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Culture War Roundup for the week of September 1, 2025

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Thank you, and I appreciate you taking the time to have this discussion.

But in neither are they the same in the sense that taking a drink out of one of them will correspondingly cause water in the other bottle to disappear. Which is the kind of thing people are asking for.

I'm not as demanding as these people, but if they want a version of "continuity" that strict, they're likely out of luck. In a very important sense, I consider it a good thing that changes made to one copy of me won't necessarily affect the other. The whole point of making backups of me, or of one's wedding photos, is that damage or destruction to one won't delete the other.

You can, of course, achieve such ends far easier on a digital substrate. Google Photos does version control, it is also possible to provide exactly the same input to two digital copies of me. Assuming the hardware and software has error-correction, we should get indistinguishable outcomes. I just don't see this as all that important, my copies are not beholden to grow and develop in the exact same manner as the "original".

I'd push back on the idea that when we wake up, we can be thought of as waking up as a reconstruction of sorts. There's a physical continuity between the me right now and the me of one second ago. The me of one second ago isn't dead per se, but it no longer exists either.

"Reconstruction" is a fuzzy word, so if it helps things, I would say it's analogous to putting a computer to sleep and rebooting it. Windows might update, the time on the clock might change, but for all practical purposes it is the same PC, even if it differs slightly when you zoom in very hard.

I can reasonably expect my pc to not change overnight. But in a year? Two years? Five? It might have had some/all it's components overhauled or replaced. At that point, the question of whether or not it's the "same" pc becomes arbitrary (or more arbitrary than it already was!), or at least context dependent. As long as it still has a valid Windows license, my files are still there etc, I'll call it my PC.

So it goes for the most personal of all computing platforms: myself.

Other than that, I agree with your claims regarding the physics of things.

As always, a pleasure, and if you want to continue our discussion when you have thought my claims over, I'll be around. While we'll likely never get on the same page about beliefs in a "soul", it's been enjoyable nonetheless.