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ialdabaoth comments on Causal Universes - Less Wrong
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Moreso, marginally different versions of people are replacing the originals all the time, by the natural physical processes of the universe. If continuity of body is unnecessary for personal identity, why is continuity of their temporal substrate?
Identity is a process, not a physical state. There is a difference between continuity of body, which is physical, and continuity of identity, which is a process. If I replace a hard drive from a running computer, it may still run all of the same processes. The same could be true of processors, or memory. But if I terminate the process, the physical substrate being the same is irrelevant.
I'm not even certain that identity is a process. The process of consciousness shuts down every time we go to sleep, and gets reconstituted from our memories the next time we wake up (with intermittent consciousness-like processes that occur in-between, while we dream).
It seems like the closest thing to "identity" that we have, these days, is a sort of nebulous locus of indistinguishably similar dynamic data structures, regardless of the substrate that is encoding or processing those structures. It seems a rather flimsy thing to hang an "I" on, though.
I'm unclear on your logic; whatever the mechanism, the "cogito" exists. (demonstrably to myself, and presumably to yourself.) Given this, why is it too flimsy? Why does it matter is there is a complex "nebulous locus" that instantiates it - it's there, and it works, and conveys, to me, the impression that I am.
The 'cogito', as you put it, exists in the sense that dynamic processes certainly have effect on the world, and those processes also tend to generate a sense of identity.
Just because it exists and has effect, though, is no reason to take its suggestions about the nature of that identity seriously.
Example: you probably tend to feel that you make choices from somewhere inside your head, as a response to your environment, rather than that your environment comes together in such a way that you react predictably to it, and coincidentally generate a sense of 'choice' as part of that feeling. Most people do this; it causes them to tend to attempt to apply willpower directly to "forcing" themselves to make the "choices" they think will produce the correct outcome, rather than crafting their environment so that they naturally react in such a way to produce that outcome, and coincidentally generate a sense that they "chose" to produce that outcome.
Wu wei wu, and all that.
And this is why we (barely) have checkpointing. If you close you web browser, and launch a saved copy from five minutes ago, is the session a different one?