We had wildly differing intuitions about reconstructive personhood.
One of the things that I thought about while reading Scott’s latest post was that “personal identity is definitely a thing where the tails come apart, too”. See also those endless debates over “would a destructive upload of me be me or a copy”.
So with happiness, subjective well-being and the amount of positive emotions that you experience are normally correlated and some people’s brains might end up learning “happiness is subjective well-being” and others end up learning “happiness is positive emotions”. With personal identity, a bunch of things like “the survival of your physical body” and “psychological continuity over time” and “your mind today being similar to your mind yesterday” all tend to happen together, and then different people’s brains tend to pick one of those criteria more strongly than the others and treat that as the primary criteria for whether personal identity survives.
One of the things that I thought about while reading Scott’s latest post was that “personal identity is definitely a thing where the tails come apart, too”. See also those endless debates over “would a destructive upload of me be me or a copy”.
So with happiness, subjective well-being and the amount of positive emotions that you experience are normally correlated and some people’s brains might end up learning “happiness is subjective well-being” and others end up learning “happiness is positive emotions”. With personal identity, a bunch of things like “the survival of your physical body” and “psychological continuity over time” and “your mind today being similar to your mind yesterday” all tend to happen together, and then different people’s brains tend to pick one of those criteria more strongly than the others and treat that as the primary criteria for whether personal identity survives.