[extropy-chat] Detectives and red herrings (was Survivaltangent)

[Anders Sandberg]

Mike Dougherty wrote:
> Suppose you have keepsakes from each of the vacations you have been on
> (refrigerator magnets, shot glasses, marginally evil tiki dolls, primitive
> masks, pottery, etc. etc.)  These are all physical tokens which cue your
> memory of those events.  Their placement around your home (general
> definition of home; the space you inhabit, whatever) gives some clue to an
> observer the relative priority of each of these tokens.

Reminds me of the excellent webcomic Dresden Codac:
http://dresdencodak.com/cartoons/dc_021.htm

(some other excellent strips unrelated to this thread are
http://dresdencodak.com/cartoons/dc_014.htm
http://dresdencodak.com/cartoons/dc_022.htm
http://dresdencodak.com/cartoons/dc_027.htm
http://dresdencodak.com/cartoons/dc_029.htm
)

> I imagine some of
> those treasures end up in a box at the back of the garage.  At that point,
> the memory-triggering value of that item has been decreased to almost
> zero.
> Suppose I have a garage sale without your consent and clean out the
> clutter.  Have I "killed" some part of you?

I think identity is very much an ongoing process, where we bind and lose
referents to our selves. Some people are more dependent on a personal
narrative than others, and the relationship between the real past and the
remembered/reconstructed one is often pretty loose. Whatever happens we
seem to quite quickly construct a new self that still remains as
"self-ish" as the previous ones, even when the change is quite radical.

I would expect the victim of the homicidal yard sale would be upset that a
loss had occured, yet claim that he was the same he always was - even if
his previous self would have claimed that a future self without the
memories in the box would not be him.

Our personal histories are backwards-linked lists, but we select our
actions to make future links be like what we currently think they should
be. When they fail to be that we tend to reassess our past instead of
thinking we are bad selves.


-- 
Anders Sandberg,
Oxford Uehiro Centre for Practical Ethics
Philosophy Faculty of Oxford University