Say I walk into a machine, and then I walk out, and also an exact duplicate walks out of a nearby chamber. My assumption is that we’d both feel like “me”. One of us would have the experience of walking into the machine and walking out again, and the other would have the experience of walking into the machine and being teleported into the other chamber.
Im probably lacking in imagination, or the relevant background, but I’m having trouble thinking of an alternative.
You assume that both would feel like you, but there is no way you can prove it. The other can be a philosophical zombie [1] for all you know.
Would the "current you" feel any different after the duplication? Most people, including me, would find this counterintuitive. What happens if the other you travels to the other end of the world? What would you see? The question is not how the replica would think and act from an outside observer's perspective, but would it have the same consciousness as you. Would you call the replica "I"?
Or to make it more complex, what would happen if you save your current state to a hard disk, and an exact duplicate gets manufactured 100 years after you die, using the stored information?
Like GP, I feel that I might be imagining imagination here, but I really don't follow what this is supposed to reveal.
>Would you call the replica "I"?
The two would start out identical and immediately start to diverge like twins. They would share memories and personality but not experience? What am I missing here?
I understand what the author means, though I struggle to express it as well. The best I can come up with is this: What defines I? Is it separated from "I" and if so how? Or does I merely appears that way because our perspective is informed by our limited being?
It seems to me that this ascribes an existence to “I” that is separate from the brain; with no evidence for this existence, that makes it mystical/magical thinking, a.k.a. superstition.
Not really. The "vertiginous question" is just that, a question. We can't call a question superstition because we don't have a good answer for it yet.
For example, we can't call the question "why does gravity exist" superstition either. It's a valid question. We can feel the gravity, measure it, and forecast it, therefore it exists, but we still don't have a concrete answer as to what causes it. We don't assume that there is a metaphysical explanation, but we don't know the actual answer either. Similarly, the vertiginous question is a meaningful question, even though we don't have an answer.
Im probably lacking in imagination, or the relevant background, but I’m having trouble thinking of an alternative.