There must be a level of knowledge at which one intuition or the other (or perhaps neither) is vindicated by the facts. Not caring about true identity may be expedient in the present, but some of these questions must have answers, answers that require information we just don’t have yet. Some other questions will have more to do with choices, values perhaps, choices about what to identify with and what aspects of yourself to value. I don’t think that, even with a shared ontology, everyone will feel the same about the desirability of making a personal backup, and so on.
Examining myself, it seems that two things bother me. First, people who believe that cryonic suspension is just like going to sleep and then being woken up. Second, people choosing cryonics because they have wacky avantgarde ideas about identity not requiring continuity of existence. The first group seem to me naive; the second group seem to me mistaken in believing that the facts require us to jettison so many common-sense ideas about ourselves and what we are, which means that decisions made on the basis of that belief may be flawed.
There must be a level of knowledge at which one intuition or the other (or perhaps neither) is vindicated by the facts.
Yes. And when an intuition is confused enough, I generally conclude that the facts (once they are fully understood) will vindicate neither it nor its negation.
That said, I agree that many questions about identity will (and do) ground out into choices about what to identify with and what aspects of ourselves to value (although we’re not always able to implement those choices unaided, any more than I can easily choose what flavors of ice cream taste good to me), and that not everyone will (or does) share those choices.
There must be a level of knowledge at which one intuition or the other (or perhaps neither) is vindicated by the facts. Not caring about true identity may be expedient in the present, but some of these questions must have answers, answers that require information we just don’t have yet. Some other questions will have more to do with choices, values perhaps, choices about what to identify with and what aspects of yourself to value. I don’t think that, even with a shared ontology, everyone will feel the same about the desirability of making a personal backup, and so on.
Examining myself, it seems that two things bother me. First, people who believe that cryonic suspension is just like going to sleep and then being woken up. Second, people choosing cryonics because they have wacky avantgarde ideas about identity not requiring continuity of existence. The first group seem to me naive; the second group seem to me mistaken in believing that the facts require us to jettison so many common-sense ideas about ourselves and what we are, which means that decisions made on the basis of that belief may be flawed.
Yes. And when an intuition is confused enough, I generally conclude that the facts (once they are fully understood) will vindicate neither it nor its negation.
That said, I agree that many questions about identity will (and do) ground out into choices about what to identify with and what aspects of ourselves to value (although we’re not always able to implement those choices unaided, any more than I can easily choose what flavors of ice cream taste good to me), and that not everyone will (or does) share those choices.