From: Lee Corbin (lcorbin@tsoft.com)
Date: Fri Nov 01 2002 - 10:43:11 MST
gts writes to Jef
> Allow me to ask you the same question I asked Lee in a previous message, one
> that is so far unanswered by him. Perhaps this will bring you down off the
> fence.
>
> In your opinion, is the following statement true or false?
>
> "Two people who think differently about the same subject at
> the same time must be two different people."
Without waiting to see how Jef answered, I will say, of course,
that indeed they can be the same person.
Naturally, according to your strict definitions this is quite
impossible. I would probably agree if I accepted your strict
definitions. But what does this really all boil down to? What
is really important here?
Yes, ultimately, because of the great number of semantic links
that it has, what we end up meaning by "person" is important.
But *more* important is the actions that we take in situations!
When I claim that duplicates are selves, what I *mean* has to
do with personal survival, and what a person is. You repeatedly
deny that you are the same person from moment to moment. You
cling to this in desperation, it seems to me, almost as if it
were some kind of definition with you.
Yet you go about day after day, month after month, being pretty
much the same person in your own mind and in daily life. Doesn't
this conflict trouble you at all?
> I submit that two different people can be at most only very closely related,
> perhaps even so intimately related that they share some common memories in
> the same way that people can share other concepts in common. Perhaps they
> are so intimately related that it creates an *illusion* that they are the
> same person. But to say that these different people should be considered as
> actually having the same non-nominal identity is to go too far. It is to say
> that "self = other." It is to abandon logic and reason.
You CANNOT get away with trying to characterize views with simple
equations. For *some* purposes (the most important ones, it turns
out) it is best to regard duplicates as the same person, that's
all. I have explained the reasons. If you care to read others'
views, e.g. Mike Perry, Derek Parfit, Robin Hanson, Max More, etc.,
you'll find that no one, not even you, is "abandoning logic and reason".
Lee
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