[ExI] Fwd: Open Individualism

[Ben Zaiboc]

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).

> ...
>
>
>     '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?

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?
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.

>
> 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" ?

This is a philosophical question, with different answers depending on 
your assumptions.

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. If I feel that I'm the same person, then I am. 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. Again, no single 'correct' answer. There are as many 
answers as you can think up different ways of looking at it.

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.

...
>
>
>     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.

>
> 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, 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.

Consider planetary motion. What gives the correct answer, Kepler's laws 
or Relativity?

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.

Ben
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