To clarify, I’m arguing that your post revolves entirely around your concepts of “I” and “people” (the map), and how those concepts fail to match up to a given thought experiment (the territory.) Sometimes concepts are close matches to scenarios, and you can get insight from looking at them; sometimes concepts are poor matches and you get garbage instead. Your post is a good example of the garbage scenario, and it’s not surpising that you have to put forth a lot of effort to pound your square pegs into non-square-shaped holes to make sense of it.
No, your last sentence did not make sense, and neither does the rest of that comment, hence my attempt to clarify. My best attempt at interpreting what you’re trying to say looks at this particular section:
‘an implicit answer to the question of what “I exist” means physically’
Where I immediately find the same problem I see in the original post: “I exist” doesn’t actually “mean” anything in this context, because you haven’t defined “I” in a way that is meaningful for this scenario.
For me personally, the answer to the question is pretty trivially clear because my definition of identity covers these cases: I exist anywhere that a sufficiently good simulation of me exists. In my personal sense of identity, the simulation doesn’t even have to be running, and there can be multiple copies of me which are all me and which all tag themselves with ‘I exist’.
With that in mind, when I read your post, I see you making an issue out of a trivial non-issue for no reason other than you’ve got a different definition of “I” and “person” than I do. When this happens, it’s a good sign that the issue is semantic, not conceptual.
To clarify, I’m arguing that your post revolves entirely around your concepts of “I” and “people” (the map), and how those concepts fail to match up to a given thought experiment (the territory.) Sometimes concepts are close matches to scenarios, and you can get insight from looking at them; sometimes concepts are poor matches and you get garbage instead. Your post is a good example of the garbage scenario, and it’s not surpising that you have to put forth a lot of effort to pound your square pegs into non-square-shaped holes to make sense of it.
Did my last sentence in the edit make sense? We may have a misunderstanding.
No, your last sentence did not make sense, and neither does the rest of that comment, hence my attempt to clarify. My best attempt at interpreting what you’re trying to say looks at this particular section:
‘an implicit answer to the question of what “I exist” means physically’
Where I immediately find the same problem I see in the original post: “I exist” doesn’t actually “mean” anything in this context, because you haven’t defined “I” in a way that is meaningful for this scenario.
For me personally, the answer to the question is pretty trivially clear because my definition of identity covers these cases: I exist anywhere that a sufficiently good simulation of me exists. In my personal sense of identity, the simulation doesn’t even have to be running, and there can be multiple copies of me which are all me and which all tag themselves with ‘I exist’.
With that in mind, when I read your post, I see you making an issue out of a trivial non-issue for no reason other than you’ve got a different definition of “I” and “person” than I do. When this happens, it’s a good sign that the issue is semantic, not conceptual.