Why do some people doubt reality, again?

[Chiki]

Are we to assume for the sake of this experiment that both halves are somehow functioning as though together? That would contradict the reality of brain chemistry would it not? A person is the sum total of their pieces, and their loss effects them in different and numerous ways.

I'm not sure what you mean by "as though together." If you mean functioning as people, then yes. They both go on to have separate lives, regardless of how limited. Which one is the original? It's possible to live with one half of your brain.

Then that entity is yet an entity. They are deceived into believing something that is false but they are not a non-entity deceived into believing they are an entity.

I'm also not completely sure what you're saying here. I'm not denying that something which is being deceived exists; but if something is being deceived into thinking that it is Hitler, then it doesn't follow that it is Hitler.

[Esau of Isaac]

I'm not sure what you mean by "as though together." If you mean functioning as people, then yes. They both go on to have separate lives, regardless of how limited. Which one is the original? It's possible to live with one half of your brain.

Neither is the original. They are both pieces of the whole. A person is an amalgamation of smaller parts functioning interdependently.

And while we can quibble over the details the larger picture remains intact. When looking at a line of paint that moves from blood red to sky blue, it is impossible to say where for sure one becomes the other, but not whether there is a blue and red.

I'm also not completely sure what you're saying here. I'm not denying that something which is being deceived exists; but if something is being deceived into thinking that it is Hitler, then it doesn't follow that it is Hitler.

I am saying that your existence as an entity is independent of your existence as the persona "You." Doubting whether memories are forged is valid, but not whether the frame they stand on is real.

Edited November 18, 2013 by Esau of Isaac

[Chiki]

Assume a person had their right or left hemisphere of their brain chopped off but they kept on surviving. That new person would still be the original person.

In the fission case, we simply assume both are alive. If one is dead and the other alive, we assume the alive one is the original. The original person doesn't disappear out of existence because there's two hemispheres going around. There's no reason to believe that. Derek Parfit covers this in more detail in Reasons and Persons.

You need some way of explaining how it's independent, then.

[Esau of Isaac]

Assume a person had their right or left hemisphere of their brain chopped off but they kept on surviving. That new person would still be the original person.

Why would that new person be the original person? You even just described them as a new person.

In the fission case, we simply assume both are alive. If one is dead and the other alive, we assume the alive one is the original. The original person doesn't disappear out of existence because there's two hemispheres going around. There's no reason to believe that. Derek Parfit covers this in more detail in Reasons and Persons.

Not that I completely disagree, but why would there be no reason to believe the original person is no longer existent?

You need some way of explaining how it's independent, then.

That is to say, you can fill a cup with whatever liquid you wish but it won't change that you're pouring liquid in a cup. The capability to reason is as independent from this topic's discussion of memory in the same sense that sight is. Logic would follow that a non-thinking entity can't come to have its thoughts manipulated by a thinking entity, right?

[Chiki]

Why would there be? Why should the original person disappear if two hemispheres are alive? There's no arguments which support that view.

The reason he shouldn't disappear, on the other hand, is because we have the intuition that the original person would stay alive if just one half was alive. We do hemisphere removal surgeries all the time and we don't say "John no longer exists after that operation."

By new person I meant the original person after the surgery. It was probably confusing.

"A non-thinking entity can't have its thoughts manipulated." I'm not sure what you mean here because a non-thinking entity has no thoughts to manipulate.

[Makaze]

The two halves make choices independent of each other. They form habits and make judgments that neither the other half nor the original that had both halves would make. If you read a letter or listened to a recording of each—the original, the left half and the right half—you would not think that they were the same person because they all have different thought processes and make different choices. You wouldn't think to consider them the same unless you were told that they all came from the same brain.

The left and right can act independently of each other simultaneously. If different actions at different times isn't enough, then different choices within the same body at the same instant might be.

If I jump into a teleporter that disintegrates me then recreates me from atoms at my destination, am 'I' truly being transported, or is it just my memory?

If my body is accidentally copied to two separate output terminals, which one is me?

I say neither. 'I' was destroyed when I was disintegrated. Whoever appears at the other end believes that they are me and can act the part, but they have a memory of their destination that the me who got disintegrated didn't have. The other copy has a memory of a different destination that the first copy doesn't have.

If they met each other, wouldn't they be able to make completely different decisions based on their subjective perspectives up to that point? At what level of divergence do two streams of consciousness become distinct?

"A non-thinking entity can't have its thoughts manipulated." I'm not sure what you mean here because a non-thinking entity has no thoughts to manipulate.

That's the point. You cannot be tricked into the idea that you exist because the ability to think about being tricked proves that you exist. The thought 'I don't exist' is a paradox.

Edited November 30, 2013 by Makaze

[Knife]

At least we know that Something exists, right?