you don’t die when you go under general anesthesia for brain surgery and then wake up?
How does that matter at all? That seems like a completely unrelated, orthogonal issue. The question at hand is should the person being disintegrated expect to continue its subjective experience as the copy, or is it facing oblivion. The fact that you can’t experimentally tell the difference as an outside observer is irrelevant.
The strange part that might give your intuition a bit of a shake is that it’s not entirely clear how you tell the difference as an inside observer either. The thought experiment wasn’t “we’re going to start doing this tomorrow night unless you acquiesce”, it’s “we’ve been doing this the whole time”, and everybody had been living their life exactly as before until told about it. What should you now think of your memories of every previous day and going to sleep each night?
Yeah, for some reason I’m not inclined to give very much weight to an event that can’t be detected by outside observers at all and which my past, present or future selves can’t subjectively observe being about to happen, happening right now or having happened.
You seem to be hung up on either memories or observations being the key to decoding the subjective self. I think that is your error.
This sounds like a thing people who want to explain away subjective consciousness completely are saying. I’m attacking the notion that the annoying mysterious part in subjective consciousness with the qualia and stuff includes a privileged relation from the present moment of consciousness to a specific future moment of consciousness, not the one that there’s subjective consciousness stuff to begin with that isn’t easy to reduce to just objective memories and observations.
At best the argument you’re making is the same as “a tree falls in the forest and no one is around to hear it, does it make a sound?” argument.
If I have a back-up of my computer software on a different hard drive and the current hard drive fails so I swap in the back up… my computer performs the same but it is obviously a different hard drive.
If my hard drive doesn’t fail and I simply “write over” my current hard drive with the hard drive back up, it is still not the same hard drive/software. It will be easy to forget it has been copied and is not the original, but the original (or last version) is gone and has been written over, despite it being “the same”.
I’m guessing a part of the point is that nobody had noticed anything (and indeed still can’t, at least in any way they could report back) until the arrangement was pointed out, which highlights that there are bits in the standard notion of personal identity that get a bit tricky once you try to get more robust than just going by intuition on them. How do you tell you die when a matrix lord disintegrates you and then puts together an identical copy? How do you tell you don’t die when you go under general anesthesia for brain surgery and then wake up?
How does that matter at all? That seems like a completely unrelated, orthogonal issue. The question at hand is should the person being disintegrated expect to continue its subjective experience as the copy, or is it facing oblivion. The fact that you can’t experimentally tell the difference as an outside observer is irrelevant.
The strange part that might give your intuition a bit of a shake is that it’s not entirely clear how you tell the difference as an inside observer either. The thought experiment wasn’t “we’re going to start doing this tomorrow night unless you acquiesce”, it’s “we’ve been doing this the whole time”, and everybody had been living their life exactly as before until told about it. What should you now think of your memories of every previous day and going to sleep each night?
Either you cease to exist, or you don’t. It’s a very clear difference.
You seem to be hung up on either memories or observations being the key to decoding the subjective self. I think that is your error.
Yeah, for some reason I’m not inclined to give very much weight to an event that can’t be detected by outside observers at all and which my past, present or future selves can’t subjectively observe being about to happen, happening right now or having happened.
This sounds like a thing people who want to explain away subjective consciousness completely are saying. I’m attacking the notion that the annoying mysterious part in subjective consciousness with the qualia and stuff includes a privileged relation from the present moment of consciousness to a specific future moment of consciousness, not the one that there’s subjective consciousness stuff to begin with that isn’t easy to reduce to just objective memories and observations.
At best the argument you’re making is the same as “a tree falls in the forest and no one is around to hear it, does it make a sound?” argument.
If I have a back-up of my computer software on a different hard drive and the current hard drive fails so I swap in the back up… my computer performs the same but it is obviously a different hard drive.
If my hard drive doesn’t fail and I simply “write over” my current hard drive with the hard drive back up, it is still not the same hard drive/software. It will be easy to forget it has been copied and is not the original, but the original (or last version) is gone and has been written over, despite it being “the same”.
Or when 90% of the atoms that used to be in your body no longer are there.