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Old 10-29-2010, 01:22 PM   #431
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Default Re: Ghosts and Mind Copies - The Identity Question

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Originally Posted by vicky_molokh View Post
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.
If that is the threshold, are Vicky-2010 and Vicky-(his one year younger brother 2010) the same person ? I am pretty sure that a one year old younger brother will look a lot more like you than a 26 years younger being. Third parties will have a harder time to distinguish between two brothers one year apart than between two bodies 26 years apart.
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Old 10-29-2010, 02:01 PM   #432
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Default Re: Ghosts and Mind Copies - The Identity Question

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Um, you need to look at your terminology, a mind is insubstantial, it cannot affect the substantial.
No, mind is informational, not insubstantial. Insubstantial doesn't interact with substantial.
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Old 10-29-2010, 02:08 PM   #433
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Default Re: Ghosts and Mind Copies - The Identity Question

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If that is the threshold, are Vicky-2010 and Vicky-(his one year younger brother 2010) the same person ? I am pretty sure that a one year old younger brother will look a lot more like you than a 26 years younger being. Third parties will have a harder time to distinguish between two brothers one year apart than between two bodies 26 years apart.
Third parties maybe, but there are things that are pretty unique. Brains have more places for unique markers than fingerprints, no?
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Old 10-29-2010, 02:11 PM   #434
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Default Re: Ghosts and Mind Copies - The Identity Question

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No, mind is informational, not insubstantial. Insubstantial doesn't interact with substantial.
How do you imagine that your so-called informational mind is interacting with the substantial?
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Old 10-29-2010, 02:12 PM   #435
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No, mind is informational, not insubstantial. Insubstantial doesn't interact with substantial.
Information, qua information, does not interact with anything. Information is stored in the patterned state of a physical carrier, and it's the physical carrier that interacts with things. As when I speak, and the air vibrations caused by my vocal organs impact other people's eardrums.

And the information stored in my copy of Transhuman Space has that set of pages as a physical carrier; the information in your copy has a different set of pages as a physical carrier. I can't read yours, and you can't read mine. The two books aren't causally or mystically attuned to each other across the thousands of miles between California and Ukraine. If I write a marginal note in mine, no change occurs in your pages.

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Old 10-29-2010, 02:43 PM   #436
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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.
When it is beamed, the particles/waves of which the beam consist (these are definitely physical, substantial) are the medium.
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Old 10-29-2010, 02:56 PM   #437
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How do you imagine that your so-called informational mind is interacting with the substantial?
It's complicated. Roughly the same way laws of physics influence the interaction of two planets in close orbit. I do not consider myself possessing the gift of language good enough to explain.
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Old 10-29-2010, 03:04 PM   #438
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It's complicated. Roughly the same way laws of physics influence the interaction of two planets in close orbit. I do not consider myself possessing the gift of language good enough to explain.
How is that belief different from how other religions say the soul interacts with the substantial world?
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Old 10-29-2010, 03:13 PM   #439
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It's complicated. Roughly the same way laws of physics influence the interaction of two planets in close orbit. I do not consider myself possessing the gift of language good enough to explain.
The laws of physics don't influence the planets at all. The laws of physics are propositions that make up part of the theoretical and conceptual structure of the science of physics, which exists in human minds and in informational media created by human beings such as books and computer files. Human minds do not have the power to control the orbits of the planets.

If I wrote a computer program to emulate planetary orbits, I would need to put (some form of) the laws of physics into it, in order to tell it how to do the calculations needed to update the positions and velocities of the planets. The files that describe the planets have no causal power on their own.

But that's not true of the actual planets. The planets themselves create gravitational fields, and respond to the solar gravitational field and each other's gravitational fields. The planets are not sapient, or even sentient, and cannot know or calculate their own physical interactions; they just act and interact in accord with their physical natures and states. And there are no planetary intelligences guiding them to do so, and no cosmic computer running the solar system through successive orbits. Things just happen as they happen. The orbits are calculable because things have determinate natures and can only act according to those natures; the calculations describe the resulting action but do not control it.

That is, the planets don't need some outside agency or force to make them move on specific orbits. They have specific masses, forms, positions, and velocities. Being what they are, they must do what they do. It's a necessity of their own natures, and not of some external force or will.

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Old 10-29-2010, 03:40 PM   #440
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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
Some interesting new stuff you got there. Thanks.
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