[extropy-chat] Agency as Prime Determinant of Personal Identity

[Heartland]

Jef Allbright:
>> As an agent acting within a given environmental context, what is
>> best from the point of view of that agent is not necessarily
>> survival but that it influences its environment so as to promote its
>> own values into the future, in effect acting to create a future world
>> matching the model it would like to see.

Lee Corbin commenting on Jef's proposal:
> Wow!  That sounds very idealistic to me (in the sense of willing
> to give up something). "Survival" is what I'm talking about, as you
> know.  Suppose that I determine that Eliezer or someone can more
> effectively "promote my values into the future" than I can.  So I
> should agree to stop being me, and let there be two of him? No
> way!

I couldn't agree more. Jef's model is so abstract that it fails to capture the
essence of survival. I tried to ask Jef about his definition of survival very early
on in this discussion precisely because I knew he would run into this problem. We
could say that the kind of survival Jef is talking about is being "experienced" by
dead philosophers, for example, whose ideas, beliefs and values survive to this day
by means of books and people who adopt beliefs and values contained in these books.
The readers/followers live and act as philosopher's "agents" so it is suggested
that the philosopher "survives" as well.


Jef Allbright commenting on Lee's model:
> Lee, I presented the little story of Aging Alice in order to demonstrate
> the incompleteness of the "patternist" view...While I agree that
> this holds for any given instant (t=0), and that it supports the view
> that an identical copy of a person is essentially that same person, this
> definition appears to fail *immediately* and progressively with
> increasing  divergence of two instances of the same person.

Correct. What Jef is pointing out here is that Lee's model fails with respect to
identity over time. If we compare two patterns of the same active brain at two
different times, say, 1s apart, these two patterns are almost certainly going to be
different. And if so, then we must either accept that we're dying every second or
that we're not dying every second because patterns do not determine personal
identity in the first place.

In summary, Lee's objection pretty much disqualifies Jef's model while Jef's
objection does the same to Lee's model. But, even though I see no tangible value in
Jef's "agency", I can see how Lee's model could be modified to account for time and
differences between patterns across time. Lee, let me know if you're interested in 
what that modification is.

Slawomir