[ExI] Fwd: Open Individualism

[Ben Zaiboc]

On 21/01/2024 16:02, Jason Resch wrote:
> 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?

Yes, of course. And if the person stepping into the transporter thinks 
that his consciousness depends on the atoms of his brain (or an 
immaterial 'soul' that is lost, etc.), the person stepping out of the 
other end will believe that he is not the same person. There is a 
character in Charlie Stross' Accelerando in exactly this position. 
No-one can convince him of their view that he is the same person, 
despite his continuity of memory, etc. Can we say he's wrong? Only by 
asserting that a different way of looking at things is the 'correct' 
one. Can he say that they are wrong? Ditto. Yes, you can demonstrate 
that a mind survives replacement of the atoms in the brain (or does it? 
Maybe it's a mind that's to similar to the original that no-one else 
notices), but in the end, you have to choose a framework and follow it 
through.

Someone else may think that they are only partially the same person.

Most would probably think that they are the same person (why would you 
undergo the procedure otherwise, unless it was forced on you?)

So, different points of view, different 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?
> 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.
I thought we'd agreed on the unique nature of experiences. You can't 
'assign' an experience to the thing that generates it. They are 
inextricably and uniquely linked, and no other person can experience the 
same thing. So there is no 'problem of assignment'. That is meaningless.
>
>     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?
The set of mind-states that are available to that mind. It will vary, 
depending on things like personal history, the details of neural 
structure, chemistry, all kinds of things. I'd say that it's impossible 
to predict, in practice.
> Is there any theoretical or fundamental limit?
I have no idea how you'd determine that. There must be limits, though. 
No human will ever know what it's like to be a Bat, to take one famous 
example. But I also think that nobody except Jonh Smith will experience 
the same things as him upon eating the same sandwich on the same day in 
the same place. So I'd say that one limit is that you can only 
experience your own unique experiences, not anyone else's.
>
>>     ...
>
>>     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))?
No you can't, as I keep saying. Those questions can have different 
answers, depending on who's asking them and what their point of view is.
The thing you don't seem to acknowledge is that these are subjective 
matters, not objective ones. They have to be, as we are dealing with the 
very phenomenon at the heart of subjectivity.
>
>     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).
Precisely. If that's what I believe, that's perfectly correct.
>
>     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.
Exactly! And two different people can hold two different definitions to 
be true. They are both correct.
> What philosophers of personal identity attempt is to clearly define 
> each and then test whether those definitions are consistent/valid in 
> all situations.
You're basically proposing to 'test' people's points of view. This is 
like trying to decide which is right, the guy who says "that car is 
blue" or the one who says "that car is turquoise".
Which is the 'correct' interpretation of the story of Bambi, is it about 
cruelty or sadness?
Of course, this is why we call it 'philosophy'. If there were any 
objectively testable and definite answers, we'd call it 'science'.
>
>     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.
Again with the 'correct'. There is no 'correct'!
Consider this: What is happening on planet X of star Y in the Andromeda 
galaxy, RIGHT NOW? (i.e. at the exact moment that you are reading this).
>
>     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.
My point is that experiences are unique. Not only to the minds 
generating them, but quite probably to each instance of 'the same' 
experience (meaning that they aren't in fact the same at all. The 
uniqueness is absolute). This means there is no such thing as two people 
having the same experience, or a common pool of experiences that can be 
'had' by a number of different people.

Which brings me back to:
>
>>         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?
We can, and do. We label it "a person".
>
>>     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.
All of /your/ experiences. And all of mine feel like mine. This is 
hardly a revelation.
>
>     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.
Because we don't all agree on the same criteria for survival?
I expect that if everyone agreed that 15 minutes of amnesia qualifies as 
death, then we would hold funerals (and probably celebrate the birth of 
a new person on the 16th minute).
The definition of death changes as time goes by, and we learn more and 
our technology advances, which just widens our choices. Some people 
regard those who are cryogenically suspended to be irrevocably dead, and 
some don't, for example.

>     Consider planetary motion. What gives the correct answer, Kepler's
>     laws or Relativity? 
>
> Here you compare two theories which provide the same predictions.
For many things, but not all.
> 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
So if the transporter is faulty and no body materialises, so of course 
no brain, and therefore no mind, you're saying that the individual 
nevertheless 'survives'??
So basically, nobody has ever died?
Pictures, please.
>
>     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.
There's no such thing (between two individuals). You are the only thing 
that is identical to you.

Ben
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