[ExI] Fwd: Open Individualism

Sun Jan 21 01:03:09 UTC 2024

On Sat, Jan 20, 2024, 7:20 PM Darin Sunley via extropy-chat <
extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org> wrote:

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

Interesting observation.

> 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.
>

I would say the notion of "observer moments" is useful to illustrate how
different theories of personal identity demarcate persons. But I would not
say the notion of observer moments is exclusive to one theory or another.
Perhaps they are a necessity to define "empty individualism", though.

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.]
>

Then I would say dust theory makes additional assumptions not made by
theories of personal identity, which are independent on matters of
ontology.  That is, any of the three categories of personal identity
theories are compatible with either materialism or idealism.

> 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.
>

Personally I subscribe to the view that the physical universe emerges out
of conscious experiences which are themselves the product of a more
primitive mathematical reality.

 I describe this theory here:

https://alwaysasking.com/why-does-anything-exist/

Jason

> 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
>> _______________________________________________
>> extropy-chat mailing list
>> extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org
>> http://lists.extropy.org/mailman/listinfo.cgi/extropy-chat
>>
> _______________________________________________
> extropy-chat mailing list
> extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org
> http://lists.extropy.org/mailman/listinfo.cgi/extropy-chat
>
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://lists.extropy.org/pipermail/extropy-chat/attachments/20240120/3e227b3a/attachment-0001.htm>