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Comment by butisaidsudo | Hacker News Reader

This is a great article on this, with a bunch of thought experiments on what makes you, you: https://waitbutwhy.com/2014/12/what-makes-you-you.html

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That was excellent but stopped tantalizingly short - he's on to something. He's uncomfortable about the concept of a "soul", but the idea of continuity is really interesting. It suggests that the boundary of a conscious entity is not purely physical, but must also encompass a temporal dimension. (This is a new thought for me, I'm excited by it.) It's a shame he felt icky about souls because you don't really need that baggage.

I'm not smart enough to really think it through but at a glance it seems to resolve those various tests and scenarios. In the malfunctioning teleport example (where the cell destroyer fails to fire), _both_ London Tim and Boston Tim are equally alive because they share the past: the teleport has succeeded in bifurcating their consciousness. Same with the split-brain twins (though you'd expect the results to be diminished).

I also like the start but it stop way before it get really interesting. I found Permutation City (by Greg Egan) to a great deal deeper, plus it's a nice story. I mentioned this also somewhere else in this thread. Tbh when people start with the soul concept or even mention it as a possibility, I usually stop reading because you start with some un-provable hypothesis that only adds unnecessary complexity. I've yet to run into a thought experiment that arrives at the concept of a soul through structured arguments (and not say religious arguments).

That's just it: jumping from discussions of the biological repository of consciousness straight to souls might be missing a whole big area.

These thought experiments got me thinking about how a conscious entity might better be considered as its "world line", not just its instantaneous physical embodiment. Call that a soul if you want, but there's no particular reason to.

I’d considered the situations in the article, but I do wonder - if you replace 10% of someone with identical particles then they are the same. 20%, 30%, etc then yes the same. But. 80%? Sure. Replace limbs and body and I can see that. But what about splitting the brain (as in article) where you don’t even need 50% for continuity.

But we effectively always get back the the ship of Theseus, and circling back to Trek,

Does Data have a soul? I don't know that he has. I don't know that I have. But I have got to give him the freedom to explore that question himself.

TFA talks a bit about that. The short of it is kinda as I was discussing above - if you consider the entity temporally as well as spatially, the Trigger's Broom/Ship of Theseus problem becomes moot.

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