[ExI] Fwd: Open Individualism

[Jason Resch]

Ben,

I appreciate your insights and careful thinking on this topic. A few
comments below:

On Sat, Jan 20, 2024, 7:27 AM Ben Zaiboc via extropy-chat <
extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org> wrote:

> On 20/01/2024 05:48, Jason Resch wrote:
>
> ... one of the questions of personal identity is "which experiences are had by which persons?"
> However we might define "person," I hope you agree that this question is meaningful.
> Experiences are something we as persons have. So the question: which experiences
> are mine? Which ones will I experience? Leads to the three-way split in
>  theories of personal identity. That is, how do we assign which observer
>  moments, are experiences that will be had by which persons?
>
>
> I don't think the question is very meaningful at all.
>
> It's treating 'experiences' and 'people' as separable things. I don't
> think they are (I don't see how they could be).
>

I agree with you that experiences are not separable from the brain/mind
that produces them. A particular kind of experience can only be had by a
particular mind state with a particular pattern / organization.


> You have to have a person before they can have an experience. It's like
> coloured blocks. You can have a blue Block and a yellow Block, but you
> can't have 'a Blue' or 'a Yellow'. And experiences are inherently personal.
> No-one else can possibly know what your experiences are, so "which
> experiences are had by which persons?" only has one answer: You have your
> experiences. I have mine. Each person has their own.
>

But 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?

(This is just one example, of many, which shows it isn't so clear cut which
experiences belong to a person, because we need to define both what we mean
by person, and what qualifies as survival of that person from one moment to
the next. We must therefore define the necessary preconditions of what must
be preserved for that person to be said to still exist.)


> '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.

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.

To do so, we must be able to define the boundaries of a person's life:

Is it a matter of their body being maintained?
Is it a matter of their brain being maintained?
Is it a matter of their psychology and personality being preserved?
Is it a matter of their memories being preserved?

If so to what extent? How much perturbation can be tolerated before we say,
"that's no longer the same, or that person is dead" ?

X is a label that we use to represent our experience, and we assume, for
> convenience, that other people experience something like it that they also
> call X (I strongly suspect that my X and your X could be completely
> different, but lead to the same behaviour. It's the old question about
> colours: "Is my blue the same as your yellow?" There is no way to know).
>
> Apart from the label that we use to communicate (assuming we speak the
> same language), there is no other link between my X and your X. There is
> certainly no known mechanism that could implement such a link. Your X is
> yours alone. We might agree that putting our fingers into a fire causes us
> both to shout, withdraw the fingers, do a little dance and never do that
> again, but we each can't know what the other is actually experiencing. The
> likelihood is that our shouts and dances are different in some ways, which
> does kind of hint that there are going to be differences in our
> experiences. Even if, by some ridiculous freak chance, the experiences were
> exactly the same, there's no way to possibly know, and no actual link
> between them.
>

I agree.

>
> There is no such thing as 'the experience of being happy' as a thing in
> itself.
>

I agree.

John Smith being happy is not something that you can separate into the John
> Smith and the Being Happy, as if they were buckets and frogs. You can
> meaningfully ask which other buckets can hold these frogs, but you can't
> meaningfully ask which other people can experience this (John Smith's)
> happiness, because it's unique to him, and inherently unknowable to anyone
> else.
>

That is all true, I have no problem with it.



> 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.

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 uneccesssry. It's a purely
metaphysical assumption which Occam would remind us to dispense with.

Jason
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