Quote:
Originally Posted by whswhs
But your use of "each mind" already begs the question: It equivocates between the qualitative identity of mind and the numerical identity of mind. Two minds can be qualitatively identical if they contain the same information at some point. But that's not sufficient for numerical identity. It is not clear that the mind in an organic body is or can be numerically identical to the digital ghost based on that mind residing in a cybershell or bioshell, given the specific technological assumptions of THS about the uploading process.
Bill Stoddard
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We still haven't seen the physical meaning of numerical identity. We can't define it for an entity in any meaningful way. The only way to find out what is the numerical identity of an entity is to ask 'What do we
think was the numeric identity of the entity when we [arbitrarily] assigned it?'. So basically it's a case of 'I know it when I see it'.