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>From: chalmers@bronze.ucs.indiana.edu (David Chalmers)
Subject: Re: red light / blue light scenario
Message-ID: <1991Dec21.015025.14261@bronze.ucs.indiana.edu>
Organization: Indiana University
References: <1991Dec20.004238.11206@smsc.sony.com>
Date: Sat, 21 Dec 91 01:50:25 GMT
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In article <1991Dec20.004238.11206@smsc.sony.com> markc@smsc.sony.com (Mark Corscadden) writes:

>  You lie down on a bed which has a blue light on the ceiling directly
>  above you.  Take a good look at the blue light above, and then close
>  your eyes and relax.  Next to you is an identical bed, but this one
>  has a red light on the ceiling above it.  At this instant a perfect
>  physical duplicate of you is created instantaneously and placed on the
>  bed next to you.  You are not physically effected in any way whatsoever.
>
>  The light above you was blue when you closed your eyes.  Do you think
>  it's possible that you will see a red light when you open your eyes
>  again?  This is speaking from a purely subjective point of view; what
>  would it be like to *experience* this scenario?

Well, if you believe Parfit, all you can say about the experiences is
the following.

(1) At time t1, there will be a person P1 having a blue experience.
(2) At time t2, there will be two people, P2 and P3, with P2 having
a blue experience at P2 having a P3 experience.
(3) Both P2 and P3 "remember" being P1, having P1's experience, etc.

Parfit argues that there is no further fact of the matter above this
simple kind of enumeration -- e.g. there is no special "continuity
of experience" between P1 and P2 that there isn't between P1 and P3.

So "how will it feel for me?"  Can't say.  All one can say is that there
will be a blue-experiencer at t1, and a blue-experiencer and a
red-experiencer at t2.  Of course this runs counter to a strong
intuition that P2's experience will be *my* (i.e. P1's) experience in
a way that P3's isn't, but when one thinks about it, the grounds for
this kind of intuition are really quite weak.  Nevertheless throwing
away the intuition is very scary (it got Hume depressed for weeks).
It suddenly makes one's life feel awfully fragmented.

-- 
Dave Chalmers                            (dave@cogsci.indiana.edu)      
Center for Research on Concepts and Cognition, Indiana University.
"It is not the least charm of a theory that it is refutable."


