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Old 10-29-2010, 12:42 PM   #421
vicky_molokh
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Default Re: Ghosts and Mind Copies - The Identity Question

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Originally Posted by Ze'Manel Cunha View Post
That's debatable, having your soul ascend into heaven can be described as your mind now being in an astral/spiritual medium.

Having your soul join into a greater whole, be it Nirvana or God, can be described as information/data merger as your mind enters the information storage medium of Nirvana/God.

As Bill quoted, transhumanist singularity is "the rapture of the nerds."
Is Heaven/Nirvana/God a medium? I think not, as they're not substantial in most cosmologies.
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Old 10-29-2010, 12:48 PM   #422
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Default Re: Ghosts and Mind Copies - The Identity Question

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This isn't getting anywhere. To me, a person is the information/mind,
But if you say that Vicky-1999 and Vicky-2000 and presumably Vicky-1985 and Vicky-2010 are the same person, you clearly accept the use of wordlines to establish identity as well. The information in them is not identical. I do not see how you could call Vicky-1985 and Vicky-2010 the same person if you would just look at informational content and whether third parties can keep them apart. But if you accept wordlines, you have to explain why a destructive uploading doesn´t end one. Note that the process takes time. There is a time when Vicky-Original is no more, but Vicky-Upload is not yet complete. During those moments, are you alive or dead ? Does the wordline continue or not ?
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Old 10-29-2010, 12:49 PM   #423
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Default Re: Ghosts and Mind Copies - The Identity Question

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Is Heaven/Nirvana/God a medium? I think not, as they're not substantial in most cosmologies.
Insubstantiality is a medium, the plane of existence where the essence/soul transcends to, the concept ports over directly to information/mind traveling from a physical body to a data medium.
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Old 10-29-2010, 12:57 PM   #424
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Default Re: Ghosts and Mind Copies - The Identity Question

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But if you say that Vicky-1999 and Vicky-2000 and presumably Vicky-1985 and Vicky-2010 are the same person, you clearly accept the use of wordlines to establish identity as well. The information in them is not identical. I do not see how you could call Vicky-1985 and Vicky-2010 the same person if you would just look at informational content and whether third parties can keep them apart. But if you accept wordlines, you have to explain why a destructive uploading doesn´t end one. Note that the process takes time. There is a time when Vicky-Original is no more, but Vicky-Upload is not yet complete. During those moments, are you alive or dead ? Does the wordline continue or not ?
Please read again. I see V84 and V2010 as the 'same' not meaning they are the same to every bit of information (and to every particle of the medium in which they are recorded), but rather that they are within the threshold of being considered the same for practical purposes. It is a way of reconciling the precedental claim that the person-0y.o. and the person-one-second-before-death are the same person with the need to establish at least a vague standard of practical sameness.
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Old 10-29-2010, 01:03 PM   #425
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Default Re: Ghosts and Mind Copies - The Identity Question

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Insubstantiality is a medium, the plane of existence where the essence/soul transcends to, the concept ports over directly to information/mind traveling from a physical body to a data medium.
I guess this is how I see the difference between a mind and a soul. A mind requires a substantial entity to be recorded on in order to actively exist, let alone function in any sort of way, while a soul doesn't. The question arises, if a soul can affect the actions of a body, then how does it do it? If it's insubstantial, it cannot affect the substantial. If it's informational, then it is affected by the medium in which it must be stored (so TL12^ brain editing hardware can reforge souls, yay!). If it is substantial, well, it gets to affect the body and the mind, but it becomes a big disappointment from a mystical PoV.
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Old 10-29-2010, 01:12 PM   #426
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Default Re: Ghosts and Mind Copies - The Identity Question

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I see V84 and V2010 as the 'same' not meaning they are the same to every bit of information (and to every particle of the medium in which they are recorded), but rather that they are within the threshold of being considered the same for practical purposes. It is a way of reconciling the precedental claim that the person-0y.o. and the person-one-second-before-death are the same person with the need to establish at least a vague standard of practical sameness.
But you do not actually establish an informational level that is sufficient to qualify them as "the same." If it's "as much information in common as in the brain of a newborn and the brain of the [same] person on their deathbed," then I put it to you that that newborn brain very likely has that much information in common with every human adult. For that matter, they could very well have that much in common with every adult chimpanzee, bonobo, or gorilla. If you really take your "informational" similarity criterion seriously, then that newborn counts as "the same person" as billions of other people.

The fact is that you don't take that criterion seriously. It's just a handwave to let you claim to fit other people's sense that they are "the same person" throughout the course of their lives into your theoretical model of identity, rather than confronting the contradiction between your concept of identity and the concept that most people use. You set the margins of acceptable difference quite wide when it's the same worldline, but narrower when it's a different worldline. It's kind of like what Americans call a "grandfather clause" in law: a case where something wouldn't be acceptable under the legal definition but is accepted because of established precedent.

There's a Spanish proverb: "Take what you like," said God, "take it and pay for it." You can have your definition of identity as similarity of pattern. But what you have to pay is either accepting that large numbers of different people have the same identity, or accepting that one person can have many different identities between birth and death. Because any measure of similarity narrow enough to reject the first will require the second.

Bill Stoddard
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Old 10-29-2010, 01:13 PM   #427
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But only reincarnist religions provide a new medium.
Many christians elieve that God will recreate the earth and give us new bodies after the last judgement.
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Old 10-29-2010, 01:16 PM   #428
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Default Re: Ghosts and Mind Copies - The Identity Question

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I guess this is how I see the difference between a mind and a soul. A mind requires a substantial entity to be recorded on in order to actively exist, let alone function in any sort of way, while a soul doesn't. The question arises, if a soul can affect the actions of a body, then how does it do it? If it's insubstantial, it cannot affect the substantial. If it's informational, then it is affected by the medium in which it must be stored (so TL12^ brain editing hardware can reforge souls, yay!). If it is substantial, well, it gets to affect the body and the mind, but it becomes a big disappointment from a mystical PoV.
Um, you need to look at your terminology, a mind is insubstantial, it cannot affect the substantial.
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Old 10-29-2010, 01:16 PM   #429
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Is Heaven/Nirvana/God a medium? I think not, as they're not substantial in most cosmologies.
Why is that a problem ? When your mind is beamed by lasercom from earth to mars it has no physical medium for the transmission time, but if I understand you correctly you argue that Vicky-Mars is identical with Vicky-Earth.
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Old 10-29-2010, 01:21 PM   #430
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Default Re: Ghosts and Mind Copies - The Identity Question

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But only reincarnist religions provide a new medium.
That is actually false. The history of both Christianity and Islam demonstrates this.

Christianity started out with the Resurrection: Christ will return, the dead will rise, and you'll reawaken from the sleep of death in a restored and glorified version of your old body. And that didn't seem very problematic when it was "after three days," or even when it was "many now living will never die." It was the body being restored, or the bones being clothed in flesh. They had no idea how memory worked; they could suppose that the memory would be restored with consciousness. So you had a material medium: the risen body.

But as centuries passed, and people suffered total body destruction, or bones were reduced to dust, that model stopped being so convincing. The argument began to be made that the risen body was not "the same" body, but "a copy," and therefore not the same person, and therefore Christ's promise of eternal life was a fraud.

The Muslims cut the Gordian knot on this: Muhammad says, "Has Allah not power to create your like?" and Islam just accepts that "like" enough equals "the same." In other words, it shares your view of identity. So does Tipler, in The Physics of Immortality.

But standard Christian theology does not. And so, instead, it systematized the notion of the soul as an immaterial medium that could carry personal identity, memory, and the self. And it distinguished between the Particular Judgment, when the soul went to heaven or hell after the person died, and the Universal Judgment, when the soul went back to the risen body, and all flesh was judged together, and everyone physically rose or fell in a material medium. The soul was, in effect, a supernatural flash drive onto which the body's memory was backed up until God could get around to providing a new body.

In both cases, you have a medium.

In contrast, while Hinduism has a medium, Buddhism does not; Buddhist doctrine is that there is no inner self, but only attachments. Let go of the attachments, and poof! It's the attachments that reincarnate.

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