[ExI] Fwd: Open Individualism

[Darin Sunley]

Open Individualism is starting to sound like Greg Egan's "Dust theory" from
Permutation City.

To state that "You have to have a person before they can have an
experience" isn't a counterargument against Dust theory, it's a naked and
content-free denial of it.

The central claim of dust theory is, indeed, that "persons" are not
ontologically primitive. That a "person" is nothing more and nothing less
than a sequence of "experiences" [observer moments] that form a sequence.
The sequence is defined by the fact that some observer moments are in the
process of remembering other observer moments. [dust theory also holds that
all possible observer moments exist, are ontologically primitive, and are,
indeed, the only things that exist.]

Yes, their theory is radically non-materialist, and yes, it has unanswered
questions, but it's not sufficiently out there that it can be trivially
disposed of with a content-free denial asserting the trivial and obvious
truth of the materialist paradigm. That's just begging the question.

On Sat, Jan 20, 2024 at 8:13 AM Jason Resch via extropy-chat <
extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org> wrote:

> 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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