Nick_Tarleton comments on A Priori - Less Wrong

32 Post author: Eliezer_Yudkowsky 08 October 2007 09:02PM

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Comment author: Nick_Tarleton 10 October 2007 01:24:46PM 3 points [-]

But if you're going to start talking about identity, then you need to do some real philosophy.

"Identity" is not magic. There is no abiding personal essence, just continuity of memory. A real philosopher said that, by the way.

I do think there are important unanswered questions in the philosophy of mind, but this isn't one of them. (Although one of them is "where is our thinking still contaminated by the idea of magic personal identity?", which I suspect is at the root of several apparent paradoxes.)