Quote:
Originally Posted by JCurwen3
Maybe some day someone will come up with some way that a true continuous self can have an unambiguous meaning given a purely materialist or, more broadly, physicalist, understanding of consciousness, but honestly, I doubt it. These questions seem more like unresolved issues over not having fully let go of a dualistic idea of a non-physical soul. Of course, believing in such a thing, the question is still not really resolved because then you have to ask if the "soul" knows to go to the copy (or the "right" copy), or if it gets somehow "split", or if it always "moves on" when its current "vessel" dies and then a new one pops into the "newborn" copy (like a baby).
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I think you have it exactly backward. My self = me = my physical being. The idea that you can say that two different physical entities are the same "self" is a metaphysical fantasy based on dualism; no materialist could possibly believe such a thing.
Bill Stoddard