Comment by mikk14
6 days ago
> What if they destroyed and reassembled only 0.5% of your brain? What's your dividing line? 0.36%? 0.0188%?
Apologies, I read too quickly and skipped over this. See one of my sibling comments. I concede this is problematic for my position and I need to think harder on how to solve it, but I don't think it's unsolvable. The placeholder answer is that there must be a certain level of damage -- the precise % probably doesn't matter as much as exactly which parts you destroy -- that is incompatible with keeping continuity.
For the rest, as a social construct, if we incinerate me to create a clone of me that is identical to the original at the subatomic level I agree that, for everyone else in society, it is me. But my self has still died and whatever replaced it is having its own experiences. And it matters very little what everybody else thinks: if tomorrow an imposter convinces everybody else that they are me, they aren't me for me. Their experiences aren't magically beamed to my brain.
Your tennis ball example is again a textbook dualist position. You can have a tennis match with different balls which is functionally identical to have it with the same ball, because the ball in the game is an abstraction that lives _outside_ the ball itself. But, assuming balls can feel when they are hit by the racket, the ball you used in the previous point and now is lying on the sideline does not feel being hit when the next point starts with another ball.
There's nothing you need to solve because definitions of words are subjective social constructs that are neither correct or incorrect. Definitions are axioms.
You have chosen to define the word "you" to require continuity, under some rubric. By that definition, a copy of you isn't really you. That's correct under your axiom, but it is incorrect under other axioms.
The functionalists I am trying to channel in this conversation have a different subjectively chosen definition of that same word, that is internally coherent assuming functionalism is a true description of the world.
You may wish to argue that their definition/axiom lacks utility, but that's subjective and cannot breach the boundary into a claim about objective correctness (logical deductions) under the axiom.
> You can have a tennis match with different balls which is functionally identical to have it with the same ball, because the ball in the game is an abstraction that lives _outside_ the ball itself.
This sounds like solipsism not dualism vs. monism. In non-solipsistic monism, social constructs can exist outside of a collection of minds, because other minds also exist.
Sorry, perhaps I just don't know what "monism" truly means, I admit my ignorance, but if we just limit ourselves to the mind-body problem, I just meant that a dualist position considers the mind as separate from the body, and monism rejects that.
The functionalist point of view you propose doesn't seem to be to be useful at all in this context. Let's backtrack. The original example I provided you when you asked about whether there can be somebody proposing monism and at the same time holding dualist positions was asking:
"If I do mind uploading, do I die?"
You can be creative in redefining what the word "I" means, which is what you engaged with, but when push comes to shove and I do the actual mind uploading, then the self that experienced my qualia since birth will irreparably stop experiencing qualia (aka: dying) and be replaced by another self. You're free to call that self as if it was me, and be all happy it can do the same things I could do, but that's not gonna change the fact that my previous self (the only "I" that matters to me) died.
Would you step in the Star Trek teleporter knowing that you will die, and think you haven't died just because you have been replaced by a different being that is functionally equivalent to you? I sure as hell will never do it.
I pretty much agree with your position. The thought occurs to me, though, that via this same definition we die every time we go to sleep or are out under anesthesia. Maybe even every moment is a tiny death and rebirth. The real difference between these events and being "teleported" is that you do them without fear (maybe some fear for anesthesia) and without being any worse off for the lack of continuity.