X-Message-Number: 14224 From: "Brett Bellmore" <> Subject: Personal identity Date: Wed, 2 Aug 2000 16:16:12 -0400 This is a multi-part message in MIME format. ------=_NextPart_000_000C_01BFFC9C.F9D2C220 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="iso-8859-1" Hi, there! Brett Bellmore here, thought I'd join in the conversation after a long layoff. My personal opinion is that the use of the term "identity" in this context is counter-productive, in as much as it smuggles in attributes of the logical use of the term. We don't aspire to be "identical" to our past selves, forever unchanging. That's death, not life! What we are seeking is to be unending, in the sense of being a process which neither terminates nor endlessly loops, while continually elaborating itself. What we're seeking, I think, would be better termed "causal continuity"; A dense weave of causal links with our previous selves which continues unbroken. Notice that this makes sense of the classic "transporter accident" problem; Some process results in you being split into two complete selves. Each of them is a causal decendent of you, so that if either survives, you survive. But they are not causal decendents of each other, so it matter to THEM that they both live. They are both you, but they're not each other! Now, it might be objected that a person causes many things in their lives, has many causal linkages to the states of other people, but that we don't live on in those people except in a metaphorical sense. That's true, but consider that the density of causal connections within the human brain represents literally terabytes of data, far more than you could possibly express by any natural means of communications over a normal lifespan. The causal connections within you represent a bridge cable to the cobwebs connecting you to other people. Should this ever change, should communications between people approach the density going on within them, I would expect individuality to become a thing of the past. Just as isolation is necessary for speciation or the maintainance of separate cultures, a very high ratio of internal to external information transfer is necessary to the maintainance of people as individuals. ------=_NextPart_000_000C_01BFFC9C.F9D2C220 Content-Type: text/html; [ AUTOMATICALLY SKIPPING HTML ENCODING! ] Rate This Message: http://www.cryonet.org/cgi-bin/rate.cgi?msg=14224