Aberatii intelectuale

 The Vertiginous Question is a problem posed by professor Benj Hellie and is simply this: why am I me and not someone else ? In other words, how come I live in this body having this particular mind and not some other body and some other mind? How come I can cause things to happen in the world from this particular vantage point and not another (your vantage point, for example)? This will be the subject of this article. In truth, for this to be properly accommodated, an entire book would be necessary. So I will need to take some shortcuts in order to keep this article manageably long, but do so in a way that doesn't take away from the coherence of the story. For this, I need to start with physics and then build our metaphysics on it and see where that takes us. We will see why death is an illusion, why you matter, despite your fragility when compared with the enormity of what we call "the rest of the universe", how we are all "one with the world", what can we say ...

 One of the topics I've always stayed away from is the topic of personal identity - this is a notoriously difficult thing to talk about: what makes you you ? This question has been haunting me for quite some time so I decided to finally take it head on and see what I can come up with, if anything. The premise that I'm going to work with is the idea that the only thing that gives us our personal identity is the current configuration of our brains - the way the neurons are interconnected and the information in this network is how our personal identity emerges - no soul or "magic substance" behind all of this. Of course, this is pretty much the established view in the scientific community, although there are exceptions. So the question is - what can we say about the personal identity starting from this premise? What are the implications? Can you be cloned? Copied? Re-instantiated? Is the copy of yourself also you ? Imagine the following scenario: Alice is a murderer. She...