I don’t know anyone who claims that it’ll be a linear or unified experience. Without continuity and communication across instances, I don’t think of it as personal immortality in the simple sense, any more than I think about children or great works as immortality.
Doesn’t this also still apply to normal succession of mental states, without branching? How does QM or MWI come into play here?
I’m not sure I understand the question. “normal” succession is succession, not branching and independent experience. So our intuitions about identity are applicable, and the cessation of the succession is death.
With branching, it depends on what it is that defines “mortality” to you. If you die, but another you lives, does that count? I say that each other you is a different agent, so that’s not immortality. I also don’t think cloning or in-universe brain copies are simple immortality, because they’re different people (even if they have the same history and some of the same memories).
If quantum theory is as accurate as it appears to be, then there is no “normal” succession in the sense you appear to be pointing at. Everything is divergence and interference. Some of this can be factored by lack of coherence into “branches”, though not in the sense of discrete binary splits and also somewhat subjective.
“Normal” succession is only what this looks like when the physical processes that underlie your memory and thought processes are as decoherent as everything else.
Doesn’t this also still apply to normal succession of mental states, without branching? How does QM or MWI come into play here?
I’m not sure I understand the question. “normal” succession is succession, not branching and independent experience. So our intuitions about identity are applicable, and the cessation of the succession is death.
With branching, it depends on what it is that defines “mortality” to you. If you die, but another you lives, does that count? I say that each other you is a different agent, so that’s not immortality. I also don’t think cloning or in-universe brain copies are simple immortality, because they’re different people (even if they have the same history and some of the same memories).
If quantum theory is as accurate as it appears to be, then there is no “normal” succession in the sense you appear to be pointing at. Everything is divergence and interference. Some of this can be factored by lack of coherence into “branches”, though not in the sense of discrete binary splits and also somewhat subjective.
“Normal” succession is only what this looks like when the physical processes that underlie your memory and thought processes are as decoherent as everything else.