[ExI] Open Individualism

[Jason Resch]

On Mon, Jan 8, 2024 at 10:22 AM Ben Zaiboc via extropy-chat <
extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org> wrote:

>
> On 07/01/2024 00:21, Jason Resch wrote:
>
>     >>> If you step into a star trek style transporter, but some error
> causes
>     >>> 5 identical copies of yourself to beam down, which one do you
> become?
>     >>>
>     >>> A) none of them
>     >>> B) one of them
>     >>> C) all of them
>
>     >>"Which one do you become?" is not a sensible or meaningful question.
>
> ...
>
> > Let's say someone comes to your door with the following proposition:
>
> > He will pay you $1,000,000 to scan you, destroy you (kill you,
> painlessly), then create a perfect replica of you to take over your life
> from that point forward. Do you take him up on his offer?
>
> No.
>

This suggests to me that you believe you will not survive the procedure. Is
that right?



>
> > Here, you need a theory of personal identity to decide whether or not
> you are killed, or whether or not you are paid a million dollars to be a
> test subject in using the first teletransporter.
>
> > Faced with this proposition, you can't avoid the issue by saying it's a
> meaningless question.
>
> That's right. but it's not the same question. In the original question,
> you get into a transporter, which disassembles your body and recreates it
> somewhere else (and accidentally creates more than one). In your second
> question, you are non-destructively duplicated, leaving your original body
> intact, which is then murdered.
>

In my example you are destroyed first, then re-created.

But you raise an interesting question: does the time-sequence of events
matter? Consider what happens inside your house a black box. You take the
man up on his offer, enter your house and then your copy emerges. But no
one knows, was the duplicate created before or after the original was
destroyed. Let's call the two possibly resulting versions of you A-copy,
and B-copy. A-copy is a version created after you are destroyed, and B-copy
was created before you were destroyed. Everything physically about A-copy
and B-copy  are the same: all the atoms of the are the same, etc., so there
is no physical difference between them. The only version is the history of
what happened to the original and how the time lines up with the creation
of the copy.

If you believe you become your duplicate if he is created after the
original is destroyed, but not if created before the duplicate is
destroyed, what basis is there to say A-copy is you, but B-copy isn't, when
they are physically the same?

Then consider when we throw relativity of simultaneity from relativity into
the mix. Then there could be two external observers, both of which
witnesses the order of events, but they disagree on whether the copy was
created before or after the destruction of the original. Then it is
relative whether a copy is an A-copy or a B-copy!


> I know there are people who regard destructive duplication as the same
> thing, but I don't. Maybe you can translate that into a 'theory of
> identity'. I won't try to. I'll just say that the crucial thing is the
> timing. Destructive scanning instantaneously (subjectively, anyway)
> translates the subject into the new form/s. Non-destructive scanning leaves
> the subject intact, with their own ongoing experiences. So non-destructive
> scanning plus subsequent destruction of the subject equals murder,
> destructive scanning does not (which raises the interesting question of
> what about if the subject is rendered unconscious before the procedure?).
>

Based on this it seems you place importance on continuity of the
body/material organization, which is in line with the usual view of
personal identity. But then I ask, when there is no physical difference
between the A-copy and the B-copy, what is the difference? Particles don't
care about, or act differently based on their (or something else's) past
history. So if you think there is a difference between A-copy and B-copy,
and it is not physical, it seems to me it must be metaphysical. (some
unseen "youness" which can either attach itself, or not, to some group of
atoms).


>
> ...
>
> > Do you consider any questions that asks: "What do you expect to
> experience in the next moment?" to be meaningless?
>
> No. I consider questions that refer to a singular 'you' in the context of
> multiple duplication to be meaningless. A bit like sending an interactive
> novel to 5 different people, then asking "what happens next?", and
> expecting just one answer.
>

You cannot answer a question about your own subjectivity from the
standpoint of a third-person view-from-nowhere. When I ask what do you
expect to experience, I mean from the inside, first-person view, not what
an objective observer sitting outside and watching it all unfold would say
about the situation.

I believe from the internal view, the observers would feel as if they
randomly become one of them. If they iterated this experiment many times,
they would tend to each write down a random sequence of numbers between 1-5
noting the position they found themselves in each time they step into this
transporter.


>
>
> >>    The same thing applies to someone who is duplicated multiple times.
> Each
>     resultant person is the same in the sense that they can correctly claim
>     to have been the original in the past, and they are all different from
>     each other because they are now separate minds that have different
>     experiences since the duplication. They will probably retain the same
>     basic personality traits, and will probably express them in different
>     ways, depending on their individual circumstances. They will each be an
>     independent person, with the same past as all the others, up to the
>     point of divergence.
>
>
> > But does your consciousness survive? That's what people are concerned
> with.
>
> I don't see why that question occurs to you. Of course it survives, in
> multiple instances. How could it not? If it didn't, there would have been
> no duplication.
>
If you sent a story to 20 different people, you don't ask yourself "does
> that story still exist?", even if you had deleted the copy on your own
> computer, you wouldn't doubt that the story still exists.
>

Is this answer consistent with your rejection of the $1M to be
destructively duplicated? Presumably you said "No" to the offer because you
believed your consciousness would not survive the process. But here you say
it does survive. Could you clarify your position, as I am no longer sure
what it is.


>
>
> >>    If you insist on the wording "which one do you become?", I'd have to
>     answer A and C. Which kind of illustrates that it's a silly question.
>
>
> > I think your answer shows the silliness of the conventional view of
> personal identity. Your answer indicates a preference for either empty
> individualism or open individualism, which are both logically more tenable,
> but empty individualism is non workable as a decision theory since it
> allows no expectations and makes behaviors like saving for retirement (or
> any future planning) pointless.
>
> I think my answer shows the silliness of the question. Or perhaps, the
> fact that we're not used to thinking in terms of multiple selves. I
> normally use the example of an amoeba dividing to illustrate this. When an
> amoeba divides into two daughter amoebas, by replicating all its organelles
> and splitting into two, which one is the original amoeba? The question
> doesn't mean anything, does it? The original becomes two. The question
> "Which one do you become?" is the same. Conventional experience doesn't
> apply, because people have never done this before.
>

Well if you believe in many-worlds, it happens all the time. What does it
feel like to be copied? It feels like something random just occurred.

"It gradually hit me that this illusion of randomness business really
wasn't specific to quantum mechanics at all. Suppose that some future
technology allows you to be cloned while you're sleeping, and that your two
copies are placed in rooms numbered 0 and 1. When they wake up, they'll
both feel that the room number they read is completely unpredictable and
random. [...] In other words, causal physics will produce the illusion of
randomness from your subjective viewpoint in any circumstance where you're
being cloned. The fundamental reason that quantum mechanics appears random
even though the wavefunction evolves deterministically is that the
Schrödinger equation can evolve a wavefunction with a single you into one
with clones of you in parallel universes."
-- Max Tegmark in "Our Mathematical Universe
<https://archive.org/details/ourmathematicalu0000tegm/page/194/mode/2up?q=cloned>"
(2014)

"The many-universes theory gives a new perspective to this fundamental
indeterminacy. The information which would have led to complete
predictability is, crudely speaking, hidden from us in the other worlds to
which we have no access. Thus, superspace as a whole is completely
deterministic; the random element comes from our sampling just a minute
portion of the whole. Regarding the real universe as the whole of
superspace, one sees that God does not, after all, play dice. The game of
chance comes not from nature, but our perception of it. Our consciousness
weaves a route at random along the ever-branching evolutionary pathways of
the cosmos, so it is we, rather than God, who are playing dice."
-- Paul Davies in "Other Worlds: Space, Superspace, and the Quantum Universe
<https://archive.org/details/otherworldsspace00davi/page/138/mode/2up?q=%22consciousness+weaves+a+route%22>"
(1980)




> When (as I hope will happen) it becomes possible, we'll have to change the
> way we think about personal identity, and it will cause many people
> considerable problems. Doubtless it will spawn new 'Theories of Identity'!
>

I think we can already use thought experiments to reason about the
implications of these future technologies, and work out what the correct
theory of personal identity is.


>
> Ask yourself this question: If you are duplicated, creating two new
> people, and only one of them is 'you', then who the hell is the other one???
>

I believe I become both.


>
>
>      >>> The "2024-you" is also different in many ways (different place,
>     different atoms, different experience), from the "2023-you".
>
>      >>> But we also, as a matter of general practice, believe/assume that
>     despite these difference, they are experienced by the same person.
>
> >>    I'd agree with both these things: Different, and also the same,
>     depending on which factors you're considering.
>
>
> > That's good. I would then add that person identity theories attempt to
> specify which factors ought to be considered.
>
> I assume here you mean 'in each case', as they are different.
>

There are things about them that are different, but we also acknowledge
(absent assuming something like empty individualism) that both experiences
are had by the same person.


>
>
>      >>> Personal identity theories attempt to answer the question of what,
>     and how much, can change while retaining the identity of a person.
>
> >>    The answer to that depends on what your definition of 'identity' is,
> so
>     it's a circular question. You could create a philosophical field
> called,
>     say, Fish Identity Theory, that attempts to answer whether Sardines are
>     animals or fish. There is no definitive answer to a question like this,
>     without any other context (the most realistic answer, of course, is
>     "both"). Insisting on one or the other is really more of an invitation
>     to have a pointless argument than a genuine question.
>
>
> > What differentiates concerns of personal identity from taxonomy is that
> there are definite hard answers to the questions or concerns: i.e. will
> you, or will you not experience this particular conscious experience?
>
> > It makes no difference to the fish what we call it, but it surely makes
> a difference to you, whether the transporter kills you (ends your
> consciousness permanently), or takes you to Paris.
>
> You are assuming that 'you' means the same thing before and after the
> procedure. My point is that there is more than one 'you' afterward, each
> fully entitled to be called 'you'.
>

Yes. They all do. All have an equal claim.


> We are not used to thinking in these terms, which is what I think causes
> these misunderstandings. This is why the question "what happens to you?"
> doesn't work, because people tend to baulk at the answer "you are
> duplicated".
>

The answer (and question) becomes ambiguous from the third-person
perspective, but it's still valid to ask about your future expectations as
an experiencer, who is about to undergo such an operation. You might not
have any definite answer,  but you could say something like "I expect my
consciousness to continue, and to find myself at one of the locations, but
I cannot predict which."

It's the same as asking an AI within a computer simulation whose process
calls the fork() system call, and sets the color of a ball within the
environment, to "red" when the return bit is 1, and to "blue" when the
return bit is 0. If you were in the simulation with the AI, and fork was to
be called several times in succession, all you could predict is that you
would see the ball start to change colors, being blue 50% of the time and
red 50% of the time, on average.



> People then ask "ok, but which one is REALLY you??", which I hope you can
> see, is a silly question.
>

Assuming there can only be one you is what creates the silliness. It
presumes there is something special about one of the copies that isn't in
the others (some dualistic, non-physical soul that follows only a single
path).


>
> The key thing to wrap our heads around, I think, is that 'you' doesn't
> have to be unique.
>

Exactly!


> And I do appreciate, this is hard.
>

It is.


> I struggled with it for quite a while. But the conclusion I came to in the
> end, is that assuming that there can only be one unique 'you' is a form of
> dualism. And I reject dualism completely.
>

Yes.

The feeling of being unique, can be entirely explained by the
non-integration of experience. There is no need to add a further assumption
of "you are unique". Occam would slice that away, since the non-integration
is all that is required to explain the feeling of being unique.


> If the same mental pattern is duplicated, then by necessity, the same
> person becomes two, or more people, in every way. This is the same as
> copying a CD or a DVD. A pattern of information is duplicated. There are
> now 500 spreadsheets, or 30,000 Beethoven's fifth Symphonies. The question
> "Which one is the real one?" is meaningless. They are all the real one, all
> identical duplicates of the original single one.
>

Yes! Now consider, if they all begin as one, what happens in something like
many-worlds where that one evolves continuously into many?  Or to use your
example, if amoeba were conscious, would what began as a single conscious
evolve to become them all? (Note, the consciousness remains non-integrated,
so they all still feel unique, I am not suggesting anything like a group or
collective consciousness, only the absence of a metaphysical/dualistic soul
that singles out one line as special or privileged).


>
>
>      >>> Empty individualism says any change at all, no matter how small,
>     constitutes a new person. Closed individualism, says you can only
> change
>     so much while being the same person. Open  individualism says there's
> no
>     limit to how much can change and yet still remain the same person --
>     that all variations of material composition of the body or
> psychological
>     content of the experience, are mere contingencies.
>
>     >> Ok, so there you have three different views on the matter. That's
> all
>     you can say. You certainly can't say if one is 'righter' than the
>     others, without further qualifying context.
>
> > Only one of these theories can be correct.
>
> I disagree. Each different theory is looking at a different aspect, which
> is why I used the taxonomy examples.
>

Would you agree though, that it is either true or false that your
consciousness survives some event? Surely from the
outside/third-person/impartial observer, it's just a matter of taxonomy,
but this field requires answering questions that deal with the subjective.
It is close to the field of consciousness in that respect.


>
>
> > Your last two answers are consistent, in that they recognize time/space
> interchangeability. That is, there's no fundamental difference between the
> same person existing in two times, vs. the same person existing in two
> places.
>
> There is a considerable difference. the first is commonplace, the second
> has never yet happened.
>

The second may be commonplace, if many-worlds is true, or if space is
infinite.


>
>
>     >>And I'm still no closer to understanding what 'Open Individualism'
>     actually means. "One numerically identical subject, who is everyone at
>     all times, in the past, present and future" is a sentence that makes no
>     sense. What does 'One numerically identical...' mean? 'Identical' is a
>     comparison, so you have to have at least two things, for them to be
>     identical to one another in any respect. 'One identical thing' is
>     meaningless. Can we replace that with "one person", for clarity, or
>     doesn't that work?. The rest just reads as gobbledigook. Can it be
>     boiled down to "one person, who is all people"? At least that sentence
>     is coherent. As for what it means...
>
>
> > Boiled down to one sentence, it is the idea that: "There is only one
> person."
>
> Ok, well that is demonstrably not true. There are at least two people, you
> and me (ok, I know about me, but... (and that's a different discussion!))
>

Can you use the fact that you are only presently aware of "now" to
refute eternalism?

Can you use the fact that you are only presently aware of "this branch" to
refute many-worlds?

If not, then I would argue that neither can you use the fact that you are
only presently aware of "Ben Zaiboc's POV" to refute open individualism.


>
>     >>Your definition above is different, though. You refer to how much
>     someone can change and still be thought of as the same. The Wiki
>     definition talks about everyone already being the same.
>
> > When I was talking about change, I was referring to changing the
> material composition of the body and the content of experience, while
> remaining the same person.
>
> The only thing left then is memory. If that remains the same, then I'd
> say, yes, same person. If not, then there is no basis for considering them
> to be the same person.
>

But we gain and lose memories all the time. Your consciousness survives the
fact it forgot what you ate a few weeks back, does it not?


>
>  > If anything about the body or experience is free to be changed while
> not destroying the person, then there is only one person.
>
> Fine, but what has that got to do with the Wiki definition, which
> encompasses all people, not just one?
>

The Wiki definition is admittedly quite terrible.

But what my point has to do with it is that it makes the particular body,
and particular content of experience, into mere contingencies, like what
color shirt you happen to be wearing. You would still be you even if your
shirt were another color.

Open individualism just extends this to the other contingencies of your
place, material composition, content of experience, etc. Thus all beings,
even those you look very different from, are you too.


>
> Someone in New Zealand, born 200 years ago, has a different body,
> experiences and memories to me. We are definitely not 'the same person'. As
> far as I can see, this idea of 'Open Individualism' seems to be claiming
> that we are. Or have I got that wrong?
>

You can experience great pain and you can experience great joy. Those two
experiences couldn't be more different from one another, but they are both
experiences you are capable of having. I would argue then that your
experience of eating an apple is not so different from the experience of
that New Zealander eating an apple 200 years ago, at least the two
experiences are more similar than the two extremes of consciousness
experience you are capable of having. All conscious experiences have in
common, the feeling of immediacy, and that is all that is required for it
to feel like it is your experience.

Jason
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