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AlephNeil comments on "Ray Kurzweil and Uploading: Just Say No!", Nick Agar - Less Wrong
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How would you show that my suggestions are less likely? The thing is, it's not as though "nobody's mind has annihilated" is data that we can work from. It's impossible to have such data except in the first-person case, and even there it's impossible to know that your mind didn't annihilate last year and then recreate itself five seconds ago.
We're predisposed to say that a jarring physical discontinuity (even if afterwards, we have an agent functionally equivalent to the original) is more likely to cause mind-annihilation than no such discontinuity, but this intuition seems to be resting on nothing whatsoever.
Yes. How bizarre of us to be so predisposed.
Nice sarcasm. So it must be really easy for you to answer my question then: "How would you show that my suggestions are less likely?"
Right?
Do you have any argument that all our previous observations where jarring physical discontinuities tend to be associated with jarring mental discontinuities (like, oh I don't know, death) are wrong? Or are you just trying to put the burden of proof on me and smugly use an argument from ignorance?
Of course, we haven't had any instances of jarring physical discontinuities not being accompanied by 'functional discontinuities' (hopefully it's clear what I mean).
But the deeper point is that the whole presumption that we have 'mental continuity' (in a way that transcends functional organization) is an intuition founded on nothing.
(To be fair, even if we accept that these intuitions are indefensible, it's remains to be explained where they come from. I don't think it's all that "bizarre".)