Mere Information

There is a difficulty in the previous section. You said that it is a logical impossibility for two different token-stages to coexist at the same time. But what if you move one of the token-stages back in time? It's the basic science-fictional scenario where you go back in time and meet yourself. What I would argue is that in this instance, you have to conclude that both token-stages belong to the same token. After all, you already believe that you are you over the whole period of time if you don't go back in time. So how can you conclude that you cease to be you over the whole period of time just because you go back in time to meet yourself? Surely the difference of going back in time is not metaphysically relevant. And if you decide that two different token-stages can exist at the same time, then you go down a slippery slope. What is to stop the backed-up and restored token-stages from existing at the same time as well? You have already decided that the differences of content replacement are not metaphysically relevant. You might no longer be human, but you will still be a person, and seemingly the same person.

This brings me right back to my original beef. My chain of consciousness still seems to be preserved when I go back in time to meet myself. But it does not seem to be preserved when I make a backup of myself. For one thing, it does not exist at all during the transference of information from one brain to another, even in principle. That is therefore a break in the transference of consciousness. The break in the transference is enough to establish that the two different token-stages of consciousness do not belong to the same person. The only thing that is getting transferred from one brain to another is information. And I don't see how consciousness is ever going to be mere information. This seems to hold even if I cannot account completely for how consciousness gets transferred over time. I have already said that I think that consciousness is just the brain viewed from a phenomenological perspective. Consequently, research into the brain will shed light on how consciousness gets transferred over time. But it is difficult to see how consciousness gets transferred via any kind of 'backup'. To reiterate, the backup is mere information, but consciousness is not mere information.

And that's what I find implausible about the cyberpunk view of personal identity.

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