10-29-2010, 12:42 PM | #421 | |
GURPS FAQ Keeper
Join Date: Mar 2006
Location: Kyïv, Ukraine
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Re: Ghosts and Mind Copies - The Identity Question
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10-29-2010, 12:48 PM | #422 |
Join Date: Oct 2004
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Re: Ghosts and Mind Copies - The Identity Question
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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10-29-2010, 12:49 PM | #423 |
Join Date: Jan 2005
Location: Stuttgart, Germany
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Re: Ghosts and Mind Copies - The Identity Question
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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10-29-2010, 12:57 PM | #424 | |
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Re: Ghosts and Mind Copies - The Identity Question
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10-29-2010, 01:03 PM | #425 |
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Join Date: Mar 2006
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Re: Ghosts and Mind Copies - The Identity Question
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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10-29-2010, 01:12 PM | #426 | |
Join Date: Jun 2005
Location: Lawrence, KS
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Re: Ghosts and Mind Copies - The Identity Question
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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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10-29-2010, 01:13 PM | #427 |
Join Date: Oct 2004
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Re: Ghosts and Mind Copies - The Identity Question
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10-29-2010, 01:16 PM | #428 | |
Join Date: Jan 2005
Location: Stuttgart, Germany
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Re: Ghosts and Mind Copies - The Identity Question
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10-29-2010, 01:16 PM | #429 |
Join Date: Oct 2004
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Re: Ghosts and Mind Copies - The Identity Question
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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10-29-2010, 01:21 PM | #430 |
Join Date: Jun 2005
Location: Lawrence, KS
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Re: Ghosts and Mind Copies - The Identity Question
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. Bill Stoddard |
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