Identity Continuity
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Full Title or Meme
Consciousness is often conflated with Identity Continuity. Considering the river as Heraclitus did, the contents of the river is continuously replaced, as are the cells in your own body. Yet we are comfortable saying yesterday as well as continuing into the present that this is the same Entity today as it was yesterday.
"Everything changes and nothing remains. ... you cannot step twice into the same stream".[1] - Heraclitus
Yet people die and rivers dry up. But the memory of them may well live on indefinitely. The identity of some fictional characters, like Harry Potter, are well-established are likely to live a very long time.
Theseus's Paradox
The Ship of Theseus, also known as Theseus's Paradox, is a thought experiment and paradox about whether an object is Persistent as the same object after having had all of its original components replaced over time, typically one after the other.
In Greek mythology, Theseus, mythical king of the city Athens, rescued the children of Athens from King Minos after slaying the Minotaur and then escaped onto a ship going to Delos. Each year, the Athenians would commemorate this by taking the ship on a pilgrimage to Delos to honor Apollo. A question was raised by ancient philosophers: After several hundreds of years of maintenance, if each individual piece of the Ship of Theseus was replaced, one after the other, was it still the same ship?
A related question arises if some of those replaced timbers will used to build another ship. Could that other ship also be called by the same name, or does Identity Continuity require some sort of uniqueness in applying to only a single real world Entity. Clearly to the two ships are different, but the Identity Continuity really only applies to the ship what was know by that name throughout its lifetime.
Process Philosophy
Process Philosophy deals with the concepts of change or "of becoming" rather than with the essential, or unchanging, part of an Identity as emphasized by Plato. This concept traveled by way of Whitehead[2] into the view of Heisenberg in his Quantum Mechanics of the observable of an Entity which, we know today, might be as small as an electron or as large as a Buckyball of Carbon atoms. In the wiki page "Prolegomena to any Future Physic" we describe the process, or path, of a quantum entity as described by its Schrödinger equation, but exact location and the identity of the electron is only known at the points where it is observed. In Quantum Mechanics only Fermions have an Identity Continuity. Bosons do not.
Process Philosophy views reality as a continuous flow of interconnected events rather than static substances. See the wiki page on Eventful Universe.
Hybrid Systems get Tricky
"Everything we know of neuroscience suggests that in the gradual-replacement scenario, you wouldn’t even notice small enough alterations, and the brain is amazingly adaptable. Your hybrid brain would retain all the same patterns of information that define you. So there’s no reason to think that your subjective consciousness would be compromised, and you would of course remain you—there is no one else to call you. However, at the end of this hypothetical process, the final you is exactly like [the sudden update of you to an AI] in the first experiment, which we decided was not you. How can this be reconciled? The difference is continuity—the digital brain doesn’t diverge from the biological one, because there was never a moment when they existed as separate entities."[3]
