@abacusvolute,
Quote:Consider a person with severe amnesia who has lost all memory. This person, call him Mr. Smith, before losing memory had a unique identity, had a clear idea of his own self, and his past experiences. After losing all memory, Mr. Smith also loses all of these assets as well. Although Mr. Smith has the same genetic material, he no longer has the same "consciousness".
There have been instances of this, with those related to such a case making comments like: "We were elated to discover that our daughter was still alive, but still feel a bit of loss because it is as if a different person is occupying her body."
Quote: Now consider another person. This person may or may not have the same genetic material as you, but he shares the exact same memories with you, and has the idea of his own self. Everything he and you do in your lives will always be the same. Although you may be different ages, might have lived at different times–does this person have the same consciousness that you do? I think so. One can also argue that to have the same thoughts, the same way of thinking as the 2 people discussed above do, they must have the same genetic material–the same brain chemistry, features etc.
The latter is more the case. A purely mnemonic clone would diverge to some degree from the actions / judgments / interests of the original body source in the same life circumstances. Taking into account accumulations of epigenetic differences over time, even two identical twins that magically acquired the exact same memory at, say age 13, would at least differ slightly over time both physically and mentally via the former potentially affecting brain operations trivially.
Quote:I propose that memory has as much to do with consciousness as genetic material–maybe more. In my previous essay: 'When History repeats itself for the Nth time", I brought up the possibility that this world may be created trillions of years from now, perhaps with a human being bearing the same genetic material that you do now. One person worthily noted that although this person may come to exist, he will not be you. And now, I ask if this person had the same memories, same sense of self, same experiences–would he be you?
Internally, each nonsynchronous copy would feel it is the genuine, unique, one-and-only; but the overaching conditions of reality that they were all embedded in would still diachronically distinguish them by having them in those different eras. Also, the answer to "would this future replicate be you?" can be answered by blowing one's brains out, in a scenario where the replicate in the future is magically prevented from doing so (the only diverging incident in one's life compared to that of the replicate, up to that point). Unless one's experience inexplicably "leaps" and continues from this era where the suicide happened to the parallel era where it did not, then obviously "your continuity over a finite timespan" would not be identical to the future replicate's.
Quote:For if he is, then we may truly be eternal beings.
If block-time or related were the case, we'd be eternal anyway. But that's another open-ended noumenal situation, as long as physics is plagued by multiple models that don't get culled or new ones that scrap the old.
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