This is equivocation. Under one definition, a me died. Under a much more meaningful and relevant definition, the only me died. Someone else that looks and acts and sounds like me is alive, but I am not experiencing life through his senses. He’s a different guy, even if no other person can tell the difference between us. I already explained this.
If you acknowledge that “you” is just a electrochemical reaction, you’re just like a computer program: only defined by what’s happening, not which CPU is running it.
I said that consciousness is a chemical reaction, and also that my experience of life is bound to my physical body. If you destroy my physical body, my experience of life ends. I do not care if an identical program is running on a different CPU right now, I am running on this one.
I want you to imagine for a moment that I’m about to shoot you in the head, but I explained that “it’s fine, because I just scanned your body and at some point I will make a perfect reconstruction of it. Nobody will ever know the difference between the you that I shoot in the head and the you that I reconstruct later.” You don’t want me to shoot you in the head. I know that for a fact. You know there’s a difference between the you that’s experiencing life right now, and the you that I will reconstruct elsewhere.
It doesn’t matter whether I reconstruct you later, or I’ve already done so, or if I do so at the exact moment the bullet enters your brain. I know that you know that when you get shot in the head, you die, regardless of how perfectly I can recreate you elsewhere. Does this analogy help you to understand why I think that a transporter that disintegrates your body kills you?
Believe me, I’ve been there. I’ve thought what you think for decades, but at some point it clicked and I knew.
My point is that there is no part that makes the one that died “the only you”. Your “point of view” is an illusion. Your belief in your ego being a unique continuous thing is product of how our brains functions, not a fact.
Think about the freeze example some more. Think about what would happen to “you” if you ship-of-theseus’d your brain while frozen by dividing all molecules randomly into two piles, adding copies of the respective other pile, and reassembling everything: what molecule holds the “you” particle?
This is equivocation. Under one definition, a me died. Under a much more meaningful and relevant definition, the only me died. Someone else that looks and acts and sounds like me is alive, but I am not experiencing life through his senses. He’s a different guy, even if no other person can tell the difference between us. I already explained this.
I said that consciousness is a chemical reaction, and also that my experience of life is bound to my physical body. If you destroy my physical body, my experience of life ends. I do not care if an identical program is running on a different CPU right now, I am running on this one.
I want you to imagine for a moment that I’m about to shoot you in the head, but I explained that “it’s fine, because I just scanned your body and at some point I will make a perfect reconstruction of it. Nobody will ever know the difference between the you that I shoot in the head and the you that I reconstruct later.” You don’t want me to shoot you in the head. I know that for a fact. You know there’s a difference between the you that’s experiencing life right now, and the you that I will reconstruct elsewhere.
It doesn’t matter whether I reconstruct you later, or I’ve already done so, or if I do so at the exact moment the bullet enters your brain. I know that you know that when you get shot in the head, you die, regardless of how perfectly I can recreate you elsewhere. Does this analogy help you to understand why I think that a transporter that disintegrates your body kills you?
Believe me, I’ve been there. I’ve thought what you think for decades, but at some point it clicked and I knew.
My point is that there is no part that makes the one that died “the only you”. Your “point of view” is an illusion. Your belief in your ego being a unique continuous thing is product of how our brains functions, not a fact.
Think about the freeze example some more. Think about what would happen to “you” if you ship-of-theseus’d your brain while frozen by dividing all molecules randomly into two piles, adding copies of the respective other pile, and reassembling everything: what molecule holds the “you” particle?