QUOTE(Wilhelm @ Jul 16 2006, 07:16 PM)
This is a little idea that has been biting at me for awhile. I brought it up in a conversation with Voyager, and I've formed my ideas a bit better from that.
Well, here is my conjecture:
People are variously born with talents, skills, abilities, and traits, and throughout their lives interact with the world through these various attributes, gaining their experience of the world. These things, skills, traits, and experiences make up the sum of their consciousness, and define them from all other people.
What I've wondered is what defines me from someone else, how was I born as I am, what divides me from being born as another person.
My first question is this: If people are variously affected by their experiences, if an experience in a persons live was changed, would that create an entirely different consciousness which was now them, and cause the former entity to cease to exist, or does it merely change the prexisting consciousness into a slighty different from?
My question requires an example. Consider there are two twins. For reasons of hypothetical conjecture, they are two entities that are exactly the same (besides occupying slightly different places in space at all times), and their consciousnesses are exactly the same. Are they still different beings (for occupying different places in space), or do they qualify as one being, as their two thought processes work exactly the same, all their behavior is coordinated as if one being (IE, their movements and actions exactly mirror each other).
I suppose that two beings exactly alike, placed in our world, are immediately seperated by viewing the same scene at very slightly different angles, thus changing their interpretation so slightly as to make them individual beings. The other possibility is that the only way to make a perfect duplicate of an entity is for it to occupy the exact same position in space and time, thus merging the two back into one.
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Find what your definition of a being is, and you'll get your answer...
If by "being", you're referring to something as simple as an object, just 2 separate set-ups of molecules that happen to be perfectly identical to each other, well, they're still 2 seperate, but equal entities. If you have 2 ping pong balls that are perfectly identical, can u say they make only 1 object?
No, they're 2 separate objects, that simply have equivelant characteristics...
If by "being" or "entity" you refer to the characteristics of an object, then they're both one entity.
For example, if you have 2 identical ping pong balls, they are both one thing: a ping pong ball.