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TheOtherDave comments on Timeless Identity - Less Wrong
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Mm. I'm not sure I understood that properly; let me echo my understanding of your view back to you and see if I got it.
Suppose I get in something that is billed as a transporter, but which does not preserve computational continuity. Suppose, for example, that it destructively scans my body, sends the information to the destination (a process which is not instantaneous, and during which no computation can take place), and reconstructs an identical body using that information out of local raw materials at my destination.
If it turns out that computational or physical continuity is the correct answer to what preserves personal identity, then I in fact never arrive at my destination, although the thing that gets constructed at the destination (falsely) believes that it's me, knows what I know, etc. This is, as you say, an issue of great moral concern... I have been destroyed, this new person is unfairly given credit for my accomplishments and penalized for my errors, and in general we've just screwed up big time.
Conversely, if it turns out that pattern or causal continuity is the correct answer, then there's no problem.
Therefore it's important to discover which of those facts is true of the world.
Yes? This follows from your view? (If not, I apologize; I don't mean to put up strawmen, I'm genuinely misunderstanding.)
If so, your view is also that if we want to know whether that's the case or not, we should look for the simplest answer to the question "what does my personal identity comprise?" that does not introduce new confusion and which adds to our predictive capacity. (What is there to predict here?)
Yes?
EDIT: Ah, I just read this post where you say pretty much this. OK, cool; I understand your position.
I don't know what "computation" or "computational continuity" means if it's considered to be separate from causal continuity, and I'm not sure other philosophers have any standard idea of this either. From the perspective of the Planck time, your brain is doing extremely slow 'computations' right now, it shall stand motionless a quintillion ticks and more before whatever arbitrary threshold you choose to call a neural firing. Or from a faster perspective, the 50 years of intervening time might as well be one clock tick. There can be no basic ontological distinction between fast and slow computation, and aside from that I have no idea what anyone in this thread could be talking about if it's distinct from causal continuity.
(shrug) It's Mark's term and I'm usually willing to make good-faith efforts to use other people's language when talking to them. And, yes, he seems to be drawing a distinction between computation that occurs with rapid enough updates that it seems continuous to a human observer and computation that doesn't. I have no idea why he considers that distinction important to personal identity, though... as far as I can tell, the whole thing depends on the implicit idea of identity as some kind of ghost in the machine that dissipates into the ether if not actively preserved by a measurable state change every N microseconds. I haven't confirmed that, though.