Don’t know if I would call a mind-state a person, persons usually respond to things, think and so on, a mind state can’t do any of that. It’s somewhat like saying “a movie is made of little separate movies” when it’s actually separate frames. And
death implies the end of a person not a mind-state. It might be a bit silly of me to make all this fuss about definitions but it’s already a quite messy subject, let’s not make it any messier.
Fine, there’s no fundamental connection between separate mind-states. Personhood can be defined (mostly), but it’s not fundamentally important whether or not two given mind-states are connected by a person. All that matters is the mind-states, whether you’re talking about morality or anthropics.
All this is of course very speculative but couldn’t you just reduce mind-states into sub-mind-states? If you look at split brain patients, where you have cut off corpus callosum, the two hemispheres behave/report in some situations as if they were two different people, it seems (at least to me) that there does not seem to be such irreducible quanta as “brain-states” either. My point is that you could make the same argument:
It’s not fundamentally important whether or not two given sub-mind-states are connected by a mind state. All that matters is the sub-mind-states.
It seems to me that my qualia are all experienced together, or at least the ones that I’m aware of. As such, there is more than just sub-mind-states. There is a fundamental difference. For what it’s worth, I don’t consider this difference morally relevant, but it’s there.
Don’t know if I would call a mind-state a person, persons usually respond to things, think and so on, a mind state can’t do any of that. It’s somewhat like saying “a movie is made of little separate movies” when it’s actually separate frames. And death implies the end of a person not a mind-state. It might be a bit silly of me to make all this fuss about definitions but it’s already a quite messy subject, let’s not make it any messier.
Fine, there’s no fundamental connection between separate mind-states. Personhood can be defined (mostly), but it’s not fundamentally important whether or not two given mind-states are connected by a person. All that matters is the mind-states, whether you’re talking about morality or anthropics.
All this is of course very speculative but couldn’t you just reduce mind-states into sub-mind-states? If you look at split brain patients, where you have cut off corpus callosum, the two hemispheres behave/report in some situations as if they were two different people, it seems (at least to me) that there does not seem to be such irreducible quanta as “brain-states” either. My point is that you could make the same argument:
It’s not fundamentally important whether or not two given sub-mind-states are connected by a mind state. All that matters is the sub-mind-states.
It seems to me that my qualia are all experienced together, or at least the ones that I’m aware of. As such, there is more than just sub-mind-states. There is a fundamental difference. For what it’s worth, I don’t consider this difference morally relevant, but it’s there.