I wouldn't put it that way, because the inaccuracy predicted by the HUP is much smaller than our ability to perceive. So HUP does not impinge on our reality. — andrewk

Well, the HUP has been experimentally confirmed, so that means we can perceive its predictions, albeit indirectly - but isn't that the case with any model prediction? You could further argue that, the HUP being an integral part of quantum physics, and quantum physics being a very accurate theory, then if the HUP was quite wrong, the world would probably have been very different. So different indeed that we wouldn't be around to make that observation.

Which brings me to the OP question. What do people mean when they say things like "the math is not the world," "the map is not the territory," etc.? In one trivial sense this is, of course, true and undisputed: a theory, a model, is just a concept that we hold in our minds, it is not that which the concept is supposed to describe.

Is the statement merely impugning the accuracy of the model or its justification? That would stake out a scientific position. Needless to say, whoever makes this statement had better know the subject really well and be prepared to marshal scientific arguments and data in support of their position - otherwise there is no reason to take them seriously.

Is the statement saying that the whole of world probably isn't perfectly accountable by any of the existing models? That would be a defensible philosophical and even scientific position, but it is a very general statement, while the original sounds like a much more specific indictment.

If not any of the above, then what?

I don't see what Schrodinger's cat has to do with a coin flip. Of course, probability is involved in both cases, one way or another, but that's not much to go on.

And I am simply suggesting that if it is conditionalized solely on someone's knowledge (or lack thereof), background or otherwise, then we should not call it "probability." Again, I recognize that this is a futile quest. — aletheist

It's not just futile to change a well-established vocabulary, it seems senseless. Is there any particular reason that the word "probability" should not mean what it means?

Which is to admit this is all an epistemological question and not an ontological one. That is, you're asking how accurate our knowledge is of an event. — Hanover

I am not sure what an ontological probability would even mean.

Guys, you are both swimming upstream, and for no good reason that I can see.

There are ways of talking about probability in both senses. Probability is always conditionalized on something, if only on the "tautological prior". Let E be an outcome (e.g. heads) of a single coin flip and H be the "fair coin" model, according to which

P(E|H) = 0.5

A different model may yield a different probability.

Now, when you talk about our confidence, we conditionalize on your background knowledge, K:

P(E|K) = ?

If your background knowledge already includes the knowledge of which side the coin came up, the probability will, of course, be either 0 or 1. If you do not know the outcome, and nothing in your background knowledge otherwise informs you about what it might be, and you assume that the coin is fair, then the probability is the same as above:

P(E|H ^ K') = P(E|H) = 0.5

where K' is your background knowledge, not including the proposition "the coin is fair".

We can guess what it might be, and you may have a 50% chance of being right but that chance pertains to your guess — Jeremiah

That's just what we mean when we say that the probability of a coin toss outcome is 50%. So the answer to your question in the OP: it doesn't matter whether the coin toss has occurred or not - as long as you haven't looked.

Suppose I've never heard of physics and probability theory, and I (incorrectly) expect the outcome of a large number of coin tosses to be influenced by the force of wishful thinking in the vicinity of the coin.

It seems an ordinary probabilistic or statistical model is a model of something in addition to one's ignorance. — Cabbage Farmer

Well, if you haven't heard of probability theory (and have no sound intuitions to help you) then all bets are off. We usually assume a "rational agent" who makes the most of the information available to her - otherwise the possibilities are wide open and we cannot say anything at all. But the information available to you doesn't have to include the correct physics. You are right, probability can be a function of a model. But having a model (such as that your wishing can alter the result of a coin toss) influences your expectations - and thus your assignment of probabilities.

So the probabilities that you come up with are still a function of what you believe. If you have no expectations of the behavior of the observed system, then the best you can do is assign ignorance priors (although it should be noted that some don't believe in assigning probabilities in complete ignorance). If you have a model that yields a different result (cheating, power of thought or whatever) then your probabilities will be shaped by the superposition of that model with any remaining uncertainty.

Has anyone here read any existing literature on the subject? There's lots!

First it should be noted that nothing about evidence and confirmation is necessitated by classical logic, simply because these concepts do not belong in classical logic. That's not to say that a theory cannot be built on deductive foundations (that's what Hempel, who came up with the paradox, as well as a number of others, attempted to do). However, even with classical logic as a background there are various ways of going about it, and different models and starting assumptions will yield different results. And then there are various non-deductive theories of confirmation: Bayesian and even more exotic theories, such as two-parameter models. (A Popperian will just dismiss the challenge, since according to her there is no such thing as confirmation. And that's why few pay attention to Popperians :P)

Physicalism

As you can see, there isn't anything like a common agreement on what the term means, and the prospects of it amounting to a coherent stand-alone metaphysical doctrine without limiting it to an exclusive little niche look pretty dim. Your own definition is too narrowly reductionist, and even this definition is vulnerable to the criticisms referenced above.

I think that physicalism is most easily conceived as what it is not, i.e. in opposition to certain specific and wide-spread views, in particular to doctrines that single out the mental for a privileged role in the ontology of the world.

Personally, I care more about epistemology than I do about ontology, and for me physicalism is more about the method of inquiry than about specific ontologies. I associate physicalism with a broadly empiricist and skeptical epistemology.

Physicalism is an updated version of materialism, not the science of physics. It just says that everything is made up of whatever physics posits. Cars being made up of physical parts isn't an issue for materialists. But experience is problematic. — Marchesk

Physicalism isn't necessarily framed in mereological terms (I personally dislike this approach).

How experience is made up of physical stuff. Saying that meat experiences color, while cars don't because meat, isn't an answer. — Marchesk

Asking "how experience is made up of physical stuff" sounds as absurd as asking how the operation of a car is made up of physical stuff. Maybe you mean something by it, but if so, you need to explain.

You could say that brains are made up of physical stuff - an awkward statement, and not very informative. But it would be a better analogy here. But brains are not consciousness, brains are conscious [of stuff] - see the difference? It's not what the brains are made out of, it's what they do.

An answer that would make the puzzlement go away — Marchesk

I am afraid I still don't understand the reason behind the puzzlement. I mean, consciousness is a wondrous thing and it certainly has plenty to be puzzled about, but let me remind you again that physicalism isn't supposed to be an oracle that will answer all of your questions.

Yeah, one wonders how it is that people found out that they had brains in the first place. Or hearts. That's a real puzzler :-}

Physicalism can't explain why some physical systems have experience and others don't. — Marchesk

Physicalism also can't explain why some physical systems are cars and others are not. Take any summation of Physicalism as a philosophical doctrine, and more likely than not, you won't see "cars" mentioned at all. Isn't that just as bad?

You might ask so what, but physicalism is supposed to present a comprehensive ontology. It can't leave anything out and be true. — Marchesk

There's your problem. While there isn't anything like a received view of what "physicalism" stands for, I've never seen it claimed that physicalism is a theory of everything, capable of answering any question that you can think of. Physicalism posits answers to certain specific questions, and that's it.

Anyway, what question are you actually asking above? What sort of answer would you accept?

And so some physical systems have experiences, like my brain/body, and others don't, like my car (which could be smart and drive itself these days) or the rock I kicked.

That's why it remains problematic for physicalism. — Marchesk

Where is the problem? Some systems are cars and others are not. Is that a problem too?

This is genius.

I agree that such is the convention. But what do those who use and defend the convention mean when they say that something exists? — Perdidi Corpus

Well, you appear to be a competent speaker of English, don't you already know what people mean when they say that something exists? I didn't have any exotic or specialist meanings in mind.

A tempting answer is to say that the visual cortex of the brain generates color. But when the brain is examined, there is no color to be found there, of course. So where is that color experience taking place? — Marchesk

The brain doesn't generate color, it experiences color (or rather, your entire organism experiences color, since the brain does not function in isolation from the rest of the organism). It would be senseless to examine the brain looking for the experience of color - what would you expect to find? When you want to drive somewhere, do you just sit and stare at your car, expecting the driving to happen by and by?

But this is veering away from the OP and towards a well-worn debate about qualia. The OP was addressed to those who already accept that consciousness can be realized in a computer, and more broadly, in any system that possesses the same structure and undergoes the same processes as those that are supposedly responsible for producing consciousness in the brain. You didn't have many takers. Instead, some flatly stated that only "meat," so to speak, can be conscious. Or conversely, that "inanimate" things or "tools" cannot. But what are the reasons for such declarations? Or are they made by way of stipulating the very definition of consciousness? Something that Russell described (in a different context) as having "all the advantages of theft over honest toil?"

But let me ask in my turn: can any amount of "honest toil" yield objective criteria for having consciousness? I think the answer is "no". If you think that consciousness can only be realized in "meat," then that is so, by definition. But on the flip side, this doesn't resolve any interesting philosophical questions, this only resolves the meaning of the word "consciousness" in your preferred usage.

It may be fun to do some further thought experiments though. What if a few neurons in your brain were seamlessly replaced by a microcomputer (or a small Chinese city doing calculations with pencil and paper, if you like)? Would you still be conscious? Would you still be you? Well, you see where this is going...

My take is that there is no objectively right or wrong answer. And no way to justify any answer given.

"Where does truth exist?" looks like a question about truth. But is it? Try treating it as a question about how we use the words "truth" and "exist"; so that it morphs into something like "Does the word exist apply to truth?" — Banno

Or, more directly, does the word "exist" necessarily implies having a location? How could you argue for that? (You haven't even tried, as far as I can see.) If pretty much everyone, as appears to be the case, already uses the word "exist" so that it applies to things that do not have a clear location, then what's the point of this exercise?

It is except the focus is own conscious experience and not understanding. Arguably, a fair amount of progress has been made in computer understanding with machine translation, image recognition, search algorithms, etc. But no progress whatsoever, far as anyone can tell, has been made on experience. — Marchesk

But what motivated the Chinese Room and similar thought experiments is the very idea that without conscious experience there is not "true" understanding. All along, it wasn't technical competence of the AI that was at issue.

Of course, what constitutes "true" understanding, as well as "true" conscious experience, is anyone's guess. I don't think there is a metaphysical truth of the matter here, because we are ultimately just stipulating how we are going to use words such as "understanding" and "conscious experience". That is, unless one intends to posit some positive metaphysics specific to consciousness - you know, the soul or some such.

Well, a paper computer executes instructions just as a microprocessor computer does. So what is true of the one ought to be true of the other.

To be clear, Marchesk is not talking about a set of instructions once committed to paper and just sitting there. He is talking about a person or lots of people performing those instructions with pencil and paper instead of silicone and electric potentials.

P.S. The OP question is, of course, a variant of the Chinese Room problem.

Yes imagining something would be the best example for this situation I feel. — Rawrren

Well, if you stipulate from the start that you are merely imagining a thing, you are, ipso facto, stipulating that the thought is not about, does not not refer to any concrete object in the world, as far as you are concerned. That is already given by your formulation, no matter what approach you then take - physicalist or otherwise. So I still don't understand, what difficulty do you see specifically for physicalism in this scenario?

Do you know of any reasoning as to why some reject intentionality? And if so, how do they then explain what we call 'intentional states & concepts'. — Rawrren

One way of viewing intentionality is linguistically, by giving interpretations of our intentional language while eschewing intentional idioms. But I confess that I am not prepared to discuss this issue in much detail. However, here are a couple of SEP articles that you may find as a good starting point for exploring different views of intentionality and surrounding issues: Intentionality, Consciousness and Intentionality.

So you think there is a problem specifically in the case where we are contemplating something imaginary?

I should note that physicalists do not all share the same concept of the mind, and not all of them, I imagine, will even accept intentional states as a valid or useful concept. So you would also have to argue that intentional states are absolutely indispensable in any theory of mind.

Can you explain in more detail what it is that you see as a problem for physicalism wrt intentional content?

That quote was fabricated by yours truly ;)

if the phenomenon of politically-driven fact-indifference is a perennial one

&

if a new term has been coined, to refer to this same perennial phenomenon as though it's unprecedented

&

if one is interested in what is new about this situation

then: the phenomenon in question is not 'post-truth' but 'a collection of groups claiming that there is an unprecedented event/era/atmosphere called post-truth' — csalisbury

It is not unprecedented, but it feels like it is becoming more common and accepted. As for "a collection of groups" - tu quoque again in lieu of addressing the issue. Instead of reflexively pointing a finger at the opposition you could argue that there's really nothing special here, no sea-change in the culture, no "new era" - and I might agree with you. I am not too certain about my characterization of the phenomenon, perhaps I am just picking out what irks me rather than identifying an objective trend.

But it does feel like a new development. In the past authoritarians sought to tightly control and restrict information. They were very much concerned with preventing the truth from getting out. Remember what event started Winston on his fateful path? He was charged with destroying a photograph that would have exposed a lie that was currently being promulgated by the Ministry of Truth. Orwell was uncannily prescient: such expurgation of incriminating records in newspapers and books was indeed practiced in Stalin's Soviet Union. But you see much less of that today, not because the propaganda lies less, but because it seems less concerned about hiding the truth.

When Russian troops invaded Crimea, the obvious fact was denied by Russian officials and the media. The soldiers, whose only cover was the lack of national insignia, were ironically nicknamed vezhliviye liudy (polite men) by the locals who were not deceived by the ruse. (The troops were mostly just strolling around in their spiffy new uniforms and top-of-the-line gear, and although armed to the teeth, their behavior was markedly reserved - hence the nickname. The task of brutalizing opponents of the occupation and closing down pro-Ukrainian media was mostly outsourced to civilian volunteers and off-duty security officers bused in from the mainland.) By and by, after the annexation Putin, followed by others, acknowledged the invasion. Putin even boasted of his role in directing the operation in a later interview. But as a rule, the earlier lie was never acknowledged or apologized for, although no attempt was made to erase it from the public record. What's more, the vezhliviye liudy - once a symbol of duplicity and underhanded hybrid warfare - quickly became a popular meme, emblazoned on tee-shirts and even memorialized in a goofy public sculpture. People who just months earlier dismissed them as an insidious fabrication of the west never seemed to take an issue with being lied to - they took the about-face in stride.

And this cynicism and indifference to the truth characterized not just poorly educated provincials who only ever watch government-controlled TV channels, but even well-educated, well-traveled, English-speaking Moscow professionals who had all the information at their fingertips (I knew some of them). No burning of pictures was necessary - the pictures were all over the Internet, and nobody minded.

— MindForged

It's misleading because, as you say, it seems like a truth-apt sentence, being that it looks like most other truth-apt sentences, but it isn't. — Michael

Again, I'm wondering what the evidence for this is.

The evidence is the straightforward proof by contradiction. That the Liar sentence is not truth-apt is a readily established fact. Now, you may wonder what makes it so, but that's a different question.

I more or less agree with @jamalrob & @The Great Whatever

"Post-truth" had been seized upon by 'experts' (in the sense jamalrob used the word) at the exact moment their theories and narratives have been shown to be false (the 'surprise' of Brexit & the 2016 US presidential election etc.)

In many cases, then, "post-truth" is literally used to mean 'an atmosphere in which people no longer believe in our narratives and theories after those narratives and theories have been demonstrated to be false" — csalisbury

No, that's just a transparent attempt at a tu quoque and ad hominem: people who talk about "post-truth" are themselves poopy-heads, and that being the case, anything they say is humbug. And that is, unfortunately, the way most political discussions go.


While I agree that there's nothing new about "post-truth," it does seem to be one of the more prominent features of the contemporary zeitgeist. I am seeing it being aggressively promoted by the Russian propaganda machine. The idea that they are trying to inculcate is:

There is no truth, or if there is, no one can know it, which is just the same. There are always two sides to every story, everything can be doubted, every narrator is most likely corrupt and self-serving. Therefore, the choice of what to believe is not so much rational and empirical as moral. To wit, if you are a patriot, you should assume the attitude of "my country, right or wrong" and believe the self-serving narrative offered by the official news media and patriotic (i.e. loyal) pundits.

And from what I can see, this idea is being effectively internalized. I remember when the accusations of wide-spread, institutionalized, government-supported doping in Russian sports broke out, a radio station conducted informal interviews of people on the street. One response stuck out to me: a woman, in answer to the question whether she thought the accusations were true, said something to the effect that "I am a patriot of my country, so I am going to believe that we are innocent." At the time I thought this to be a remarkably candid expression of the "post-truth" attitude. But since then I have heard similar sentiments reiterated again and again in interviews with the "common people." One, when pressed on the point, went on to say that, yes, the government-controlled media may not be telling the truth. But then no one can ever know the truth. He was still going to believe the official narrative.

A strategic move that often goes along with the "post-truth" idea is to implicitly concede that, yes, we are shit, but so is everyone else. And if you are a patriot, then your own shit doesn't stink. This move is probably felt to be necessary in the environment in which the iron curtain is no longer seen as effective in stemming the flow of information and communication with the world outside the government control. Besides, people's moral reactions cannot be completely extinguished through propaganda. A more effective strategy is to sour them to the entire world, turn them into cynics. Our elections are not fair? Well, neither is anyone else's. Our official media serves up lies and propaganda? So does the supposedly free western media. Our government is corrupt and inefficient? So is every government. There is no such thing as democracy and freedom. Everyone is doing it. We are no worse than anyone else.

Nick Bostrom has done some fairly involved investigations in epistemic probability, starting with his PhD thesis. That's not to say that he is right, necessarily, just that he won't throw around such terms lightly.

A computer program is an abstraction, just as an idea, a formula, a narrative. The world cannot literally be a computer program: if it is a computer anything, it has to be hardware, by definition.

I read the novel as an adult, and to be honest, the "big ideas" interested me much less than the literature. And it is great literature, no doubt about it. I don't think much of Dostoyevsky as a philosopher - not because I think that he was wrong about this or that; he just doesn't have the cool-headed, analytic temperament that I look for in a thinker.

Neither Dostoyevsky's ideas nor his characters are very life-like - nor should they be, as long as he is writing a novel and not a report. With this novel, as well as with most of his other "great" novels, I was most taken by the atmosphere of a phantasmagorical fever-dream. When I read a book of his for an extended period of time (and I am a slow reader), I feel like I am literally running a fever myself. In that immersive, unreal, poetic quality he reminds me of Faulkner (or rather Faulkner reminded me of him, since I read Faulkner later).

Dostoyevsky wasn't a great stylist, but he was such a forceful, original artist that neither this lack of literary refinement nor his philosophical pretensions prevented him from creating great literature when he was at his best, as he was in this novel.

No, if something is computable (doesn't encounter the Halting problem), then it is real in some sense. — Question

What sense is that? Does it have anything to do with what I asked? ("How can you possibly prove physical laws with a calculation?")

If something can't be computed then that is indicative of a gap in understanding or that there are some things that are unintelligible. — Question

How do you figure that? Do you even know what it means for something to be computable?

Now look I am not an a close-minded arsehole — intrapersona

Right, of course, you even have transgender friends :-}

Look, if you want to be "truthful," why these disingenuous excuses? If you think that there's something wrong with bigotry, well, that's the answer to your question, isn't it? And if you don't think there's anything wrong with bigotry, then grow yourself a pair and own it.

Or am I running in circles in trying to state that all physical laws can be proven to be true — Question

How can you possibly prove physical laws with a calculation? Being computable or otherwise neither proves nor disproves anything. Nor does this have anything to do with Incompleteness theorems, as far as I know.

Yeah, I wasn't as clear I ought to have been (and I lost sight myself of my initial strategy.) It's not that the fear of impending torture is a 'problem' itself - the idea is to elicit an explanation of why we should be afraid of such a thing that wouldn't apply equally to a fear of life after death. — csalisbury

OK, but what kind of an explanation are we looking for? If we are looking for a motivation (why ought we be afraid), that's one thing. If we are looking for a "third-person" explanation of the phenomenon - that's another thing, or rather a number of things, depending on the chosen framework for the explanation - psychology, evolutionary biology, neurophysiology, non-naturalist metaphysics.

And it looks like you have an answer (your intent to naturalize has indeed been obvious, I note neutrally) - self-identity is supervenient on bodily identity (& extrapolating: since the body loses its identity after death, there's nothing left to supervene on.) It will be my body that is tortured; there will be no body after I die.

Is that fair? — csalisbury

Not quite. I proposed earlier that self-identity is a mental construct, partly innate, partly a product of culture, personal development and even preference. As such, it doesn't have to strictly supervene on the body, the way, say, cognition presumably supervenes on the neurophysiology of the nervous system. However, the body does provide a natural preexisting "boundary" (as you put it) that most ordinary conceptions of self-identity respect at least in part. Certainly, the raw feeling of the continuity of self that we experience moment-to-waking moment goes along with the normal functioning of the body with its given boundaries. But the more abstract intellectual concept of self-identity can and often does extend beyond that boundary - in the hypothesized afterlife, for instance, or a reincarnation. Or sometimes in other directions as well: the ancestors, the tribe or the country, or even the world.

A relevant guest post on Sean Carroll's blog by philosopher David Wallace: On the Physicality of the Quantum State

I do not mean some kind of self-body identity (a la mind-brain identity). I do mean to naturalize selfhood though, which intention I thought would be obvious. Therefore, I do not start from a blank slate in Descartes's fashion, because I don't think that is possible or sensible - as illustrated by Descartes's own failure. Likewise, the silliness of the OP to which this thread was a followup was to pretend that we know nothing about the world except for the fact that something referred to as "I" came into existence at some point and persisted for some time. If we truly knew nothing else, then it wouldn't be unreasonable to suppose that such events could have occurred multiple times instead of just once. But speculating in near-total ignorance is fruitless: all we are warranted in doing is acknowledging such bare logical possibilities. We can't go any further from there. We can't even say whether one possibility is more or less plausible than another.

No, I start off as an unapologetic naturalist and I do not intend to build all of my background knowledge and assumptions from scratch. Some things I take for granted, such as the existence of an organism, a self-sustaining homeostatic system. This I presume to be the substratum upon which consciousness operates, and where the sense and understanding of "self" emerges. Memory would then be an important factor, a biological and psychological mechanism that is crucial to shaping this sense of sustained "self" collocated with the body.

Would you be willing to sum up the problem presented as you see it? I'd like to measure my intent against the actual effect, in order to revise and tweak. — csalisbury

The "problem" is that there is supposedly a question that cries out for an explanation: why do I care about something that is going to happen to me in the future?

If memory is to serve as a condition for selfhood, then it must circumscribe some region - it must draw a line and say: that which happens within this boundary will be preserved in the memory of entity x. If memory is to be the eminence grise behind selfhood, it must also be a drawer of boundaries. And that makes things difficult. Because that which draws the boundary is also that which is to be bounded. — csalisbury

I'm sure personal identity is a psycho-social construct, but such a construct requires a lower-level continuity in order to even get off the ground - The construction of a self-narrative requires some kind of spatio/temporal/experiential boundary (boundary-process?) which excludes certain experiences/elements as candidates for integration in a self-construct and includes others. — csalisbury

I don't understand your difficulty. Memory doesn't have to draw any boundaries: it's not like it can choose a different scope or perspective than that which is given by the conditions in which its bearer finds itself. To put it simply, you can't have memories of what you (your body, for lack of a better term) haven't experienced.

Of course, that's assuming we are talking about ordinary, common-sense memory. If you want to widen the notion beyond the evident, then, like I said, all bets are off - imagination is your only limit.

And in any case, I don't think the thought experiment I've posed is all that extraordinary. Throughout history, many people have awaited torture. This is a far cry from teleportation. — csalisbury

No, your thought experiment is not extraordinary. It is indeed so ordinary that it does not present a problem that you think it does.

Instrumental interpretations don't care about ontological commitments. It's a matter of simply approaching the explanation or account as something that works for what it is, where it doesn't matter if it's a fiction or not.

Ontological commmitment interpretations are the opposite, obviously. One takes the explanation or account to be literally picking out things in the world, just as they are. — Terrapin Station

I am not sure there is a real distinction here, but anyway, I still don't see how MWI can be taken instrumentally in this sense. "The explanation or account as something that works for what it is" - that is the bare-bones QM. It gives us enough to perform measurements, relate them to other measurements, and make predictions. Interpretations, MWI included, go beyond that and make metaphysical commitments - which is what you seem to be shunning.

I'm an instrumentalist on some things, and not on other things. I particularly tend to be an instrumentalist with respect to explanations/theories that are mathematical-only (or primarily), or that are more abstract in received view interpretations. — Terrapin Station

There are no mathematical-only explanations. Mathematics doesn't explain anything: in order for it to be an explanation, a physical theory, it needs to be related to the physical world. I don't understand the distinction that you are trying to make here.

Can you explain what you mean by "instrumental interpretation"? To me it sounds like an oxymoron.

What does it mean to be a "a shut-up-and-calculate instrumentalist with respect to MWI"? How would you use MWI in calculations or why would you even need to?

If we were to survey physicists, what percetage do you think would say that they buy MWI instrumentally versus buying it as making a realist ontological commitment? — Terrapin Station

How does one "buy MWI instrumentally"? If you are a shut-up-and-calculate instrumentalist, then ostensibly at least you have no use for interpretations, MWI included.

The old argument from consensus. — tom

I am curious, Tom, seeing as you so stridently promote a position held by a small minority of physicists, if not by Deutsch alone - a minority among a minority of MWI proponents, most of whom, I believe, do not hold that MWI is the only interpretation version of QM that can account for all known observations - I am curious, are you a physicist yourself? Do you have a thorough understanding of quantum physics? Is this position your own?

I'd like to cut this rational justification/ emotional response knot and simply say : Nearly all of us would be scared if condemned to torture & we'd be scared because it's going to be us who is tortured. — csalisbury

Well, that's a plausible answer to the question "Why should you be worried about something that's only going to happen to you." The answer you give is that it's going to happen to you. But I would object that that's not why we are worried; we don't actually reason this way. There is no why, it's just something we do instinctively. You might speculate though that it's the same instinct that makes us believe in the invariance, or at any rate, continuity of the self over time. Maybe.

So, well & good. but personal continuity is an explanandum, not an explanans. We might posit some sort of soul (which, having been posited, drastically lowers any assurance one might have about the impossibility of one's existing after death.) But if, on the other hand, one rejects the idea of a soul, then another explanation must be put forth.

That second explanation is what I was hoping to draw out. — csalisbury

My explanation is deflationary (but not eliminativist). I do not think that personal identity constitutes a sharp metaphysical unit. I think that it is a psycho-social construct, rather than some independently existing entity, like a soul. (Which is not to say that it is not real: psycho-social constructs are as real as anything else.)

This is a broader, less specific answer than John's idea of an integrated memory stream. That is one possible psychological mechanism, but it at most addresses the sense of one's own identity; there is also a recognition of personal identity in others, which would have to have some other explanation. I suspect that, our evolved psychology being a terrific mess that has accumulated many ad hoc patches, crutches and shortcuts over the ages, there is no one simple and elegant mechanism to account for all aspects of our self-identification.

If personal identity is a psycho-social construct, it is to some extent a product of our biological makeup, and to some extent a matter of cultural tradition and even personal preference. Therefore, to come to the title question, there is no objectively right or wrong answer to the question of whether your self can continue or to reemerge after your death. Our common intuitions with regard to personal identity are based on our common experiences. But of course, we none of us have afterlife experiences - at least none that could be shared with our mortal selves. Nor do we have experiences that could shape our intuitions with regard to any number of other fantastical thought experiments that are often trotted out in order to explore issues related to personal identity: teleporters, matter duplicators, etc. Such thought experiments, rather than providing an insight, defeat their purpose by being too extraordinary.

Fortunately, nothing important is at stake when considering such questions - unlike the realities of our existence that have shaped our intuitions with regard to personal identity: contemplating our own "selves" and the "selves" of people around us. So if you must answer the question, then knock yourself out, believe whatever strikes your fancy. There are no consequences to having such an opinion, nor is there any way to put it to the test.

But you weren't experiencing pain or death (beyond the pain of anxious apprehension) waiting. in the hallway, to be caned. So why be frightened? What did the suffering of a boy, not in the hallway, have to do with you? — csalisbury

I understand (I think) that your line of questioning has to do with the question of personal identity and its continuity through time (or lack thereof). But like others here I find the questions you choose to ask to be confusing, and perhaps confused. What sort of answer to you expect here? Are we supposed to rationally justify our feelings? Do you mean to imply that feelings of fear, anxiety or empathy need to have a rational justification? Rooted in what?