“Was not their mistake once more bred of the life of slavery that they had been living?—a life which was always looking upon everything, except mankind, animate and inanimate—‘nature,’ as people used to call it—as one thing, and mankind as another, it was natural to people thinking in this way, that they should try to make ‘nature’ their slave, since they thought ‘nature’ was something outside them” — William Morris


Monday, March 18, 2013

OOO and Personal Identity

I've been playing around with this idea for some reason, mostly because I am a big fan of Derek Parfit.

Since appearance is memory, form, the past, in an OOO reality one should be able theoretically to “photocopy” this appearance and “paste” it onto another entity. This would be the equivalent to Parfit's teleportation machine and certainly equivalent to quantum teleportation, which has been done already.

In a world of weird essences personal identity is real yet a paradox—it is not metaphysically present, that is to say, it is not welded onto an essence that is fundamentally different from it.

Thus one can have a  “no-self” view that is not reductionist.

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