[ExI] Fwd: Open Individualism

Sun Jan 21 16:02:00 UTC 2024

On Sun, Jan 21, 2024, 9:31 AM Ben Zaiboc via extropy-chat <
extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org> wrote:

> 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).
>

It matters to the person stepping into the transporter, does it not? Are
you saying there is no scientifically establishable answer to this
question? Could not an experimentalist undergo the teleportation to
(hopefully) personally confirm his theory that his consciousness survives?

> ...
>
>>
>> '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?
>

Yes "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?
>

Experiences-to-person. Or using your terminology: mind_states-to-person.

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.
>

If each of us are minds, and each mind can have many states, which set of
possible mind states can one be or become?

Is there any theoretical or fundamental limit?

>
> 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.
>

You can leave them as a philosophical questions, or as I prefer to do, you
can turn them into a hard empirical questions, with definite yes/no
answers, by asking and testing things like:

Does my conscious survive radical brain surgery?
Does my conscious survive gradual replacement of material?
Does my conscious survive instantaneous replacement of material (e.g. in a
teleporter)?
Does my conscious survive the accumulation of memories over a lifetime?
Does my conscious survive loss of memories in the decline of senility?
Does my conscious survive about changes in memory content (e.g. partial
amnesia, implantation of false memories (as in Total Recall))?

> 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.
>

You can say you don't care, but then ask yourself: why save for retirement
all your life if you are only to give all that money away to some old rich
guy in the future who isn't you? -- (at least it won't be you if you really
believed you're a different person each day).

If I feel that I'm the same person, then I am.
>

Yes, this is how I defined survival, by the subjective feeling that ones
consciousness has continued into another moment.

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.
>

Note that here you are using two different definitions of person. What
philosophers of personal identity attempt is to clearly define each and
then test whether those definitions are consistent/valid in all situations.

Again, no single 'correct' answer. There are as many answers as you can
> think up different ways of looking at it.
>

If you examine deeply what certain answers imply, I believe you will find
the number of possibly correct answers, is a very small set.

> 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.
>

An uploaded mind cannot access the true time outside the simulation. If you
run the mind simulation twice at two different times, there's no room for
the mind to know anything was different between the two runs, unless you
introduce something metaphysical.

But if your point is that brains are messy things and always changing, I
see and agree with that point.

> ...
>
>
>> 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.
>

Earlier, you said:
"a person consists of many different mind-states"

So then, why cannot we label the collection of mind-states which a
particular person consists of?

>
> 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,
>

The only attribute that is necessary is the "immediacy of experience" --
the feeling that it is *I* who is having the experience". You can remove
everything else and people will believe they have survived to live in that
moment.

Note that this attribute is equally present in all experiences. All
experiences feel like it is I who is having them.

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.
>

They only seem valid, until you investigate them more deeply. If you say
memory is important, why don't we have funerals form people when they get
concussed and forget the past 15 minutes? If you say material is important,
why don't we have funerals for people every 7 years when all their atoms
are replaced? If you say continuity of a mind process is necessary, why
don't we have funerals when someone gets general anesthesia and we shut
down that process?

The answer is, because all generally acknowledge and feel that our
consciousness survives all these things. Our consciousness can survive
material replacement of our body and brain, it survives gain and loss of
memories, and it survives discontinuities like general anesthesia and
comas. None of these can therefore be the critical attribute for a person's
survival.

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

Here you compare two theories which provide the same predictions.

Different theories of personal identity offer different answers to the same
question. For example:

Teleporter survival:
Bodily continuity - no
Psychological continuity - yes

Memory loss survival:
Bodily continuity - yes
Psychological continuity - no

Faulty transporter survival:
Bodily continuity - no
Psychological continuity - no
Open individualism - yes

> 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.
>

It's not a mental connection. It's an identity of personhood.

If you don't see it yet, you need to go through the thought experiments,
and give them serious thought. This isn't an idea that can just be told and
accepted, you need to understand why the problems within other theories
leave no other option.

I list out some thought experiments that can help one get to this
realization in this chapter:

https://drive.google.com/file/d/1AJhXBFhAE4Xpu6WxD_C4bbW5yFs-pz1R/view?usp=drivesdk

Jason

> Ben
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