Re: personal identity

den Otter (otter@globalxs.nl)
Thu, 8 Jan 1998 16:33:06 +0100

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Harvey Newstrom <harv@gate.net> wrote:
>
> Wei Dai wrote:
> > All of them would be me, but I would not be any of them. To reiterate,
> > A is B if and only if A remembers being B, where A and B are mind states
> > (or person-stages).
>
> This is the old semantic problem that always comes up in this argument.
> They are all "me", but not *this* me. If another me survives, do I care
> that the current me dies?

I know *I* would care...The other "me's" would be more like twin brothers than
a real part of me. The very fact that they can be identified as separate beings,
proves that they can't be you. Whether they're exactly similar or not is pretty
irrelevant. If *you* die, *you're* dead, no matter how many exact copies are
out there. The surviving copies are merely a kind of "living memorial", about as
useful to you as a perpetual personal website, or a nice tombstone, for you're
no longer aware of anything.

DdO
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