So, how do you feel about going to sleep at night? Because the “you” that goes to sleep is definitely not the same as the “you” who wakes up in the morning
Except in the view of society, the law etc. You wake up with the same name, social security number, property, debts etc. The fact there is a lot of tension between our intuitions about identity , and what a physically based theory can offer is why there is as I’d born if identity.
If I understood Rob correctly, his view is that if R2 feels that he “is Roger,” and he really is a sufficiently accurate copy—then why should we care?
Because it goes against our intuitions that the same person cannot exist in two different places; and creates social and legal questions, such as who controls Roger’s property, who gets to sleep with Roger’s wife and so on.
Adopting momentary identity , AKA “empty individualism”, doesn’t help, since it creates the same set of puzzles even in the absence of cloning and teleportation.
But how can I be confident that… it’s the same conscious experience?
Why would that matter? There is still a difference between having two identical tokens of the same type, and having one token in two locations.
Perhaps—even hypothetically—there can be no way to verify whether it is “the same” consciousness
(It happens to be that a lot of people use “consciousness” to mean both ” what you are experiencing right now” and “the thread of identity that makes you you” … but that doesn’t mean they actually are the same).
Art identity and human personal identity are different things. For example, art needs to preserve sameness, but if human preserves sameness—he is a dead frozen body.
As I understand it, you agree that R1 and R2 would not be the very same individual, even if they were exact copies of each other (i.e., two identical tokens of the same type). That’s the idea I’m trying to convey in my post, but it seems I’m not doing it very well, and I’ve started to doubt myself—whether this is merely a “human language game.”
But it does seem genuinely true: if there are two tokens, then there are two independent “centers of experience” (if we are talking about conscious creatures of course).
And a single token in two locations does not seem physically realizable to me, although my knowledge of physics is fairly limited.
You also say that there are certain intuitions by which one can test or track the identity of objects. I’m not familiar with those ideas, but I’ll definitely look into them—thank you for the link.
Am I correct in understanding that, in the context of my thought experiment about perfect resurrection, you consider it impossible to bring back that very “I”—that very same line of experience, that very same “view from the inside”—whose existence ended with the person’s death?
And regardless of whether the answer is yes or no, I’d be interested to hear why you think so.
@Saul Schleimer
Except in the view of society, the law etc. You wake up with the same name, social security number, property, debts etc. The fact there is a lot of tension between our intuitions about identity , and what a physically based theory can offer is why there is as I’d born if identity.
@MarkelKori
Because it goes against our intuitions that the same person cannot exist in two different places; and creates social and legal questions, such as who controls Roger’s property, who gets to sleep with Roger’s wife and so on.
Adopting momentary identity , AKA “empty individualism”, doesn’t help, since it creates the same set of puzzles even in the absence of cloning and teleportation.
Why would that matter? There is still a difference between having two identical tokens of the same type, and having one token in two locations.
We already have a set of intuitions about unconscious material objects, and they tell us that an exact duplicate of the Mona Lisa would be a duplicate and not the Mona Lisa. The Bensinger approach is therefore special pleading that conscious entities are different
(It happens to be that a lot of people use “consciousness” to mean both ” what you are experiencing right now” and “the thread of identity that makes you you” … but that doesn’t mean they actually are the same).
[@avturchin
We don’t think paintings have souls. You can disbelieve that duplicates are originals without departing from physicalism.
No, identity theory is a thing.
Art identity and human personal identity are different things. For example, art needs to preserve sameness, but if human preserves sameness—he is a dead frozen body.
I’d like to ask the following:
As I understand it, you agree that R1 and R2 would not be the very same individual, even if they were exact copies of each other (i.e., two identical tokens of the same type). That’s the idea I’m trying to convey in my post, but it seems I’m not doing it very well, and I’ve started to doubt myself—whether this is merely a “human language game.”
But it does seem genuinely true: if there are two tokens, then there are two independent “centers of experience” (if we are talking about conscious creatures of course).
And a single token in two locations does not seem physically realizable to me, although my knowledge of physics is fairly limited.
You also say that there are certain intuitions by which one can test or track the identity of objects. I’m not familiar with those ideas, but I’ll definitely look into them—thank you for the link.
Am I correct in understanding that, in the context of my thought experiment about perfect resurrection, you consider it impossible to bring back that very “I”—that very same line of experience, that very same “view from the inside”—whose existence ended with the person’s death?
And regardless of whether the answer is yes or no, I’d be interested to hear why you think so.