I feel like this conversation stumbles over a "can you step in the same river twice?" problem. Answering the question of whether one is "the same person" after a major change is difficult, and is perhaps something more like a spectrum than a binary. Am I same the person I was ten minutes ago? My mind wants to believe so. Am I the same person as I was thirty years ago? Harder to say. I can't even claim to have all the same memories as that person. Things have been lost, and probably some portion of what I "remember" is in fact imagined. Perhaps it is more accurate to say that the self is being recreated, continuously, from moment to moment, with imperfect fidelity. We are not truly the same, even after a few seconds. We are just _very similar_ to who we were a minute before.
I struggle with the question of whether the psychological patternist should agree that after a brain transplant, we are talking about "the same person". Perhaps the set of memories and beliefs and desires transfers... But there is a good deal of "embodied cognition". To take a trivial example, one might remember loving durian fruit before the transplant, but discover that one's new body is repulsed by it.
The whole body matters to the question of "identity". I think it is often good for us to embrace the continuity -- sometimes literally, as the widely-circulated Kor meme illustrates ( https://www.reddit.com/r/traaaaaaannnnnnnnnns/comments/q9o9ac/throwback_to_when_star_trek_did_trans_acceptance/ ). But on the other hand there are those who are more comfortable with the idea that their old self is dead, and they're better off liberated from it.
The difference between the pattern view and substance view is interesting. But I'm long-since convinced of a pattern account of consciousness.
Fantastic stuff! Very in line with some thoughts I’ve been having for the longest time. Once you see this matrix it is everywhere. Indeed my whole substack is dedicated to this one idea!
This is very Parfitian - if I remember right, Parfit also gives the last word to Nagasena in Reasons and Persons. These opinions also mesh with what Proust says close to the end of Time Regained about the many deaths of the self that precede the physical death.
I may be mixing up several different stories but I do recall one story in which teleportation is banned by the Catholic Church as the body teleported is considered to have died thereby separating the body from the soul. Could be the same story but the reconstituted body is considered a simulacra
I feel like this conversation stumbles over a "can you step in the same river twice?" problem. Answering the question of whether one is "the same person" after a major change is difficult, and is perhaps something more like a spectrum than a binary. Am I same the person I was ten minutes ago? My mind wants to believe so. Am I the same person as I was thirty years ago? Harder to say. I can't even claim to have all the same memories as that person. Things have been lost, and probably some portion of what I "remember" is in fact imagined. Perhaps it is more accurate to say that the self is being recreated, continuously, from moment to moment, with imperfect fidelity. We are not truly the same, even after a few seconds. We are just _very similar_ to who we were a minute before.
I struggle with the question of whether the psychological patternist should agree that after a brain transplant, we are talking about "the same person". Perhaps the set of memories and beliefs and desires transfers... But there is a good deal of "embodied cognition". To take a trivial example, one might remember loving durian fruit before the transplant, but discover that one's new body is repulsed by it.
The whole body matters to the question of "identity". I think it is often good for us to embrace the continuity -- sometimes literally, as the widely-circulated Kor meme illustrates ( https://www.reddit.com/r/traaaaaaannnnnnnnnns/comments/q9o9ac/throwback_to_when_star_trek_did_trans_acceptance/ ). But on the other hand there are those who are more comfortable with the idea that their old self is dead, and they're better off liberated from it.
The difference between the pattern view and substance view is interesting. But I'm long-since convinced of a pattern account of consciousness.
Agree with you about personal identity, but gave a special upvote just for the orca!
Wonderful, venerable bear!
Gate, gate, paragate, parasangate, bodhi svaha.
Fantastic stuff! Very in line with some thoughts I’ve been having for the longest time. Once you see this matrix it is everywhere. Indeed my whole substack is dedicated to this one idea!
This is very Parfitian - if I remember right, Parfit also gives the last word to Nagasena in Reasons and Persons. These opinions also mesh with what Proust says close to the end of Time Regained about the many deaths of the self that precede the physical death.
I may be mixing up several different stories but I do recall one story in which teleportation is banned by the Catholic Church as the body teleported is considered to have died thereby separating the body from the soul. Could be the same story but the reconstituted body is considered a simulacra