[extropy-chat] Survival tangent (was Just curious, it's not natural!)

[Jef Allbright]

Anna -

> I can't seem to grasp this dispute.  I believe that there have been 
> very minor groups that have set values, beliefs and memories and that
> have historically changed the meme belief but I don't recall reading
> that "one" particular "single person" ever changed anything.  Am I not
> understanding the conversation? Please let me know.

No, you are not understanding that conversation.  (By the way, your
English writing keeps getting better and better.  It's amazing to me.)

My point in that conversation was the use of valid logic.  It so happens
that I didn't fully agree with any of the assertions being made.  I
don't agree that persons, in the very general sense of independent
agents, are well defined by their "values, beliefs, and memories", but I
wasn't supporting or denying that assertion.

My point was that Heartland makes invalid logical inferences almost
continually when he argues for his belief regarding survival of a person
based on his concept of "a unique trajectory through space-time of the
physical constituents of the mind-producing process".  My concern is
that we strive to maintain fairly high standards on the extropy list
such that people will tend to stick around for intelligent and
stimulating discussions. Many of us feel that repetition and circular
argument degrade the quality of the list, so I made the effort to
highlight some examples and I provided key terms for anyone interested
to google for further information.

Those terms include "affirming the consequent", "denying the
antecedent", "circular reasoning", "logical fallacy".  Wikipedia has
some good concise descriptions of these, but the writing style may be a
little too academic for the general reader.  I'm sure that other pages
exist with plenty of good examples of logical fallacies, in particular
the fallacy of circular reasoning.

Note again that I was not arguing here for or against any particular
assertion; only for clarity and logical coherence.

----------------------------------------

As to the substance of your intended question, there are those who think
(or feel) that a person is necessarily unique.  That is certainly our
observation to date, and that is certainly our personal experience.  We
certainly feel unique and we don't seem to have any examples in normal
life that contradict this.  Furthermore, our linguistic idioms and our
culture strongly reinforce the idea of unique identity and make it
difficult to imagine or discuss alternatives without very careful
attention to our use of the linguistic symbols by which we represent our
thoughts.

But with advancing technologies we can imagine situations where the
usual, common-sense order may be disrupted, and since this is the
extropy list, we explore and discuss these ideas.  [Actually this occurs
in cycles as new people join the list.  [It would be highly desirable to
have an easily accessible repository of these ideas and arguments, but
that's another project.] So, for example, we talk about what it would
mean if/when we could make exact physical duplicates of a person, and
what it really means to be a person in a broader than common sense.

Philosophers have been dealing with the question of personal identity
for thousands of years already. Anyone seriously interested in
discussing the topic should be familiar with previous thinking including
"ship of Theseus", Max More's thesis on the "diachronic self", and Derek
Parfit's _Reasons and Persons_ in order to avoid rehashing. Buddhist
thinking adds another perspective as it shows why even the concept of an
individual self may be incoherent within any reasonably broad context.
And of course there are many works of fiction that explore this idea in
an inspiring but less than rigorous manner.

Two things about this topic remain interesting to me:  
(1) Even after people have become quite familiar with the logical
arguments, they tend to stay with whatever belief *feels* right to them.
This has immense implications for effective decision-making under
accelerating change, and so is of increasingly practical importance to
our lives and well-being.
(2) Some people have "moved up" beyond the common-sense description of
personal identity to embrace the broader "patternist" definition but
have yet to embrace an even more general description based on agency
rather than physical/functional similarity. In my opinion this is where
our thinking graduates from the "aha, it should be possible" stage to
the more practical level of how we might deal with the social and moral
ramifications of multiple instances of a personal identity.

Anna, as usual I've packed too much into too few paragraphs.  If you
have questions after googling the search terms I've suggested, let me
(or others) know. I'll do my best to respond on or offlist as
appropriate for list quality.

- Jef