From: Phillip Huggan (cdnprodigy@yahoo.com)
Date: Thu Jan 26 2006 - 11:45:44 MST
I don't really think "thread view" is an approriate description for the non-pattern view of consciousness. The essence of it lies in the fact that consciousness is substrate dependant. So the normal biological recycling processes that replace human brain tissues maintain whatever matter/energy is causing consciousness, whereas in gradual destructive uploading the suicide happens a little at a time because the brain is recycling to a substrate that can't house consciousness at all, and all the field interconnects that make a brain *real* in this universe, surely cannot be replicated. I know the last sentence sounds like gobbledygoop, but it is the reason why even if I'm wrong and uploading works, there still cannot be two identitical individuals existing in the universe at the same time. Whatever successful uploading procedure is found must replace all the field interactions the original brain had in housing the mind with identical field interactions in the mind's new artificial
brain. The field interactions (physics of our brains in the universe) are part of our identities.
Russell Wallace <russell.wallace@gmail.com> wrote:
The thread view (identity is a verb, a continuing thread of consciousness) and the pattern view (identity is an adjective; as John Clark put it, "I am the way matter behaves when it is organized in a Johnclarkian way") give the same results most of the time; the one scenario that always gets adherents of the two arguing with each other is destructive scan uploading (fine by the pattern view, semelparous suicide by the identity view). (Happily, gradual uploading is a potential way around this problem for the thread view.)
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