Reddit reply Comment on Me-ness | IDENTITY | CONSCIOUSNESS

"I guess the question is would that be a copy or you"

good question. I think one can be in two or more places at once and still be the same person. At least one can conceive that would seem hypothetically possible with enough power. Note that even if being the same you wouldn't necessarily have to be aware the copies exist, the copies could be unaware of each other, yet be the same individual without shared memory. 

Take for example if you traveled to the past, which may or may not be possible, if you travel to the past. That was you in the past, and it is you also who are the time traveler, but the past you is unaware of the future you. In fact you could have amnesia and not be aware of past you while past you is not aware of future you. Could also work if you came from the future to the present, it would be you but you wouldn't know nor share working memory.

That said, more knowledge is needed of the nature of consciousness, because the idea of simultaneous copies being you leads down quite a deep rabbit hole.

Limited Meaningful path(s) vs All possible paths equally valid

A question that arises if one starts to analyze their surroundings is what is the cause of them, as individuals, existing at this point in this specific time and place with this specific series of events, many of which can drastically overpower what little options one has in this highly limited state.   Though some do not seem to question the limitations of the human state, taking it for given, due to the accumulation of the works of the imagination and their ever more realistic displays more and more are coming to question these limitations.    Though some still dismiss the possibility of transcending such limitations as unrealistic, or fantasy.

But even if these limitations were only temporary, the present state still demands an explanation.

One possibility, the multiverse like possibility, is that all possible events and actions take place one path or possibility not being ruled out, but basically everything is possible and is, someone was bound to experience this.   Another possibility is that even though everything is possible in principle, there are certain set of paths for which there is predilection, that are favored, perhaps by something akin to logical necessity, the rest of the paths confined to fiction or subset worlds of the main line or structure.

When one looks at mathematical statements once a series of symbols or statements is assigned a particular meaning, what derives from them and their combination is constrained by the necessity of their validity due to their being part of the body of truth.

Counterfactuals

The basic idea of counterfactual theories of causation is that the meaning of causal claims can be explained in terms of counterfactual conditionals of the form “If A had not occurred, C would not have occurred”. While counterfactual analyses have been given of type-causal concepts, most counterfactual analyses have focused on singular causal or token-causal claims of the form “event c caused event e”. -source

While the logic of counterfactuals is sensible when it comes to describing objects and possibilities, it could be the case that if there exists deeper causality to the world, an event running counter to its actual evolution could very well be a logical impossibility given the same state, logically inconsistent if it were different.   It could be no other way.

There are those that argue against determinism, but to truly differ from determinism you would need randomness, not just pseudorandomness, but actual true randomness.

These stochastic processes are, in theory, completely unpredictable, and the theory's assertions of unpredictability are subject to experimental test. This is in contrast to the common paradigm of pseudo-random number generation commonly implemented in computer programs or cryptographic hardware. -hardware true random number generator

But true randomness itself could very well be not just an ill defined concept but an illogical concept.  The past is not subject to change, and the present and future that follow are highly dependent on that lack of change.   No other decision could have been made, even the most minute of decisions would have significantly changed the positions of even atoms in the atmosphere making them inconsistent with their present and future positions.   A radioactive atoms, of which there are some in the food and air, and in the drinks, it cannot be the case that it ever decayed anywhere in the body of the long line of ancestors of present humans in such a way as to result in adding the last mutation to make a cell into a lethal cancer prior to their lives reaching the point where such was the case if it was the case.

Not just Einstein or Hitler, but even all those of lesser fame, their contribution upon the future cannot be changed by a change to the past, the past is fixed in stone, or it would make it inconsistent with the present and the future.

Supported by Block time, the idea that relativity suggests absolute simultaneity does not exist, the absolute present does not exist, but that the nature of what we call the present as well as the future does not have a boundary or transition with the past, but all is equal in nature to the past.

The foundation of the philosophy of eternalism, all moments eternal, atemporal.

Eternalism is a philosophical approach to the ontological nature of time, which takes the view that all existence in time is equally real, as opposed to presentism or the growing block universe theory of time, in which at least the future is not the same as any other time.^[1] Some forms of eternalism give time a similar ontology to that of space, as a dimension, with different times being as real as different places, and future events are "already there" in the same sense other places are already there, and that there is no objective flow of time.^[2] It is sometimes referred to as the "block time" or "block universe" theory due to its description of space-time as an unchanging four-dimensional "block",^[3] as opposed to the view of the world as a three-dimensional space modulated by the passage of time. -Eternalism

It could be that such a structure, may have an internal logic, a reason why certain laws apply, and even a certain set of events takes place.

Perhaps.   Perhaps there is underlying structure and logic to it all.   It just seems that underneath the clay of all the possibilities, many of which may be truly nonsensical, within some path or paths with seeming meaning and logic may lay.

If it were that all paths are possible or real in some sense, one wonders what defines or determines the path experienced and the constraints within it.

It all boils down to the nature of truth, is it some meaningless blob where all possibilities are equally valid, or is there a reason for certain things to be in the grander scheme of things, an underlying structure and logic to reality, to existence itself.   Right now mathematics suggests that once an initial series of elements is taken into account, from these emerges a vast body of structure, and not all combinations, not all possibilities or statements are logically valid, are true, some are and some aren't.   Does what holds for mathematics hold in the grander scheme of things of the real world?

Comment on possibility of technological resurrection

We don't know what happens to the mind after death. I believe in mathematical realism, and Ibelieve simulations do not necessary depend on specific implementation to exist. I believe they exist independently as abstract potential patterns( in some real number, maybe a transcendental like pi exist numerical sequences representing all the temporal states of a simulation, and these have existed outside of time eternally).

If you burn all the books of isaac asimov and all the copies of them, the actual patterns haven't been destroyed even if no local physical implementation of them exist. As has been often said even random monkeys typing with enough time will produce these works again along with all possible books past present and future.

Now I believe the brain is hardware that is simulating sensory perception and an accompanying observer. I believe this simulation or sequence of patterns is eternal and has always existed outside of time, it exists independent of the brain's existence. If the multiverse is true it is likely that infinite copies exist and are taking the exact same sequence of actions at the same time.

Now I do not believe this means that one is intrinsically immortal. There are sequence of things that have defined beginning middle and end even if they are timeless, eternal in nature.

What I do think is that death remains an open question, we just don't know what happens to the continuity of consciousness, does it just end there or does it continue somehow? For example take a particular simulation of an ai with perfect checkers play against another ai with perfect checkers play, the game iirc will end in a draw. Now if you destroy the computers on which this simulation is being run, you don't actually destroy that particular perfect play game it exists outside of time along with all imperfect plays in a combinatorial space.(the related data for perfect play is about 200GB iirc).

If I take a book of hamlet and burn it midway through, the ideas the play is not actually destroyed only my access to it. If I was a character in the play i would be none the wiser, the ideas , thoughts, words are immune to corruption. In the brain the conscious observer is the main protagonist of the simulation, a simulation that is independent of substrate, as patterns while implemented in matter are independent of the matter in which they've been implemented. In theory it is perfectly plausible that the mind keeps on going somehow(for example, maybe the multiuniverse is true and the exact mind simulation is being run in parallel an infinite number of times, when the hardware is destroyed in one of these worlds, the individual simply continues in the rest of the copies as the actual interaction is exact it is conceivable the individual exists simultaneously at the same time across all copies.).

But again I restate we don't know what happens, we're only consciously aware of what our memory allows us to be aware of. Yet we know from experiments, drugs, accidents, etc that in some cases one can have no recollection of times when one was conscious. Do we solely exist in one body at a time? Even if so given that our brain has zero memory access to anything that could occur outside the brain's sensory input and its internal processes, we just can't know if our memory can be considered to provide the limits of what we're actually conscious of. If time travel is possible, we could be in two bodies at a time, past and future or more if repeated travelling occurs, and yet despite our conscious existence being in multiple places at the same time we wouldn't be aware of it, while hypothetical this hints that it is conceivable. We could conceive of a ship of theseus thought experiment, were a man and his wife's brain and body are slowly replaced with each others. Eventually the man becomes the wife and the wife becomes the man, did the man stop being the man at any point? how about the wife? or was the man both man and wife always but not consciously aware of this because of memory separation?I'm reminded of this story