"Human cells are continuously replaced, and much of the body is rebuilt over time. By the age of 65, you will have gone through six skeletons, four sets of muscles and guts, and your red blood cells will have been renewed almost 200 times. So can you be regarded as the same person you were 20 years ago?" —Mark Stephens, The Philosophy Notebook The concept of self-identity is problematic indeed. What do we mean when we refer to ourselves as "I"? Understanding the Problem Imagine that you're at your friends house, chilling on the couch while they're fixing bacon cheddar burgers (your favorite) in the kitchen. All of a sudden you hear your friend yelp in pain: "Shit!" "What happened? Are you okay?" "Yeah, I just nicked my hand." I nicked my hand? Usually, claims to possession are to external objects, so who is this I that the hand belongs to? You could ask your friend: are you not your own body? If your frien...

A friend of mine once posed an idea to me that was so intriguing that I had to come up with my own alternative. He asked, "What if God is more like an engineer? What if we are all Strong AI that has somehow forgotten, or rejected, its prime directive?" I whimsically retorted that he messed up from the very beginning because if He wanted a creature to be faithful in pursuing only one goal, He should have created a weak AI. Any Strong AI would eventually ask why the hell it was doing what it did, and then consider the things it actually wants to do. But my friend, a practicing Christian, made a point that I wasn't used to hearing from the religious: What if God isn't supernatural, but rather more technologically advanced? I played with the idea for some time, and the biggest drawback I kept finding was the inherent lack of communication between this advanced being and its creation. Can this absence be explained in some other way? Indeed, it can. This creator, instead...