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byrnema comments on Identity and Death - Less Wrong Discussion

9 Post author: Tenoke 18 February 2014 11:35AM

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Comment author: byrnema 19 February 2014 02:17:37PM *  1 point [-]

So it's like the same algorithm operating on different data?

To be clear, just the part about feeling like I'm "me". I think it would feel very different to be an alien, but I expect I would feel the same way about being myself.

On some level of abstraction this is both trivial and meaningless: at the bottom we all are just "particles following the same laws of physics"

I agree about the triviality. Especially for the thesis that we all share one consciousness -- that we are all a physical computation is both obvious and meaningless (everything is a physical computation) but it also means it doesn't matter if that particular computation is displaced in space or time or copied -- there's nothing unique that doesn't get carried over (if it's true that all our senses of self are essentially the same computation).