alt Hacker NewsAs 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.
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> 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.
If you have a son and you kill him, you haven't destroyed the concept of a son. You can always make a new son. If the son had consciousness, it’d be none the wiser.
Is that the same son? Do you not go to prison for murder?
> If the square had consciousness, it’d be none the wiser.
This is exactly what don't know, and is interesting to explore.
> 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
So if your brain was somehow cloned, you'd exist in two places at the same time? It seems possible for two separate consciousness to have the same memories and be identical in all respects, and yet still not be the same.
To illustrate, two instances of a programs can share the exact same binary code (the "pattern") and yet they are separate instances.