Both parts you quoted are saying that the notion of personal identity I’m describing is (or at least can be) “fine to live with.” You might disagree with this, but I’m not following where the contradiction is between the two.
So if I tried to live with this idea “for a full week”, except at the end of the week I know I’d be shot and replaced, I’d be freaking out, and I think you would be too.
What I meant was to try imagining that you disappear every second and are replaced by someone similar, and try imagining that over the course of a full week. (I think getting shot is adding distraction here—I don’t think anyone wants someone they care about to experience getting shot.)
It’s pretty obvious that the connected conscious experience I’ve (I hope!) experienced my whole life, would, at that transition, come to an end.
I don’t find it obvious that there’s something meaningful or important about the “connected conscious experience.” If I imagine a future person with my personality and memories, it’s not clear to me that this person lacks anything that “Holden a moment from now” has.
Another way of putting it; in your view, the only reason death is undesirable is that it permanently ends your relationships and projects. I also care about this aspect, but for me, and I think most non-religious people, death is primarily undesirable because I don’t want to sleep forever!
I don’t think death is like sleeping forever, I think it’s like simply not existing at all. In a particular, important sense, I think the person I am at this moment will no longer exist after it.
They contradict each other in the sense that your full theory, since it includes the particular consequence that vaporization is chill, is I think not something anyone but a small minority would be fine to live with. Quantum mechanics and atheism impose no such demands. It’s not too strong a claim to call this idea fine to live with when you’re just going about your daily life, ignoring the vaporization part. “Fine to live with” has to include every consequence, not just the ones that are indeed fine to live with. I interpreted the second quote as arguing that not just you but the general public could get used to this theory, in the same way they got used to quantum mechanics, because it doesn’t really affect their day-to-day. This is why I brought up your brain-scan hypothetical; here, the vaporization-is-chill consequence clearly affects their daily lives by offering a potentially life-or-death scenario.
I don’t think death is like sleeping forever, I think it’s like simply not existing at all. In a particular, important sense, I think the person I am at this moment will no longer exist after it.
Let’s say I die. A week later, a new medical procedure is able to revive me. What is the subjective conscious experience of the physical brain during this week? There is none—exactly like during a dreamless sleep. Of course death isn’t actually like sleeping forever; what’s relevant is that the conscious experience associated with the dead brain atom-pile matches that of the alive, sleeping brain, and also that of a rock.
What I meant was to try imagining that you disappear every second and are replaced by someone similar, and try imagining that over the course of a full week. (I think getting shot is adding distraction here—I don’t think anyone wants someone they care about to experience getting shot.)
It’s not the gunshot that matters here. If at the end of this week I knew I’d painlessly, peacefully pass away, only to be reassembled immediately nearby with my family none the wiser, I would be freaking out just as much as in the gunshot scenario. The shorter replacemet timescale (a second instead of a week) is the real distraction; it brings in some weird and mostly irrelevant intuitions, even though they’re functionally equivalent theories. Here’s what I think would happen in the every-second scenario, assuming that I knew your theory was correct: I would quickly realize (albeit over the course of many separate lives and with the thoughts of fundamentally different people) that each successive Martin dies immediately, and that in my one-second wake are thousands of former Martins sleeping dreamlessly. This may eventually become fine to live with only to the extent that the person living it doesn’t actually believe it—even if they believe they believe it. If I stayed true to my convictions and remained mentally alright, I’d probably spend most of my time staring at a picture of my family or something. This is why your call to try living with this idea for a week rings hollow to me. It’s like a deep-down atheist trying to believe in God for a week; the emotional reaction can’t be faked, even if you genuinely believe you believe in God.
I don’t find it obvious that there’s something meaningful or important about the “connected conscious experience.” If I imagine a future person with my personality and memories, it’s not clear to me that this person lacks anything that “Holden a moment from now” has.
I agree, this future person lacks nothing—from future person’s perspective. From the perspective of about-to-be vaporized present person, who has the strongest claim to their own identity, future person lack any meaningful connection to present person beyond the superficial, as present person’s brain’s conscious experience will soon be permanently nothing, a state that future person’s brain doesn’t share. Through my normal life, even if all my brain’s atoms eventually get replaced, it seems there is this ‘connected consciousness’ preserving one particular personal identity, rather than a new but otherwise identical one replacing it wholesale like in the teleporter hypothetical.
If I died, was medically revived a week later, and found a newly constructed Martin doing his thing, I would be pretty annoyed, and I think we’d both realize, given full mutual knowledge of our respective origins, that Martin’s personal identity belongs to me and not him.
I don’t intend these vague outlines to be an actual competing conception of personal identity, I have no idea what the real answer is. My core argument is that any theory that renders death-and-replacement functionally equivalent to normal life is unsatisfactory. You did inspire me to check out Reasons and Persons from the library; I hope I’m proven wrong by some thought experiment, and also that I’m not about to die.
Both parts you quoted are saying that the notion of personal identity I’m describing is (or at least can be) “fine to live with.” You might disagree with this, but I’m not following where the contradiction is between the two.
What I meant was to try imagining that you disappear every second and are replaced by someone similar, and try imagining that over the course of a full week. (I think getting shot is adding distraction here—I don’t think anyone wants someone they care about to experience getting shot.)
I don’t find it obvious that there’s something meaningful or important about the “connected conscious experience.” If I imagine a future person with my personality and memories, it’s not clear to me that this person lacks anything that “Holden a moment from now” has.
I don’t think death is like sleeping forever, I think it’s like simply not existing at all. In a particular, important sense, I think the person I am at this moment will no longer exist after it.
They contradict each other in the sense that your full theory, since it includes the particular consequence that vaporization is chill, is I think not something anyone but a small minority would be fine to live with. Quantum mechanics and atheism impose no such demands. It’s not too strong a claim to call this idea fine to live with when you’re just going about your daily life, ignoring the vaporization part. “Fine to live with” has to include every consequence, not just the ones that are indeed fine to live with. I interpreted the second quote as arguing that not just you but the general public could get used to this theory, in the same way they got used to quantum mechanics, because it doesn’t really affect their day-to-day. This is why I brought up your brain-scan hypothetical; here, the vaporization-is-chill consequence clearly affects their daily lives by offering a potentially life-or-death scenario.
Let’s say I die. A week later, a new medical procedure is able to revive me. What is the subjective conscious experience of the physical brain during this week? There is none—exactly like during a dreamless sleep. Of course death isn’t actually like sleeping forever; what’s relevant is that the conscious experience associated with the dead brain atom-pile matches that of the alive, sleeping brain, and also that of a rock.
It’s not the gunshot that matters here. If at the end of this week I knew I’d painlessly, peacefully pass away, only to be reassembled immediately nearby with my family none the wiser, I would be freaking out just as much as in the gunshot scenario. The shorter replacemet timescale (a second instead of a week) is the real distraction; it brings in some weird and mostly irrelevant intuitions, even though they’re functionally equivalent theories. Here’s what I think would happen in the every-second scenario, assuming that I knew your theory was correct: I would quickly realize (albeit over the course of many separate lives and with the thoughts of fundamentally different people) that each successive Martin dies immediately, and that in my one-second wake are thousands of former Martins sleeping dreamlessly. This may eventually become fine to live with only to the extent that the person living it doesn’t actually believe it—even if they believe they believe it. If I stayed true to my convictions and remained mentally alright, I’d probably spend most of my time staring at a picture of my family or something. This is why your call to try living with this idea for a week rings hollow to me. It’s like a deep-down atheist trying to believe in God for a week; the emotional reaction can’t be faked, even if you genuinely believe you believe in God.
I agree, this future person lacks nothing—from future person’s perspective. From the perspective of about-to-be vaporized present person, who has the strongest claim to their own identity, future person lack any meaningful connection to present person beyond the superficial, as present person’s brain’s conscious experience will soon be permanently nothing, a state that future person’s brain doesn’t share. Through my normal life, even if all my brain’s atoms eventually get replaced, it seems there is this ‘connected consciousness’ preserving one particular personal identity, rather than a new but otherwise identical one replacing it wholesale like in the teleporter hypothetical.
If I died, was medically revived a week later, and found a newly constructed Martin doing his thing, I would be pretty annoyed, and I think we’d both realize, given full mutual knowledge of our respective origins, that Martin’s personal identity belongs to me and not him.
I don’t intend these vague outlines to be an actual competing conception of personal identity, I have no idea what the real answer is. My core argument is that any theory that renders death-and-replacement functionally equivalent to normal life is unsatisfactory. You did inspire me to check out Reasons and Persons from the library; I hope I’m proven wrong by some thought experiment, and also that I’m not about to die.