In asking 'what is the first person?', he seems to be talking about something less trivial than what we called a geometric point of view, but I cannot identify what else there is to it. — noAxioms

This should be a strong clue:

The first-person view of the mental encompasses phenomena which seem to resist any explanation from the third person. — noAxioms

These phenomena are qualia.

If you still doubt this I'm sure I can find more explicit passages in the paper or elsewhere.

This is no paradox. What is wrong for a deontologist is to choose to kill someone. In the 1 vs. 1 case, the agent isn't choosing to kill. He is forced to kill. He is only choosing to kill one person or another. This choice may carry no particular moral weight to the deontologist.

What about simply being compelled to kill someone? As in, someone overpowers you, and physically forces you to press a button that results in a death. Is this a "paradox" to the deontologist?

You seem to be arguing against a mentally crippled version of deontology.

Consider the case where the person at the switch was forced to choose between two tracks, each with one person.

In your view, would the deontologist condemn the person at the switch as a murderer, no matter what choice they made?

No longer able to appeal to the sanctity of non-interference, the individualist ethic risks moral paralysis. — Copernicus

Not necessarily. Suppose A, B, C are on track 1, and D on track 2. The choice of track 1 can be broken down into 3 bundled yet district choices: to run over A, B, and C. The choice to run over A can be judged equivalent to the choice to run over D, and when comparing the track 1 or 2 decision, cancel out. This is consistent: if both tracks contained 1 victim, and one was forced to choose, neither choice would be a murder. But in the example, track 1 can be judged as committing two murders, and track 2, none.

One can maintain this, and yet maintain that non intervention trumps this calculus. I don't agree, but that is not the point.

I think that's what I said. It makes qualia the fundamental issue, not first person, which is, as you call it, mere geometric PoV. — noAxioms

You seem to be arguing against a position that nobody takes. Neither Chalmers nor anyone else believe geometric PoV is mysterious. Everyone agrees that qualia is the fundamental issue.

and if so, that all of say quantum theory is wrong, or at least grossly incomplete. — noAxioms

Not necessarily. It is the "hard problem", not the "impossible problem". Chalmers does believe physics is incomplete, but several believe consciousness is explicable naturally without amending physics, while still acknowledging the uniquely difficult status of the hard problem.

The title of this topic is about the first/third person divide, which Chalmers asserts to be fundamental to said 'hard problem', but it isn't. The qualia is what's hard. — noAxioms

This feels like a strange misunderstanding. Qualia are intrinsically first person. When people talk about first person experience being mysterious, they are talking about qualia, not mere geometric POV.

This especially raises my eyebrows, because I remember a time you thought you were a p zombie!

The primary disconnect seems to be that no third-person description can convey knowledge of a first-person experience — noAxioms

Without reading the full post, this misses the problem.

The problem is, no third person explanation can arrive at first person experience. There is an 'explanatory gap'. Not only do we not know the specific series of explanations that start at neural facts and ends at first person experience, conceptually, it doesn't seem possible that any such series can exist.

They both agree on the same underlying fact: there is no continuity beyond the perception of it. NC adds the additional idea: therefore, we are always dying.


But is this idea coherent? If there is no continuous consciousness, then what is it that is doing the dying? It seems there must be a continuous consciousness in the first place, for it to die. NC can only answer: it is the instance of consciousness that dies.

Consider an analogy with the Ship of Theseus. PC: there is no underlying reality of the identity of the ship, whether it is the same ship or not is up to the observer. NC: there is no underlying reality of the identity of the ship. Therefore, the ship is being destroyed again and again, every instant. What is being destroyed? The exact state of the ship, at the molecular level.

Why is the exact state of the Ship reified into a thing that can be destroyed? If identity is ultimately conceptual, then this exact state is simply the wrong concept, meaning, a useless concept no one uses in practice. The right concept is more like, the functional unity of the ship's parts over time.

It is like NC is saying, identity is conceptual, not actual. And, I am now completely redefining the concept in such a way that everyone is dying millions of times a second.

Moreover, no human behavior is coherent under NC. Even hedonism is irrational. Why reach for that ice cream? Me + 10 seconds will enjoy it, not me. A theory that makes nonsense of the entirely of human action just might be the wrong theory.

I think PC and NC are actually the same position.

PC says there is no deep fact of continuity or discontinuity. What matters is the subject's perception of continuity, nothing more. The believing is the reality. I see no divergence here with NC.

And so the imperfect transporter is not an objection to PC. It is not the universe which is supposed to be deciding whether or not continuity happened. It is ultimately up to the subject whether they are a continuation or not. If there is a dividing line, that line is a preference of the subject, nothing more.

. What I said is that the source of your existence seems legit to me because I had (literally) the same experience of interacting with you in both reality and dreams. For me, this is more than sufficient to claim that you actually exist. — javi2541997

Clearly I'm missing something. If the experience of interacting with me in a dream is the same as in reality, and I didn't cause your dream experience, then why believe i caused the real experience at all? At the very least it makes my status as cause suspect.

The dream if anything seems to weaken the claim.

I would say that "conspiracy theory" is a fairly empty term in this pejorative sense. — Leontiskos

I don't think so. Any phenomenon admits to multiple explanations, the vast majority of which are profoundly unlikely. A conspiracy theory is a rococo sort of explanation, containing multiple agents and moving parts that must act in perfect concert for it to be true. Prima facie there is nothing that says a conspiracy theory must be false. However due to their complexity there are almost always multiple serious flaws in such theories.

For a conspiracy theory to be a conspiracy theory, there must be a conspiracy theorist who espouses it. The two come as a package. It is well noted that it's impossible to disabuse a conspiracy theorist of their theory. Because, It is always possible to paper over any flaw with more complexity. This is recursively endless. The same phenomenon is seen in science. No theory can be disproven outright. Rather, for the false theory to fit the data, more and more complexity has to be piled onto it, until it collapsed under its own weight, and the scientific community thoroughly dismisses it. But, there can always be cranks who will cling to it no matter what, and work diligently sustaining there theory by patching over the flaws with more and more complexity. Flat earth is a perfect example of this.

This is the irrationality of conspiracy theories. It is the selection of a theory not because it is best, but because it meets the needs of the conspiracist. To the conspiracy theorist, the fundamental axiom is that their theory is correct. Given this starting point, any apparent contradiction can be worked around, given enough time and cleverness. This process is obviously not rational, it does not favor outcomes where the result is true. Even if, every now and then, they might indeed be true.

The point is that I have knowledge and consciousness that you exist because you caused me certain experiences in both dreams and reality. — javi2541997

Here and in several other cases you are presuming your conclusion, that we exist. Only if we exist, have we caused these experiences in you, in reality. (But much less so in dreams. It seems more accurate to say that your mind, creatively using these experiences as a foundation, synthesized your dreams. We have no causal efficacy in what specifically did and didn't happen in your dreams.)

Suppose that I, and everyone else but you on this site, were all AI personas. If so, we would impart the same experiences to you, and you would have the same dreams about them. So these experiences and dreams themselves cannot prove that we are not AI. You might argue in various ways that this AI hypothesis is profoundly unlikely, and I would agree. But I don't think you can prove it is not the case.

I have no doubt I could have made different choices on innumerable occasions. There has never been a time in my life when my actions have been so constrained that I could only do one thing. I act according to what I know of my desires, what I know of the world, my emotions, and my reasoning. All these muddle together in my poor, strained brain, and out pops a decision, for better or worse. By chance, I could have made other decisions such that I would be a multi millionaire now, married with children, homeless, imprisoned, or dead.

But, what of it? That things might have been different does not imply the strong notion of "free will" that I suspect is incoherent.

Do you consider the description of the salt marsh I discussed as a "toy case?" If so, I disagree. — T Clark

Do you consider the description of the salt marsh I discussed as a "toy case?" If so, I disagree. — T Clark

No, that is the opposite of a toy case. By toy case I mean the simplified examples that may come to mind when considering causality, such as one billiard ball hitting another.

The question I've been asking is--if it is such a complex system of events, why bring the idea of causality into it at all. Why not just describe the system? — T Clark

Because cause is what people are often interested in. And precisely because systems are often complex, describing it is too much, if possible at all.

That A casually impinges on B is both of practical significance and is a metaphysical reality. That your history of smoking is a casual antecedent to your lung cancer, while brushing your teeth isn't, is an interesting and real feature of the world. But, as you point out, the way it is a casual antecedent is usually quite complex, in a way that the language of cause doesn't easily capture. The word "cause" seems to imply a billiard ball view, where the cause solely produced the effect, which confuses and obscuring the reality, especially of very complex events such as wars, elections, and ecologies. But this doesn't mean we should throw out casualty entirely.

Nice OP!

I feel you have demonstrated less that cause is not a useful concept, but that the concept needs a lot of refinement to generalize beyond toy cases. The problem is that people want to take the toy concept and apply it to everything.

As you point out, "did X cause Y?" is almost always the wrong question, as there is almost never a single cause if an event. I think of cause and effect less like a segmented arrow (A causes B, which causes C, which causes...) and more like a directed graph (A, B, C together cause D, which, together with B and E, causes F ...)

To give a simplified example, think of a family tree, terminating with yourself at the bottom. Everyone you can reach by moving only up in the tree caused you. If you need to travel down to reach someone, they did not cause you. This is already a useful distinction. Moreover, every cause of you is more or less proximate, with your parents being the nearest.

In a family tree, every cause is necessary, none is sufficient. In the full spectrum of casual relationships all four permutations of necessary/sufficient are possible.

In a family tree there is a orderly relationship between causes and effects, where every effect has two immediate causes, four nearest proximate causes, 8 second nearest, and so on. In reality there is no such order. any event may have any number of causes, arising from anywhere on the graph. Effects of a cause may even simultaneously serve as a cause of the cause, in the case of feedback loops.



Moreover, there are an immense number of casual relationships omitted by the family tree (ie, your parents had sex, causing your mother's egg to be fertilized by your father's sperm, causing...) These are real, but irrelevant to the story the family tree is telling. Every casual account is a story that might be telling the truth, but never the whole truth. The whole truth is beyond the scope of human communication, but that is not to say it is unreal. The whole truth is the God's Eye view of casual reality. Every casual story filters the vast majority of reality out, to tell something focused and specific about the events it tries to describe.

This is to me a sketch of a sketch of a more general account of casualty.

This is not news in the US, the discrepancy in violence is very, very obvious and well known. That the right is pretending otherwise, elevating a lone gunman from a solid MAGA family with no known ties to leftist groups into a Reichstag-like pretext for sweeping crackdowns on the left, is straight from the fascist playbook.

And if we are talking about rhetorical violence, the discrepancy is even more stark.

This is the argument now being put by sections of the commentariat on the right; that the left is complicit in violence that purportedly resulted from what they have said. — Banno

Please don't confuse this absurdly hypocritical power play for an "argument".

I'm not saying we should separate speech and consequence, where one is protected and the other isn't. I'm saying that the issue here doesn't seem to fit neatly into illocution/prolocution. It isn't how hate speech is received by individuals that is at issue. Rather the real danger, worthy of abridging free speech, are the consequences of a social environment where here speech is allowed to flourish, and especially encouraged by influential voices.

This is not reflected in the shooter example.

Of particular interest to me is how Austin's distinction of perlocutions from illocutions has been used in solidifying the performative aspect of hate speech, in separating the harm caused in the utterance of some particular speech act from harm caused as a later result of that act. — Banno

It seems that this goes beyond perlocution and illocution. When someone utters, "I hate all stupid XYZs and I wish they would all disappear", the illocution might be an expression of contemptuous emotion, the perlocution might be hurt, feeling of exclusion, anger, or agreement. While we might dislike such locutions, this in itself hardly seems appropriate to legislate against. The target is presumably the second order effects of this kind of sentiment taking root, marginalizing, or worse, endangering, entire groups.

Words? Infammatory? Have you seen the light and converted or something? — unenlightened

Moreover, I heard rumor that the big bad guv'ment had got itself involved. But I guess that is a-okay, here.

Must be some really interesting philosophy at work.

Not, these are large portions of the population. But even if it were fringe, it would already make the theory difficult.

Presumably, they are stil able to speak, so, form concepts, understand meanings and grammar - all of which require thought. — Wayfarer

Clearly they can speak, and clearly they can think. But it also seems clear that they think without using words.

If words are just one style of thinking, it seems difficult to claim that language arose mainly as a tool for thinking.

No. Thinking is:

cognitive behavior in which ideas, images, mental representations, or other hypothetical elements of thought are experienced or manipulated. In this sense, thinking includes imagining, remembering, problem solving, daydreaming, free association, concept formation, and many other processes.

You’re using non-standard definitions again. — T Clark

:up:

Much more reasonable than that made up junk in the OP.

"Experiencing" is probably not a thing with AI, but "manipulating" almost certainly is. The type of responses AI gives are simply not amenable to a computation style which aggregates input and spits out a statistically plausible output. This would quicky fall prey to the combinatorial explosion of possible inputs. Afaict, manipulation of "elements of thought" is the only way AI can function at all.

For example consider playing chess, a tiny sliver of AI functionality, and one which is generally not explicitly trained for in LLMs. Imagine an input like 1. E4 E5. 2. NF3 F4... How could ai reliably produce a rational output based only on inputs it has seen before, when every game is unique. Only thinking can do this.

In fact, a representation of the chess board can be observed when LLMs play chess. What else could this internal, emergent chess board be other than an "element of thought"?

They stress that language is not primarily a system of communication, but a system of thought. — Wayfarer

How can this be reconciled with the fact that many people don't think in words?

https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/saskatchewan/inner-monologue-experience-science-1.5486969

Given such ability, it would seem prudent, if your hand hurts due to arthritis, to simply cut it off and print a new one without the problem. — noAxioms

Perhaps, but that is a different thought experiment.

Is the new thing you? Probably the same answer as asking if you're the same person you were 20 years ago. Different, but pragmatically the same person. — noAxioms

It is more than pragmatic. We defer immediate gratification for rewards in the future, sometimes 20 years or more. This would only make sense if we believed we were the same person. These actions are never altruistic, we don't save money to benefit some alien successor entity.

You're assuming physicalism here. Under dualism, the new body will have its own immaterial mind, not the original, or maybe it will be a p-zombie, not having a mind at all. It will not be able to tell the difference. — noAxioms

For the purposes of this thought experiment I am assuming physicalism.

Why do these stories always require being 'put under'. — noAxioms

I did this to stimulate the intuition that the original->clone one continuous individual, in the same way that teleporter TEs do. But then challenge that intuition when the original wakes up.

Correction: Tears of joy stream down the face of the copy. Your use of pronouns is inconsistent. — noAxioms

This was intentional, to emphasize that from the clone's perspective, the clone feels they are continuous with the original.

How do you know this? By what criteria is this assessment made, and by whom? By what criteria do you currently assert that you're the same person as 'you' last year? Without these answers, you're just being either undefined or at least unclear. — noAxioms

That which benefits the next year's 'me', benefits me (as far as I believe, and behave). But that which benefits the copy clearly does not benefit the original.

AFAIK, AI is not improving itself. Improvements still must come through human minds (though perhaps with some, and increasing, AI assistance).

Moreover, the shape of the curve of improvements feels more like a plateau than an exponential explosion. 2020 felt like runaway growth of the technology. Now it feels far more stable. Improvements happen, but they are increasingly incremental. A lot of "feels" here, but do you think otherwise?

The information exists in the relationship between the two devices, the interpreting reader and the USB device. But then we cannot say that the information was contained in the USB stick as a ghost in the device. — JuanZu

But then, what is the difference between the reader-usb where the reader reads your porn collection, and where the reader reads an empty USB? That difference would seem to lie solely on the USB, not the reader, or the reader-usb complex. But if the difference between the information and no information case depends only on the USB, it would seem the information "lives", or not, on the USB alone.

The victim had a mistaken belief about how it worked. The technician let the victim recover consciousness and see the copy. So the argument is based on things going wrong rather than things going to plan. And thus the “when” is indeed an issue already. We should be discussing the plan that was intended where the idiot victim would have got what he paid for and never woke up to realise he had been plainly idiotic. — apokrisis

Why on earth are you concerned about following a "plan" that exists only as a part of a fiction?

What is relevant to us is the implications of when the victim is killed. What are the relevant differences, if any, between the different versions?

And then if you consider your the successful version of the plan, there is a both a copying of the info and a “disassembly” which is not actually a disassembly in being a temporary division of a person into his form and his matter. It is a permanent destruction of the originally embodied person rather than a momentary deconstruction. — apokrisis

It depends on whether the original molecules are transmitted or not. If they are somehow transmitted, then there is a difference, but it is a difficult argument to explain why this difference matters. If instead, the teleporter operates by scanning the victim, disassembling the victim, sending the information, and reconstructring the victim with a separate set of molecules, I claim that this is logically equivalent to my version.

Again, you leave me unclear what it is you really want to argue here. But to the degree the teleporter operation is conceivable as something real, an embodied approach to the issue of conscious identity would make it seem OK to disassemble and reassemble a person as the combination of some quantity of completely general matter and its equally unique and specific organising pattern. — apokrisis

My argument is that, if my version doesn't work for you as an example of successful personal continuation, than neither does the teleporter. So I disagree with what you wrote here. If you think my version fails but the teleporter is ok, you are simply falling for a sleight of hand in the teleporter story, such as: that there is only ever one copy of the victim... that the victim's molecules may be recycled... that the process is instantaneous. I don't believe any of these are metaphysically relevant. They are only relevant to our intuitions.

But your victim seemed to be thinking that the mind was something more. It was not about a structure of material organisation but some kind of spirit that could hop across and wake up somewhere else.

The nature of this confusion in terms of its metaphysical commitments was unclear. But it sounded Cartesian. So as I say, the story is entertaining. But in what way is it enlightening? — apokrisis

He believed either that, or psychological continuity as @ChrisH maintains, or some muddle of the two, or was merely going with the flow. The point is, this example, to me, clearly fails as an instance of personal continuity. So the reader is forced to claim that even this example constitutes continuity (ChrisH), is forced to explain why the teleporter suceeeds while this fails (you), or is forced to reject the teleporter as well (me).

This is an argument against the wisdom of undertaking human cloning. — ChrisH

No that is not what I was going for, I'm not interested in that question. I'm trying to wrap my head around the notion of an individual splitting.

The core question here, for me: is it rational for the original to accept the treatment? According to bodily continuity, it is a hard no. According to psychological continuity... it is deeply unclear. Once or the other must be right, either it is rational or or isn't.

You believe in psychological continuity, so what do you think?

In my view, neither the original nor the clone will be aware of which they are. The only way they can deduce who they may be is from external information which may or may not be trustworthy. — ChrisH

I'm not sure if you understand. It is a very queer situation. In the intended sequence (original is killed before the clone wakes up), there is no doubt: the original will wake up as the clone (assuming he wakes up at all). But in the scenario I gave, original woke up, then was killed. So to the original, as he woke up, it might have seemed horribly unlucky. Why couldn't he have been the clone?

As if the universe rolled dice, and deposited him in one or the other body depending on the roll. Absurd. But if so, then was there any chance of the original washing up as the clone? If not, it must then be irrational to accept the treatment.

A teleporter scenario seems benign for that reason. — apokrisis

Teleporter:

A enters booth 1 -> disassemble A -> transmit info to booth 2 -> assemble B -> B exits booth 2

My version (what should have happened) :

A enters scanner -> transmit info to printer -> assemble B -> "disassemble" A -> B exits printer

My version (what actually happened) :

A enters scanner -> transmit info to printer -> assemble B -> B exits printer -> "disassemble" A

All three versions perform the same fundamental operations. The only difference is when the disassembly of A happens.

In the teleporter, the disassembly happens right after entering the booth. I'm my version, it was supposed to happen after B was assembled. But the orderly made a mistake, and A saw B walking around before "disassembly".

The later the disassembly happens, the worse the case seems for continuity. But isn't this "seeming" just intuition? Why should it matter, metaphysically speaking, when the disassembly happens?

You have a single world-line or identity at any moment in that a single embodied state gets broken down, then rebuilt, with no leakage of selfhood, just the kind of halt and reboot of going to bed everynight. — apokrisis

Is this sort of reasoning intuitive, or metaphysical? Does the universe really track such things, such that one scenario counts as embodied continuity, and the other does not? Or is it we who are tracking such things as we read these stories, merely thinking as we do that we are tracking the universe.

Or does "psychological continuity" mean something other than the embodied and enactive view of cognition and sense of self? — apokrisis

By that I mean the idea that it is not the the body that counts in personal persistence, but the mind. So long as the mind is faithfully reproduced, the original persists as the clone.

The teleporter is sciencey bullshit. But at least dematerialising a body to atoms in one location and instantly having them reassembled as the same form elsewhere preserves the continuity of an embodied state. — apokrisis

I think it is all smoke and mirrors, and that my op is logically equivalent. Is, for instance, the instantaneous reassemblage metaphysically critical? Or, does it just play into our intuition that the person moved quickly, rather than was destroyed and recreated.

The problem with cloning is that this is now a thought experiment based on actual real-world science. You have to grow your body. And for it to have a mind, it would have to grow with it in the usual fashion.

So as I said, things fall down where your victim is said to believe that there is only an empty body on the other side of the procedure. And somehow his own mind it going to hop over to inhabit it. — apokrisis

No real world science here, it is just as bullshit as the teleporter. I described the machine growing of the clone as a "organic 3d printer", and I implied that it only took a few hours. And so, equivalent to versions of the teleporter where the victim is reassembled at the destination (but not versions where the original molecules are actually transported somehow).

There is not even any bullshit reason to expect continuity at this level. Even if we grant some cloning procedure that creates fully formed bodies with identical mental experiences that can be grown in a vat in a couple of weeks, there is still no reason for your victim to make his invalid inferences. — apokrisis

Yet people here (i.e. @ChrisH) believe in the continuity.

If you said you were going to dissolve him in the vat and then regenerate him from the vat just as quickly – and somehow both the mental patterns and flesh and blood patterns would re-emerge together exactly as they were, just a bit gene edited for arthritis – then now you would be closer to the teleporter story. — apokrisis

Closer in metaphysical ways that matter? Or closer merely in the way it plays on our intuitions, "transformation of the same thing" in this case.

And then the real question here. How can plainly unrealistic technologies illustrate anything other than some of the weird beliefs we have about the separability of body and mind? Organisms are cognitive structures down to the level of enzymes and their other molecular machinery. We don't come apart like hardware and software, despite what might be commonly believed. — apokrisis

To me, the real lesson is that the concepts we use only present themselves as aspects of reality. But really they are tailored to reality as it happens to be for us, and break down when we try to apply them to scenarios that are foreign to them ( In this sense the scenarios are necessarily unrealistic, if they were realistic our concepts would have already been shaped to accommodate them).

So then, what do we do? Can we salvage our concepts by fixing a few flaws so they work in every situation? Or do we concede that they are fundamentally bespoke, and do not and can not match with "reality"? So much of philosophy, I think, reduces to this kind of question, of the relationship between concepts and reality.

My point is that, in my view, both successfully survive as continuations of the pre-cloned-original. Pointing out that from the perspective of one, the other is a different person doesn't seem to me to invalidate this. — ChrisH

There is still an epistemic asymmetry. You know, as the original, that you will be murdered. This is guaranteed. But you can only ever believe that you will also continue as the clone. Since there is no observable consequence of continuance or it's failure, this can never be verified. You can only try to reason it out, as we are. Are you confident enough in your reasoning to stake your life in this way?

But really, it is quite difficult to conceive of this splitting. Suppose the split happened, and the clone was a "valid descendent". To what does this benefit the original? The original, post split, is still the original, the copy is as "other" as any stranger. Somehow, the original also woke up as a clone. But as soon as the split happens, the clone has interests that are opposed to the original. Would you pay $1000 for another version of you to be a millionaire?

Is it somehow a matter of chance which path you take? Does the original wake up and think "damn I got unlucky! I wanted to wake up as a clone!"

Really this whole concept doesn't feel fully coherent.

But you have set this up so that the victim acted on a misunderstanding. And that over-complicates things. It seems the victim expected to have his mind moved to a vacant body, not that another body would appear imprinted with what would be his last living state of mind. — apokrisis

In the same way that someone entering a teleporter expects to come out the other side, the victim expected to wake up as the clone. There was no misunderstanding in the sense that the victim understood how it works. He just didn't understand what it implied.

But if the victim had some hazy notion about a soul stuff being lifted and moved across to some new matter vessel, then they are indeed the victim of a bad metaphysics. — apokrisis

He might equally have believed in psychological continuity.

The mind could be lifted as some kind of pattern of information and plonked down to run on some other bit of physical hardware. There is just the single pattern and two bits of hardware involved. So continuity tracks the porting of the pattern. — apokrisis

At times I have believed something like this. And I think a compelling case can be made. If there is no observable consequence of this "continuity", if the universe looks exactly the same whether the original "continued" on in their twin or did not, to everyone involved and to the twin themselves, and to us in our mundane acts of living, shouldn't we discard this notion of continuity altogether?

And thus, so long as the twin feels as if there is continuity, that is, so long as the information from the original was transferred intact, then there is continuity, there is no observable extra thing to it.

Except when the original remains alive. Then the lack of continuity with the .

Having created a pair of identities – made as identical as they could possibly be – there is no reason they can't both be allowed to live on. It is not necessary to add on the moral drama. — apokrisis

The inspiration of this thought experiment was to reframe the basic teleporter concept in such a way that it seems viscerally clear that the clone or teleported are not the original. That from the original's perspective, it is just suicide. Straightforward cloning wouldn't capture that.

Also, I like the drama.

What you haven't done is show that the clone and post-cloned-original cannot both be considered equally valid descendants of the pre-cloned-original — ChrisH

They may be. But why is that the question? The patient (or teleportee), isn't asking if the clone (or teleported) will be a "valid decedent", whatever that means. They ask if they will survive the procedure. It is not in my interest to create a 'valid descendent " who lives happily. It is my interest to live happily.

I agree the original and clone have different perspectives but (in my view) they both view the world from the perspective of someone who was the original prior to cloning. — ChrisH

These are both true.

The point of the story was to give a visceral sense that the clone is certainly not you.

There are two entities, Original and Copy. Original is unproblematically the same person after the procedure. Copy is manifestly NOT Original, from Originals perspective. To Original, Copy presents as an other who happens to look like him. What benefits Copy (pain free life) manifestly does NOT benefit Original, and what harms original (illness, murder) does NOT harm Copy. Original thought the procedure would be to Originals benefit; it was to Copies benefit.

If Original (after) is the same as Original (before), and Original(after) is not Copy, Original (before) is not Copy.

And from both points of view, one of the you's made the decision that life was better with the illness edited out. And that one of you had pre-consented the termination of that you's history line. You had wanted to be the other you.

So claiming that a life has been stolen is a bit strong. It was freely given at the time. — apokrisis

Not quite, I don't think the intent was to give anything. It was not an altruistic gesture. The decision was made in self interest, in the mistaken belief that the original would become the clone. But the reality is, a stranger acquired the originals life.

Not that this stranger doesn't possess interests and rights. But the original is the victim of this story.

Would be interesting to find a thought experiment to make me change my mind, but they all seem to result in the second subject of experience being in a different spatial location to the original subject of experience, and hence having different experience and memories, and ipso facto not being the same person. — Down The Rabbit Hole

So you maintain that the clone is not the original, not because the original can see the clone walking about, but because of the seconds of time in which their experiences differ??

I don't think it makes sense to talk about personal continuity between you and your twin. I'd have thought what is pertinent is the degree (or lack) of continuity you and your twin have with the the 'you' prior to cloning. I'd have thought both have equal psychological continuity - physical continuity, in my view, is not important. — ChrisH

Yes that is the more accurate wording, I will edit the op.

I think both sides have valid arguments. But to me this is a pretty convincing one for the bodily continuity side. Why not you?

The scenario is very boring. I will stay with arthritis. The clone is the clone and just someone else. Cryonics is definitely more interesting. — SolarWind

Yet many don't share this intuition. And moreover most find it to be analogous to the teleporter case , meaning that that one is boring too. Maybe so, but there are a whole lot of people who insist teleportation is not murder, like this scenario is.

↪hypericinWhy would I choose to die so that my replica can live? I don't understand that. You've not cured my illness. You've just created a new person just like me without my illness. Why can't we both live? Why do we need another of me without arthritis? Why not make a whole team of people like me, — Hanover

I set it up this way to match the teleporter thought experiment as closely as possible. If it seems absurd that anyone would choose it, and it does in fact map to the teleporter, then I did my job, and teleporting is equally absurd.

You seem to be interpreting "bodily continuity" as meaning something like "Let's only care about the body, and not the self". — Mijin

Nope.

It means that the self is inherently tied to the physical substrate and therefore is also the self. — Mijin

I interpret it to mean that bodily continuity is a prerequisite of physical continuity. So yes the self is in some sense tied to the physical substrate. But this does not entail a strict identification with the body that you seem to think. The body can still persist in cases where the self is extinguished. Death is the obvious limit case. Followed by brain death, then severe brain damage.

To be sure, the brain is part of the body. But (assuming bodily continuity) identity likely hinges mainly on the functioning of the brain, not the body as a whole.

For people that believe in bodily continuity, for example, any level of brain damage that doesn't kill them results in still the (numerically) same person, — Mijin

Numerically the same body, not the same person. You can suffer enough brain damage such that your personhood is extinguished, but your body survives. And certainly enough to radically alter your self, in the deepest way possible.

We aren't talking about qualitative identity, we are talking about numerical identity. — Mijin

We are talking about numerical identity of the self, which may indeed hinge on qualitative identity. If a teleporter is not a death machine, it must.

, it depends on what determines the difference between surviving in any form versus not surviving at all, and we have no idea what does, or could, determine that. — Mijin

If you had a stroke or a TBI, what determines whether you survive in any form, or whether your old self is gone? There is no hard line. Part of you is gone, that is all. Do you think some metaphysical argument can determine this?

Insisting that there must be a line between survival and extinction, either in the teleporter case or a mundane brain injury, is a mistake.

It implies that if the person walking out of the transporter has a single atom the same as the person at source, then the person at source has survived. — Mijin

It implies no such thing. you are the one insisting that survival is a binary.

There is no way ot argue for "partial survival" because one cannot be and not be. — AmadeusD

I have given you ample reasons why you can partially survive, in the psychological sense. You respond by blankly insisting that no, you can't. .