From: gts (gts_2000@yahoo.com)
Date: Thu Nov 07 2002 - 09:00:08 MST
John K Clark wrote:
> But the gts at the time the copies were made would share the feeling of
> identity with the original. Copy A is gts and copy B is gts but after some
> time copy A is not copy B and neither is the gts of an hour after the
> duplication because neither remembers being him at that time.
Yes, this gets to the heart of the issue.
As you and I agree, each branch will believe, rightly, that he is a
continuation of the original. And yet each branch will nevertheless have his
own separate personality (non-nominal identity). The differences between the
two branches will become more apparent with the passage of time and events,
both to them as well as to third-party observers. The two people will
rightly think they are a continuation of the original person but they will
also have separate experiences, separate personalities, and thus separate
non-nominal identities.
The key word above is "continuation." Each branch is a *continuation* of the
original but it is I think a serious mistake to say that each *is* the
original. The original vanished at the time of the forking and reappeared as
two slightly modified identities. The two identities also continue to change
into new slightly modified identities with each passing moment.
I understand the apparent paradox that Lee would have us accept as true as
being due to a false understanding of identity as something fixed. The
paradoxes go away when we adopt the humanist view of personality as
something dynamic, always changing. We are literally different people with
each passing moment, always in a process of becoming. Our experience of
continuity of identity through time is an artifact of intelligence. The
human mind sees continuity in a succession of similar but disparate objects,
including when those objects are ourselves. The illusion that identity is
fixed rather than dynamic is amplified further by our use of nominal
identities for identification purposes (name, social security number, etc).
We tend to believe we are our static labels, forgetting that our labels are
merely pointers to our dynamic ever-changing selves.
-gts
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