[ExI] Fwd: Open Individualism

[Jason Resch]

Arnold Zuboff, the academic who first published on the idea of open
individualism, which he calls "universalism" provided the following
argument for why universalism is preferable to both the usual view, as well
as "empty individualism" or what Zuboff calls "super-insulating buddhism".
To accompany this argument, he also provides two documents that go into
further detail (which are linked here
<https://drive.google.com/file/d/1Upyq9_iiDCpTXbg9ePi-6MQLkbdP6f6m/view?usp=sharing>
and here
<https://docs.google.com/document/d/17T8HAus6yjlBYPCwgtrT2z7j7U485MEA/edit?usp=sharing&ouid=109779696990142678208&rtpof=true&sd=true>
).

PARSIMONY



*10. What do the two views have going for them?*



I believe that the usual view has nothing at all to be said for it. Once
the two views are laid out together, there is not even one argument I can
think of that would favour the usual view. (There are, however, powerful
and, indeed, decisive arguments for the truth of universalism. You will see
most of those I’ve thought of presented in this work.)



But what certainly does *seem* to tell in favour of the usual view is the
powerful impression we all have that can seem to be simply of its truth—the
impression, which we are predicted to have by universalism, that the extent
of my experience is limited by the identity of a single thing. I have
described this impression as hiding the truth of universalism. But it does
more than that: It hides even the very possibility that there could be any
rival to the usual view.



Yet, since the impression itself is predicted within universalism, it
cannot have any value at all as evidence for deciding between universalism
and the usual view.



*11. The rising of the sun*



The powerful initial impression that the sun is revolving once daily around
the earth, which gave us the terms ‘sunrise’ and ‘sunset’, is exactly what
the opposing view that the earth is rotating once daily would predict and
can be no evidence at all in deciding between those views.



Wittgenstein once asked a friend why it was initially assumed that the sun
went around the earth. When the friend replied that it just looks that way,
Wittgenstein then asked what it would look like if it looked as though the
earth was rotating. The impression, he was pointing out with his second
question, is not in itself really of the truth of one of those views or the
other.



This ignores, however, that before the impression could strike one as other
than that of a motion of the sun, further sophistication was required—the
knowledge that the earth was spherical, that we were stuck to it by gravity
pulling us towards its centre and that we would not be feeling its rotation.



And before I can see the confined impression I have of the immediacy of my
experience as the impression of merely a lack of integration of experience
that is all mine and not an impression of a limitation of what I am, I
need, among other things, to disabuse myself of that illusory thought that
makes brain bisection paradoxical—the thought that I can’t be someone who
is at this objective moment of time experiencing anything different from
this content. I need the insight that I called ‘the irrelevance of
objective simultaneity’. Thinking that objectively simultaneous contents of
experience could not be mine without them being integrated is very much
like thinking that the spinning of the earth could not be occurring without
my feeling it. Both are naïve conflations of what is objectively true with
what is subjectively felt.



Anyway, the sunrise impression becomes neutral with further knowledge. It
turns out to be no evidence at all to decide between either view about the
sun and the earth. And, of course, once it is accepted that we are
attracted to the centre of a rotating spherical planet there is nothing at
all left to be said for the theory that our impression of the sun’s rising
is caused by an actual rising of the sun rather than the spinning of the
earth.



*12. Ockham’s razor*



But it is even worse than that for the usual view of what I am. The usual
view is not really giving us one of two explanations of the impression that
initially inspired belief in it, as would be the view that the sun actually
rises if the earth were flat and motionless.



This worse problem for the usual view is that the lack of integration of
mental contents is just as much there in the usual view as it is in
universalism to explain the impression of my supposedly being only one
thing. My *actually* being only one thing—the claim that is distinctive of
the usual view—is therefore doing no work within the usual view itself to
explain the impression that is being pointed to as the great evidence for
it.



It is as though a spinning of the earth was somehow already present and
fully accounting for the impression of the sunrise even in the original
theory of the sunrise.



The impression in a brain hemisphere of at this moment of objective time
being someone with only the experience of a concert or only the experience
of studying need not *even in the ordinary view* be caused by actually
being only the person experiencing the one or the other. For the very same
impression would even in the ordinary view have been caused anyway by the
failure of integration across the hemispheres.



Note carefully the contrast with the old sunrise theory: In that old theory
it would indeed have had to be the sun actually rising that gave such an
impression with the earth being flat and stationary. The sun’s actual
motion of rising would be doing that work within that theory. The actual
motion of the sun would be needed within that theory to explain the
evidence—the impression of a sunrise.



Ockham’s razor is the requirement of rational theory-making that no
elements should be present in the theory that are not called for by the
evidence. Evidence only supports that which is needed to explain it.



And so, this idle claim, that I actually am only one thing, ought to be cut
out of even the usual view by Ockham’s razor, which would leave us with the
simpler view, universalism.



Experience being mine is explained by immediacy, and the impression of
limitation comes merely through the lack of integration of the contents of
my experience. No further explanation is required or even possible. A
distinction of persons would be redundant.



*13. An electronic corpus callosum*

It may help to make clearer how lack of integration and not the
distinctness of conscious things is all that is really behind the usual
view's distinction between me and you, if we imagine a science fiction
'electronic corpus callosum', as we'll call it, being installed in the
brains of the two of us. This clever device can integrate the activities of
both our brains through radio transmission. All experiences involving
either of us will be received and related together as equally first-person
(as happens in the integration of our hemispheres).



(I’m not expecting it to be easy to imagine in detail how the experiences
of two whole human bodies could be made to go along with each other as do
the experiences processed in two brain hemispheres connected by a natural
corpus callosum. But we shall roughly imagine that somehow or other the
sensations and control of, for example, four hands would be brought
together within something like the same perspective much as are the
sensations and control of two hands in the normal case. I cannot see any
principle standing in the way of this.)

How could the identities of the previously independent organisms have any
relevance to the identity of the resulting experiencer now that the
boundaries of integration of experiential content have been so thoroughly
breached? The organisms would still be distinct, but they would both be the
single me that was you.

And this helps to show that it was the lack of experiential integration and
not the distinctness of experiencing organisms that was really doing the
work in suggesting a distinctness of persons even within the usual view
itself.

Note that then dropping the electronic connection would be like brain
bisection and that all the experience would still be mine though it would
falsely seem to be split into mine and yours. (That is, each side of the
experiential content would seem to itself to be mine with the other being
yours.)

Next let's just develop this gadget into a grand electronic corpus callosum
integrating the experience of all conscious beings. All the content would
be equally mine, and with full integration it would be known throughout to
be mine. None of the organisms would deserve any singling out as me because
of their distinctness as organisms. And if, as in brain bisection, the
connection is dropped, it would all still be mine while falsely seeming to
belong to distinct subjects of experience.





1. Super-insulating Buddhism



Is universalism really the only easy game in town? Very much so.



There is a sort of view that departs from the usual view by going in the
opposite direction from universalism. The usual view imposes insulating
boundaries on who I am that confine me within the life of a single human
being. The rival view we shall now consider confines me to a much smaller
momentary existence that does not extend beyond the present moment of a
human being. And it thus makes my far more pinpointed existence even more
improbable than that I have on the usual view.



In a Buddhistic view any psychological process would be forging on through
a succession of non-continuous experiencers. At any point in this process
there would be an experiencer with its momentary pains and pleasures, but
it could have no non-illusory self-interest in any further accumulation of
experience as this would not belong to it—since not that subject but only
other momentary subjects would exist in any further experience. The
experience would belong to no continuing subject. Neither self-interest nor
other-interest (interest, that is, for the self-interests of others) would
be appropriate.



But notice that this radical and bleak view does not escape either the
conceptual or the statistical difficulties of the usual view of the person.
For each such momentary subject would have its own identity conditions
involving both a token and a type. There would arise the question of
whether this momentary subject would have existed if its identity
conditions had been divided or had been different by degree. And the
improbability for itself of existing of any of the momentary subjects would
make such a hypothesis statistically untenable just as it did the usual
view of the person. For in every moment of the ongoing mental process an
inference would be supported that from this momentary perspective the
existence of this momentary subject would be overwhelmingly improbable by
contrast with the existence of the universal subject in universalism.



4. A Humean bundle of perceptions



If the world contained nothing but a Humean bundle of perceptions, with no
thing as a subject possessing them, then those unpossessed perceptions,
purely on account of their inherent immediacy, would be mine and I would
therein be present in that world in the centrally important way.

What would I then be? I wouldn't be the perceptions themselves. I'd be a
fictional something from which the lines of vision were seeming to lead.
And even though nothing was really there in that world but the perceptions,
I would have full self-interest in diminishing any pains in the bundle and
be present in the world—merely because an experience was mine.

And if instead it was true that some sort of thing actually was there, from
which the lines of vision were leading, then that thing would be me, we
could say, but that would be at bottom incidental to my proper existence
and my personal experiential fate.

Furthermore, if that very same thing had been there but without any
potential of having experience that was mine, it could not in any way have
been me.



5. Naturalism (Derek Parfit’s view)



Consider a philosophical view about personal identity that I shall call
‘naturalism’.



The naturalist sees that in the usual view there is an uneasy union of the
complex conditions of a particular body or mind with the simple conditions
of a subject of experience.



The naturalist sees the complex conditions as in themselves natural and
unproblematic but doesn’t see, as does the universalist, that the
indivisibility and all-or-nothing presence of the subject of experience are
also natural and unproblematic because they are simply features of the
natural quality of immediacy that permeates all experience and determines
personal identity.



The naturalist believes rather that only the positing of a supernatural
simple substance could satisfy these seemingly non-natural properties of a
person in the usual view and therefore proposes to purge the usual view’s
person of its non-natural component. And thus, for the naturalist, the
person—or what is left of the person—is *merely* a complex natural process.
A philosopher who, like Derek Parfit, thinks that what matters most in this
is a *mental* process, rather than the physical process of the body, could
be called a ‘*psychological* naturalist’.[1]



Parfit readily admits that he is running counter to the usual view by
denying that a person’s existence is an all or nothing affair. If a
person’s existence, as Parfit claims, is determined by the reach of
connected memories and intentions, then this naturalistic identity, as
Parfit admits, may change by degree.



Hence, if a year from now a person carrying on from me has only a certain
fraction of the memories and intentions I have now, that person would be
only by that same fraction’s worth identifiable with me now. And the
strength of my appropriate self-interested concern with that person’s fate
presumably ought to be measured as this same fraction.



One great problem with this view is that it seems we must on *any* view
consider a person to be one and the same in all the integrated memories and
intentions existing *at a single time*. Thus, if some person existing a
year from now is to be identified *partially* with me because some of that
person’s memories and intentions carry on from mine now, since it must be
one and the same person in all the integrated memories and intentions *at
that time*, that person must also be identified *wholly* with me.



That person couldn’t be me in thinking something that would be familiar to
me now and at the same time be someone else in having an accompanying
thought that would not now be familiar to me. It seems rather, contrary to
Parfit’s contention, that either all or none of those thoughts in the later
stage will have to be mine.



Parfit tries to deal with cases of human fission, like brain bisection, by
dropping any claim that the resulting branches of a split are identical to
the original person and speaking instead of a “survival” of the person in
both branches. This would be like a plant surviving in all the plants that
grew from its cuttings though it would not have been identical with any of
them.



But when we try to think of the significance of such survivals to the
original subject of experience, we find that the key question of future
self-interest is every bit as puzzling as when we were struggling with the
question of identity.



If one of your survivals was going to be dragged to a torture chamber and
the other escorted to a wonderful party, how ought you now to anticipate
such survivals? Will one, both or none of these two lines of experience be
immediate for you like your experience now? Surely only the answer to this
question can give us the proper basis for judgments of self-interest. And
this is the ineradicable question of the identity of the subject of
experience.



But Parfit claims that what is properly *important* to me is not personal
identity but rather merely the survival of my memories and intentions.
Let’s look at this claim.



Imagine I learned that all the pattern of brain traces on which my memories
and intentions depended would be recorded just as they were in the last
moment of mental soundness before my death and later imposed on what had
been somebody else’s brain in place of its previous such patterns. That
future person would then think just like me that ‘this is me, Arnold Zuboff’.
But would that person be right in thinking that? Would this then actually
be me or would it be somebody else with memories just like mine, a sort of
engineered clairvoyant?



Notice that it *could* be important to me that my knowledge and intentions
be carried forward even if I think I am no longer to be in the world. Since
that future person will at least be a bearer of my projects, the
continuance of them in someone else could be important to me as might be
the carrying out of provisions in my last will and testament.



But the way in which my self-interest could be *relevantly* involved in
this case would have to be based on the additional factor of whether this
future person would be* me*.



For example, imagine that I could at some time prior to that death, whose
finality for me we are now trying to determine, hide away some of my wealth
where only that future person with my memory traces would know where to
find it. But, let us say, it would be a lot of trouble for me to do this
hiding of my wealth.



If I think of that future person as being *me*, I have the *relevant* kind
of self-interested reason for going to that trouble—that the future benefit
will, like the present trouble, be *mine*. The two experiential contents,
of trouble and benefit, will both come to *me* and the trouble for me may
thus be over-balanced by the benefit for me. (Of course, by the way,
universalism says I should have precisely such concern for all experience.)



If I think of that future person as another, however, any self-interested
concern that may remain cannot be of this relevant sort. I could be pleased
with the thought that this person will use that wealth to further causes in
which I am interested whether that person will be me or someone else. But I
cannot myself look forward to the pleasures that the wealth may bring that
person in the self-interested manner relevant to the issue of personal
identity if I do not believe that I will *be* that person. These are
vitally different ways in which a future can be important to me, but only
the latter is connected directly with the judgment about personal identity.



Now, intentions and memories and the carrying forward of projects are
important only because there are persons, subjects of experience and
self-interest, by whom they are experienced and for whom they have
consequences. If I care about others, I care about the self-interests of
others.



Furthermore, many things can be important to a subject of self-interest or
someone else concerned about that subject independent of continued
possession of any such memories or projects. It may be a goal of such a
project to provide comfort for such a subject at a time when current
memories and intentions will be lost, as in senility. If I became a victim
of nightmares in which the view of myself and the world was violently
altered, it could be of enormous importance to me or one concerned about me
that the terrors in those discontinuous episodes be lessened if that is
possible.



Carrying through with projects is important and being in the world as a
subject of experience is important; but that doesn’t make them the same
thing. And in a certain respect the more basic of the two is being a person
in the world. For projects without persons are meaningless.



Does it make any sense for Parfit to be calling ‘persons’ those beings
whose identities or survivals are conceived of by him as determined only by
the identities or survivals of their psychological processes?



We’ve already seen that the divisibility and changing by degree of such a
process would make an essential connection between it and a proper subject
of self-interest paradoxical. Perhaps the most consistent position like
Parfit’s would recognize itself as a straightforward rejection of both
continuing persons and continuing self-interest altogether (and Parfit
gestures sometimes at something like this radical solution). The view would
be that there really exist only natural processes, that these processes
embody an illusion that there are also, associated with them, continuing
indivisible, all-or-nothing subjects of experience and that only these
illusory, non-existent persons could be the proper subjects of
self-interest (or other-interest).



This bleak view, it seems to me, turns out to be equivalent to the
super-insulating Buddhistic view that I described earlier. There would,
after all, still be consciousness accompanying the process (insofar as it
was consciously carried on). There would therefore at each momentary stage
of the process be at any rate a momentary subject of experience and
self-interest, which would, for example, be that which was hurt if there
was pain. But there would be no such subject of experience and
self-interest somehow stretched out through the continued existence of the
process.



Anyway, whether Parfit tries still to identify a person with a continuing
process or lets the person fragment into momentary subjects of experience,
the improbability for itself of existing, either of the process-‘person’ or
of any of its momentary subjects, would make such a hypothesis
statistically untenable just as it did the unreconstructed usual view of a
person. For every moment an inference would be supported that the existence
of *this* momentary subject, or *this* process-person, was from its
perspective immensely improbable and should be given up in favour of the
existence of the universalist subject of experience.



[1] Here I am only addressing Parfit’s position in his early paper
‘Personal Identity’.





Jason


On Mon, Jan 22, 2024 at 4:16 PM Jason Resch <jasonresch at gmail.com> wrote:

>
>
> On Mon, Jan 22, 2024 at 3:21 PM Ben Zaiboc via extropy-chat <
> extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org> wrote:
>
>>
>> On 21/01/2024 16:02, Jason Resch wrote:
>>
>> On Sun, Jan 21, 2024, 9:31 AM Ben Zaiboc via extropy-chat <extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org> wrote:
>>
>>>
>>>
>>>     On 20/01/2024 15:11, Jason Resch wrote:
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>>       where does one person begin and end? If someone steps into a
>>>       transporter that destroys their body and reconstructs it
>>>       elsewhere, do we draw a terminating border at one end and say the
>>>       person died here, and a new separate person began elsewhere? Or do
>>>       we draw the borders such that there is a continuous link bridging
>>>       then, such that it is all the same person, and the experiences of
>>>       the person who emerges on the other side of the teleporter, *are*
>>>       experiences that will be had by the person who stepped into the
>>>       transporter?
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>>     Depends on what you need, and what point of view you adopt. There is
>>>     no single correct answer (which is not to say that there are no
>>>     answers).
>>>
>> It matters to the person stepping into the transporter, does it not? Are
>> you saying there is no scientifically establishable answer to this
>> question? Could not an experimentalist undergo the teleportation to
>> (hopefully) personally confirm his theory that his consciousness
>> survives?
>>
>>
>> Yes, of course. And if the person stepping into the transporter thinks
>> that his consciousness depends on the atoms of his brain (or an immaterial
>> 'soul' that is lost, etc.), the person stepping out of the other end will
>> believe that he is not the same person.
>>
>
> They might choose to label the previous copy a former self, but someone
> who is consciously experiencing something cannot believe that they are
> dead/not experiencing something. The consciousness, based on everything it
> knows and feels, would necessarily feel as though their consciousness
> survived the procedure, regardless of what they might say about their
> previous body.
>
>
>> There is a character in Charlie Stross' Accelerando in exactly this
>> position. No-one can convince him of their view that he is the same person,
>> despite his continuity of memory, etc.
>>
>
> That is interesting.
>
>
>> Can we say he's wrong? Only by asserting that a different way of looking
>> at things is the 'correct' one. Can he say that they are wrong? Ditto. Yes,
>> you can demonstrate that a mind survives replacement of the atoms in the
>> brain (or does it? Maybe it's a mind that's to similar to the original that
>> no-one else notices), but in the end, you have to choose a framework and
>> follow it through.
>>
>> Someone else may think that they are only partially the same person.
>>
>> Most would probably think that they are the same person (why would you
>> undergo the procedure otherwise, unless it was forced on you?)
>>
>> So, different points of view, different answers.
>>
>
> But all survivors of teleporters believe "I am alive and conscious", which
> is to me, the only meaningful definition of "survival." In other words, it
> would be inconsistent for the survivor to say "I am dead!" or "I am no
> longer conscious" -- unless the procedure did turn them into a zombie of
> some kind, but this would presumably require some form of dualism.
>
>
>> ...
>>
>>
>>>                               'The experiences' is just a label that we use in our
>>>                 heads so we can think about these things (remembering
>>>                 that the thoughts don't have to be true or accurate, or
>>>                 even make any kind of sense). It would be more accurate
>>>                 to say 'I experience', 'you experience'. Saying 'you *have*
>>>                 experience X' tempts us to think of X as a thing that is
>>>                 possessed (and could therefore also be possessed by
>>>                 someone else). It's not.
>>>
>>>         I agree they aren't swappable or tradable like playing cards. There is a tight kinky between each experience and a particular mind state.
>>
>>
>>     Not sure what a 'tight kinky' is. Presumably a typo, but I'm not
>>     sure what you meant to write. A tight link?
>> Yes "tight link".
>>
>>>
>>>
>>>     I suppose you could say that, being careful to recognise that the
>>>     experience does not exist on its own, and is then 'linked' to the
>>>     mind. The experience is produced by the mind, so talking about a
>>>     'link' is unnecessary and potentially misleading.
>>>
>>>
>>>         That said, we acknowledge that for a given person (here I mean the common sense understanding of the term), has a life which spans and includes many different mind states, and many different experiences.
>>>
>>>         It is this many-to-one relationship that creates the problem of assignment.
>>>
>>>
>>>     I don't know what that last sentence means. What do you mean by
>>>     'assignment'. Assignment of what?
>>>
>> Experiences-to-person. Or using your terminology: mind_states-to-person.
>>
>> I thought we'd agreed on the unique nature of experiences. You can't
>> 'assign' an experience to the thing that generates it. They are
>> inextricably and uniquely linked, and no other person can experience the
>> same thing. So there is no 'problem of assignment'. That is meaningless.
>>
>>
>>>     Again, I take issue with the language used as well. A person doesn't
>>>     really 'have' a life which includes many different mind-states. I'd
>>>     rather say a person consists of many different mind-states. If those
>>>     didn't exist, there would be no person.
>>>
>>>
>>>     This is the same difficulty caused by the common habit of referring
>>>     to 'our minds'. We don't *have* minds (which implies a duality), we *are* minds.
>>>
>> If each of us are minds, and each mind can have many states, which set of possible mind states can one be or become?
>>
>> The set of mind-states that are available to that mind. It will vary,
>> depending on things like personal history, the details of neural structure,
>> chemistry, all kinds of things. I'd say that it's impossible to predict, in
>> practice.
>>
>> Is there any theoretical or fundamental limit?
>>
>> I have no idea how you'd determine that. There must be limits, though. No
>> human will ever know what it's like to be a Bat, to take one famous example.
>>
>
> I don't see why we could not gradually morph someone's brain into that of
> a bat, using advanced nanotechnology, for example.
>
>
>> But I also think that nobody except Jonh Smith will experience the same
>> things as him upon eating the same sandwich on the same day in the same
>> place. So I'd say that one limit is that you can only experience your own
>> unique experiences, not anyone else's.
>>
>
> If there are no fundamental limits on how John Smith's brain can be
> perturbed over time, there's no limit to what experiences John Smith is
> capable of.
>
>
>> ...
>>>
>>> How much perturbation can be tolerated before we say, "that's no longer the same, or that person is dead" ?
>>>
>>>
>>>     This is a philosophical question, with different answers depending
>>>     on your assumptions.
>>>
>> You can leave them as a philosophical questions, or as I prefer to do, you
>> can turn them into a hard empirical questions, with definite yes/no
>> answers, by asking and testing things like:
>> Does my conscious survive radical brain surgery?
>> Does my conscious survive gradual replacement of material?
>> Does my conscious survive instantaneous replacement of material (e.g. in a teleporter)?
>> Does my conscious survive the accumulation of memories over a lifetime?
>> Does my conscious survive loss of memories in the decline of senility?
>> Does my conscious survive about changes in memory content (e.g. partial amnesia, implantation of false memories (as in Total Recall))?
>>
>> No you can't, as I keep saying. Those questions can have different
>> answers, depending on who's asking them and what their point of view is.
>>
>
> As I've said repeatedly, such questions are always asked/interpreted from
> the perspective/POV of the person undergoing the procedure, who receives
> empirical confirmation afterwards.
>
>
>> The thing you don't seem to acknowledge is that these are subjective
>> matters, not objective ones. They have to be, as we are dealing with the
>> very phenomenon at the heart of subjectivity.
>>
>>     To me, the mind is the important thing, and the mind is an embodied
>>>     dynamic pattern of information. How much can that pattern change,
>>>     and still claim to be 'the same person'? I don't have any single
>>>     fixed answer. But you could take the attitude that I'm the same
>>>     person that I was since I was born (because of a common genome,
>>>     continuity of physical body, etc. My mind didn't even exist then,
>>>     really, so I don't subscribe to that view. I'd say that I didn't
>>>     exist yet), or you could say that I'm a different person each day,
>>>     or even from moment to moment. I don't really care.
>>>
>> You can say you don't care, but then ask yourself: why save for retirement
>> all your life if you are only to give all that money away to some old
>> rich guy in the future who isn't you? -- (at least it won't be you if
>> you really believed you're a different person each day).
>>
>> Precisely. If that's what I believe, that's perfectly correct.
>>
>
> Find me the person who believes that, and decides not to save for
> retirement because of that belief (that is, anyone who truly believes, and
> lives their life according to the belief, that they are only a
> single-thought moment). I doubt such people exist. Neither decision theory,
> nor science itself, can operate if you remove the concept of future
> expectation.
>
>
>>  If I feel that I'm the same person, then I am.
>>>
>> Yes, this is how I defined survival, by the subjective feeling that ones consciousness has continued into another moment.
>>
>>>  There's a sense in which I am the same person that I was a few decades ago, and a sense in which I'm a different person to who I was when I started writing this email.
>>>
>> Note that here you are using two different definitions of person.
>>
>> Exactly! And two different people can hold two different definitions to
>> be true. They are both correct.
>>
>
> Assuming neither one leads to inconsistencies, or makes
> untestable/unfounded assumptions.
>
> I'll reiterate, the inconsistencies do not appear in the definitions
> themselves. The definitions can be written down and they all seem perfectly
> fine. The issues arise when we attempt to use these different definitions
> to answer questions with objective answers (e.g. do I survive this or not)?
>
>
>>  What philosophers of personal identity attempt is to clearly define each and
>> then test whether those definitions are consistent/valid in all
>> situations.
>>
>> You're basically proposing to 'test' people's points of view. This is
>> like trying to decide which is right, the guy who says "that car is blue"
>> or the one who says "that car is turquoise".
>> Which is the 'correct' interpretation of the story of Bambi, is it about
>> cruelty or sadness?
>>
>
> These aren't testing points of view. They are tests of the logical
> consistency of theories. As well as evaluating them on probabilistic
> grounds, and for unfounded metaphysical assumptions (e.g. Occam's razor).
> The only time subjectivity enters the picture is in the experiments to test
> whether one's consciousness subjectively survives (e.g. a teleporter, a
> surgery, a mind upload, or any other procedure).
>
>
>> Of course, this is why we call it 'philosophy'. If there were any
>> objectively testable and definite answers, we'd call it 'science'.
>>
>
> If you believe there are no objective tests favoring one theory vs.
> another, am I correct that you believe open individualism is a possibility
> you can neither prove nor disprove?
> If not, then you must think it makes some different predictions from the
> others which we could objectively test. What would those tests be?
>
>
>>     Again, no single 'correct' answer. There are as many answers as you
>>>     can think up different ways of looking at it.
>>>
>> If you examine deeply what certain answers imply, I believe you will find
>> the number of possibly correct answers, is a very small set.
>>
>> Again with the 'correct'. There is no 'correct'!
>> Consider this: What is happening on planet X of star Y in the Andromeda
>> galaxy, RIGHT NOW? (i.e. at the exact moment that you are reading this).
>>
>
> For the Andromeda case, I would say we exist in an infinite number of
> subjectively indistinguishable possibilities, each consistent with
> everything we know.
>
> "It is impossible for any observer to deduce with certainty on the basis
> of her observations and memory which world she is a part of. That is, there
> are always many different worlds for which being contained in them is
> compatible with everything she knows, but which imply different predictions
> for future observations."
> -- Markus Müller in “Could the physical world be emergent instead of
> fundamental, and why should we ask?
> <https://arxiv.org/pdf/1712.01826v1.pdf>” (2017)
>
> But the indeterminacy of the far away and unmeasurable, is different from
> your supposition that different theories of personal identity could all be
> right. As I showed below, different theories of personal identity provide
> different answers to the same questions regarding the same situation.
> Therefore they cannot all be objectively correct. If there is such a thing
> as objective truth and an objective reality, then at least some of these
> theories must be wrong (at least in such cases where they give different
> answers).
>
>
>>
>>>     I can't say for sure, but I suspect that the experience of [anything
>>>     you like] is different as my mind changes over time. That each
>>>     experience is unique not only to a mind, but to a mind at a specific
>>>     time. It could be that someone's experience of eating a cheese
>>>     sandwich on a rainy afternoon in March 2019 is different to the same
>>>     person's experience of the same thing in the same place, on a rainy
>>>     afternoon in March 2029. Actually, thinking about it, I'd be
>>>     surprised if this wasn't true.
>>>
>> An uploaded mind cannot access the true time outside the simulation. If
>> you run the mind simulation twice at two different times, there's no
>> room for the mind to know anything was different between the two runs,
>> unless you introduce something metaphysical.
>> But if your point is that brains are messy things and always changing, I see and agree with that point.
>>
>> My point is that experiences are unique. Not only to the minds generating
>> them, but quite probably to each instance of 'the same' experience (meaning
>> that they aren't in fact the same at all. The uniqueness is absolute). This
>> means there is no such thing as two people having the same experience, or a
>> common pool of experiences that can be 'had' by a number of different
>> people.
>>
>> Which brings me back to:
>>
>>
>>>>                 So the way I see it, this whole concept of 'theories of
>>>>                 personal identity' is built on a misconception of the
>>>>                 nature of 'experiences'.
>>>>
>>>         To this I would say, and I hope it clarifies, that personal identity isn't so much trying to answer "should
>>>           put this frog in that bucket or this one?", but rather, it is
>>>           about trying to define the borders of the buckets themselves.
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>>     My point was that the frogs in buckets analogy doesn't apply.
>>>
>> Earlier, you said: "a person consists of many different mind-states"
>> So then, why cannot we label the collection of mind-states which a particular person consists of?
>>
>> We can, and do. We label it "a person".
>>
>>         What circumstances are necessary for a person to arise, survive, or die, etc.
>>>
>>>         There are easy, conventional answers to such questions, based on the presence or maintenance of some attribute.
>>>
>>>         But I think if you seriously consider the
>>>           problems that arise in those cases you will understand the
>>>           difficulties of the conventional view and it's inability to
>>>           handle a host of situations.
>>>
>>>         In the end, belief in the necessity of some
>>>           attribute that is needed for "you to be you" is both unfounded
>>>           and uneccessary. It's a purely metaphysical assumption which
>>>           Occam would remind us to dispense with.
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>>     You're assuming that being able to use different attributes,
>>>     according to what you find important, is equivalent to not using
>>>     any. The fact that there may be 10 different paths to get from where
>>>     you are to where you want to go, doesn't mean that you don't need
>>>     any path at all. Some attribute *is* necessary,
>>>
>> The only attribute that is necessary is the "immediacy of experience" --
>> the feeling that it is *I* who is having the experience". You can remove
>>  everything else and people will believe they have survived to live in
>> that moment.
>> Note that this attribute is equally present in all experiences. All experiences feel like it is I who is having them.
>>
>> All of *your* experiences. And all of mine feel like mine. This is
>> hardly a revelation.
>>
>
> If you think about this a little more deeply, you may discover that all
> experiences, as felt by all beings, feel like "mine".
>
> This is really saying nothing more than all beings consider them to exist
> in the time "now", or the place "here." There is a relativity involved,
> that generates the illusion of a selection (that some time is privileged to
> be now), or that some organisim's neurology is privileged to be "you".
>
> This passage, from Nagel in "Physicalism
> <https://philpapers.org/rec/NAGP-2>" (1965) may help to dispel this
> illusion by shedding some more light on the issue:
>
> "Consider everything that can be said about the world without employing
> any token reflexive
> expressions. This will include the description of all its physical
> contents and their states, activities
> and attributes. It will also include a description of all the persons in
> the world and their histories,
> memories, thoughts, sensations, perceptions, intentions, and so forth. I
> can thus describe without
> token-reflexives the entire world and everything that is happening in
> it–and this will include a
> description of Thomas Nagel and what he is thinking and feeling. But there
> seems to remain one
> thing which I cannot say in this fashion–namely, which of the various
> persons in the world I am.
> Even when everything that can be said in the specified manner has been
> said, and the world has in a
> sense been completely described, there seems to remain one fact which has
> not been expressed, and
> that is the fact that I am Thomas Nagel. This is not, of course, the fact
> ordinarily conveyed by those
> words, when they are used to inform someone else who the speaker is–for
> that could easily be
> expressed otherwise. It is rather the fact that I am the subject of these
> experiences; this body is my
> body; the subject or center of my world is this person."
>
> This passage shows that when we examine it, we find no physical fact or
> reason to account for the idea that consciousness is limited to a single
> perspective of a single biological creature which is you.
> You could equally be present in all the conscious beings, and each
> instance would suffer the illusion that it is only one biological creature
> (as that is the only thing each can remember).
>
>
>
> but there are
>>>     many choices, depending on your point of view and what you want to
>>>     achieve. The conventional view (that there is one correct answer)
>>>     just needs to be widened to acknowledge that there are many correct
>>>     answers, all valid, that do cover a host of situations.
>>>
>> They only seem valid, until you investigate them more deeply. If you say
>> memory is important, why don't we have funerals form people when they
>> get concussed and forget the past 15 minutes? If you say material is
>> important, why don't we have funerals for people every 7 years when all
>> their atoms are replaced? If you say continuity of a mind process is
>> necessary, why don't we have funerals when someone gets general
>> anesthesia and we shut down that process?
>> The answer is, because all generally acknowledge and feel that our
>> consciousness survives all these things. Our consciousness can survive
>> material replacement of our body and brain, it survives gain and loss of
>>  memories, and it survives discontinuities like general anesthesia and
>> comas. None of these can therefore be the critical attribute for a
>> person's survival.
>>
>> Because we don't all agree on the same criteria for survival?
>> I expect that if everyone agreed that 15 minutes of amnesia qualifies as
>> death, then we would hold funerals (and probably celebrate the birth of a
>> new person on the 16th minute).
>> The definition of death changes as time goes by, and we learn more and
>> our technology advances, which just widens our choices. Some people regard
>> those who are cryogenically suspended to be irrevocably dead, and some
>> don't, for example.
>>
>
> I agree it changes. It changes as new technology expands the scope of
> recoverable situations. If we can build an ultimate healing technology,
> which can heal someone of any wound, even an explosion that blasted them
> into a 1,000 pieces, then we would understand death to only be the result
> of irrecoverable data loss. So long as we had the information necessary to
> restore a person using this healing technology, then any injury would be
> survivable. We could then ask: what if we had the information, but not all
> the original parts. Could we use any old spare atoms to heal the person,
> and restore them to life? Would it be the same person? Technological
> improvements will necessarily lead us to expand and revise the notion of
> personhood, just as it has and will continue to expand the scope of
> survivability, and the border between life and death.
>
>
>>
>>
>>>     Consider planetary motion. What gives the correct answer, Kepler's
>>>     laws or Relativity?
>>>
>> Here you compare two theories which provide the same predictions.
>>
>> For many things, but not all.
>>
>> Different theories of personal identity offer different answers to the same question. For example:
>> Teleporter survival:
>> Bodily continuity - no
>> Psychological continuity - yes
>> Memory loss survival:
>> Bodily continuity - yes
>> Psychological continuity - no
>> Faulty transporter survival:
>> Bodily continuity - no
>> Psychological continuity - no
>> Open individualism - yes
>>
>> So if the transporter is faulty and no body materialises, so of course no
>> brain, and therefore no mind, you're saying that the individual
>> nevertheless 'survives'??
>> So basically, nobody has ever died?
>> Pictures, please.
>>
>
> The faulty transporter is an example where there is a new body, but some
> memories are lost or inserted (changed). So it combines  the aspects of
> teleporter survival, and memory loss survival. Each continuity theory would
> find something necessary was lost, and therefore conclude that the person
> did not survive.
>
>
>>
>>>     I still don't see any reason to assume that there's some kind of
>>>     mental connection between myself and that Maori dude 200 years ago.
>>>     Or anybody else.
>>>
>> It's not a mental connection. It's an identity of personhood.
>>
>> There's no such thing (between two individuals). You are the only thing
>> that is identical to you.
>>
>
> I think this may be inconsistent with your agreement above that a person
> is a collection of mind-states. Each mind state is different. How then do
> we decide to put them into a particular collection which we call "one
> person?"
> What is it about the mind states that makes them belong to one person and
> not another?
>
> Jason
>
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