[ExI] Fwd: Open Individualism

[Jason Resch]

On Mon, Jan 22, 2024 at 3:21 PM Ben Zaiboc via extropy-chat <
extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org> wrote:

>
> 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.
>

They might choose to label the previous copy a former self, but someone who
is consciously experiencing something cannot believe that they are dead/not
experiencing something. The consciousness, based on everything it knows and
feels, would necessarily feel as though their consciousness survived the
procedure, regardless of what they might say about their previous body.


> 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.
>

That is interesting.


> 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.
>

But all survivors of teleporters believe "I am alive and conscious", which
is to me, the only meaningful definition of "survival." In other words, it
would be inconsistent for the survivor to say "I am dead!" or "I am no
longer conscious" -- unless the procedure did turn them into a zombie of
some kind, but this would presumably require some form of dualism.


> ...
>
>
>>                               '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.
>

I don't see why we could not gradually morph someone's brain into that of a
bat, using advanced nanotechnology, for 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.
>

If there are no fundamental limits on how John Smith's brain can be
perturbed over time, there's no limit to what experiences John Smith is
capable of.


> ...
>>
>> 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.
>

As I've said repeatedly, such questions are always asked/interpreted from
the perspective/POV of the person undergoing the procedure, who receives
empirical confirmation afterwards.


> 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.
>

Find me the person who believes that, and decides not to save for
retirement because of that belief (that is, anyone who truly believes, and
lives their life according to the belief, that they are only a
single-thought moment). I doubt such people exist. Neither decision theory,
nor science itself, can operate if you remove the concept of future
expectation.


>  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.
>

Assuming neither one leads to inconsistencies, or makes
untestable/unfounded assumptions.

I'll reiterate, the inconsistencies do not appear in the definitions
themselves. The definitions can be written down and they all seem perfectly
fine. The issues arise when we attempt to use these different definitions
to answer questions with objective answers (e.g. do I survive this or not)?


>  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?
>

These aren't testing points of view. They are tests of the logical
consistency of theories. As well as evaluating them on probabilistic
grounds, and for unfounded metaphysical assumptions (e.g. Occam's razor).
The only time subjectivity enters the picture is in the experiments to test
whether one's consciousness subjectively survives (e.g. a teleporter, a
surgery, a mind upload, or any other procedure).


> Of course, this is why we call it 'philosophy'. If there were any
> objectively testable and definite answers, we'd call it 'science'.
>

If you believe there are no objective tests favoring one theory vs.
another, am I correct that you believe open individualism is a possibility
you can neither prove nor disprove?
If not, then you must think it makes some different predictions from the
others which we could objectively test. What would those tests be?


>     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).
>

For the Andromeda case, I would say we exist in an infinite number of
subjectively indistinguishable possibilities, each consistent with
everything we know.

"It is impossible for any observer to deduce with certainty on the basis of
her observations and memory which world she is a part of. That is, there
are always many different worlds for which being contained in them is
compatible with everything she knows, but which imply different predictions
for future observations."
-- Markus Müller in “Could the physical world be emergent instead of
fundamental, and why should we ask? <https://arxiv.org/pdf/1712.01826v1.pdf>”
(2017)

But the indeterminacy of the far away and unmeasurable, is different from
your supposition that different theories of personal identity could all be
right. As I showed below, different theories of personal identity provide
different answers to the same questions regarding the same situation.
Therefore they cannot all be objectively correct. If there is such a thing
as objective truth and an objective reality, then at least some of these
theories must be wrong (at least in such cases where they give different
answers).


>
>>     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.
>

If you think about this a little more deeply, you may discover that all
experiences, as felt by all beings, feel like "mine".

This is really saying nothing more than all beings consider them to exist
in the time "now", or the place "here." There is a relativity involved,
that generates the illusion of a selection (that some time is privileged to
be now), or that some organisim's neurology is privileged to be "you".

This passage, from Nagel in "Physicalism <https://philpapers.org/rec/NAGP-2>"
(1965) may help to dispel this illusion by shedding some more light on the
issue:

"Consider everything that can be said about the world without employing any
token reflexive
expressions. This will include the description of all its physical contents
and their states, activities
and attributes. It will also include a description of all the persons in
the world and their histories,
memories, thoughts, sensations, perceptions, intentions, and so forth. I
can thus describe without
token-reflexives the entire world and everything that is happening in
it–and this will include a
description of Thomas Nagel and what he is thinking and feeling. But there
seems to remain one
thing which I cannot say in this fashion–namely, which of the various
persons in the world I am.
Even when everything that can be said in the specified manner has been
said, and the world has in a
sense been completely described, there seems to remain one fact which has
not been expressed, and
that is the fact that I am Thomas Nagel. This is not, of course, the fact
ordinarily conveyed by those
words, when they are used to inform someone else who the speaker is–for
that could easily be
expressed otherwise. It is rather the fact that I am the subject of these
experiences; this body is my
body; the subject or center of my world is this person."

This passage shows that when we examine it, we find no physical fact or
reason to account for the idea that consciousness is limited to a single
perspective of a single biological creature which is you.
You could equally be present in all the conscious beings, and each instance
would suffer the illusion that it is only one biological creature (as that
is the only thing each can remember).



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.
>

I agree it changes. It changes as new technology expands the scope of
recoverable situations. If we can build an ultimate healing technology,
which can heal someone of any wound, even an explosion that blasted them
into a 1,000 pieces, then we would understand death to only be the result
of irrecoverable data loss. So long as we had the information necessary to
restore a person using this healing technology, then any injury would be
survivable. We could then ask: what if we had the information, but not all
the original parts. Could we use any old spare atoms to heal the person,
and restore them to life? Would it be the same person? Technological
improvements will necessarily lead us to expand and revise the notion of
personhood, just as it has and will continue to expand the scope of
survivability, and the border between life and death.


>
>
>>     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.
>

The faulty transporter is an example where there is a new body, but some
memories are lost or inserted (changed). So it combines  the aspects of
teleporter survival, and memory loss survival. Each continuity theory would
find something necessary was lost, and therefore conclude that the person
did not survive.


>
>>     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.
>

I think this may be inconsistent with your agreement above that a person is
a collection of mind-states. Each mind state is different. How then do we
decide to put them into a particular collection which we call "one person?"
What is it about the mind states that makes them belong to one person and
not another?

Jason
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