alt Hacker NewsNone of these scenarios would result in "me" from a monist perspective. The destruction is a discontinuity point, I died there and then, and then the next planck moment a new being was created with all my memories. But "I" died.
The functionalist answer, as you understand it, is dualist. It says "something" survived the utter complete destruction of the physical body and was "put back in it" once it was reassembled. If "it" survived the complete physical destruction of the body, it must be somewhere else, detached from the body.
And, you know, there's really nothing wrong being dualist. I do not mean to denigrate that specific worldview. What is problematic is claiming to be a staunch monist while holding dualist positions.
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What if they destroyed and reassembled only 0.5% of your brain? What's your dividing line? 0.36%? 0.0188%?
> The functionalist answer, as you understand it, is dualist.
I think you're misunderstanding that words are social constructs which can point to abstract categories rather than necessarily single concrete objects at a particular moment in time (although words can also do that).
Like if you have multiple tennis balls, each ball is still a tennis ball, despite each ball being different, because "tennis ball" is a social construct and an abstraction that's an indirection to a certain concept. In the worldview I am talking about, the word "you" is an indirection to a mind that is indistinguishable in content and experience from the one you have right now, with the property of fungibility across modalities, time and space.
If this actually happened, would the 'I' that replaced you be any wiser. How do you know this hasn't happened to you already? Maybe multiple times per second?
> It says "something" survived the utter complete destruction of the physical body and was "put back in it" once it was reassembled. If "it" survived the complete physical destruction of the body, it must be somewhere else, detached from the body.
The information of how to put your body and mind back must have survived somewhere, in the alien mind for example or the machine they used. But the information would still be in (a medium in) this universe and bound to this universe physical laws. I would say this is still a monist position.
A true dualist believes that consciousness survives outside of a medium in this universe.
As a monist who holds the view that you’re claiming monists can’t legitimately hold, I don’t see any difficulty at all in squaring these ideas:
- there is no separate “stuff” that minds are made out of, no privileged plane of existence specific to minds; minds are just patterns like everything else
- destroying an instantiation of a pattern != destroying the pattern
And speaking of squaring ideas – if I draw a square on a piece of paper, and then light that paper on fire, I haven’t destroyed the concept of a square. I can always draw an identical square on another sheet of paper. If the square had consciousness, it’d be none the wiser.