[ExI] Time and Personal Identity

[Jason Resch]

>
> >
> >       >       > 2. A belief that you will experience future events in
> your life (rather than
> >       >       > "you" being confined to this singular moment in time)
> >       >
> >       >       I'd call that a fact, based on empirical experience.
> >       >
> >       > We have no experience of experiencing more than one moment in
> time. We only
> >       > have memories of the past, with anticipation for experiencing
> future moments.
> >
> >       I don't have to believe it, it happens without me even trying.
> Sorry, I do not
> >       have to bet on experiencing future states, it just happens.
> >
> > But is it the you-now who experiences tomorrow, or is that the
> you-morrow who
> > experiences that future time?
>
> I don't need to answer that question. I only have to act. =) But this
> opens up
> another discussion about identity. Maybe we should move that to another
> thread?
>

(I'll start a new thread)

To continue this topic, the question is: what factor (assuming there is
one) preserves and unifies one's identity as "you" from moment-to-moment,
and throughout all the moment's that constitute one's entire life, such
that the person that was you as 3 year old, is the same person as you are
as a 50 year old?

On this topic there are three answers in the philosophy of personal
identity:

   - *Empty Individualism* (nothing connects those separate
   experiences over time, each one consists of an independent and isolated
   thought-moment")
   - *Closed Individualism* (the standard view -- you are the continuation
   of some bundle of psychological attributes/memories, and/or you are the
   continuation of some physical brain/body).
   - *Open Individualism* (a.k.a. "universalism" -- all conscious moments
   are yours, because all are perceived as "I", you are hence, not a single
   person, but the universal experiencer, which experiences all conscious
   experiences)

See the following diagrams for visualization:
https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/1UvJ5X8ovzz6ZrJJWKDoiUvj2g6p6H6p-nUz1XdDt6aU/edit?usp=sharing

The common-sense view of personal identity is that each person is
identified by either the material continuation of some body, or the
psychological continuation of some mind. In this way we can say a person at
age 80 is ultimately the same person as when they were 10. But this view
has several problems.

*Arguments against Closed Individualism:*

*Breaks in Continuity*

Whether one believes in the importance of bodily continuity, or
psychological continuity. Either may be entirely sacrificed while
preserving the other, and to our intuitions, we feel the same person will
remain. For example, let's say your friend "John" developed a memory defect
where he could only recall things that happened to him in the last 12
months. Then a year from now, he would have an entirely new set of memories
available to ghim, yet at no point will we say that "John has died" or that
John's experiences are no longer experienced by John.

Likewise, we can also imagine something like a teletransporter that breaks
continuity of the body (or to avoid science-fiction devices), or we could
imagine your friend Jane, who fell into a coma for a long time, so long
that all the atoms in her body cycled out by metabolism, such that when she
awoke from the coma, she had an entirely new body and brain. Yet despite
this discontinuity, we would still maintain that Jane survived her coma,
and she is now fully alive and experiencing things.

If both psychological and bodily continuity can be broken in these ways,
then neither is important to survival and continuation. Then it follows
that both could change together (we could discontinuously break both bodily
and psychological continuity) and our conclusion would have to be the same:
the same person remains, and is experiencing as before. It may not be the
same body, and it may not have the same memories, but it is the same person.

"Either side of the classic debate has the upper hand when it argues
positively that the person could remain the same if its own pet criterion
was maintained even if the other was wholly absent. And, indeed, one could
easily imagine a person going along into another body with a transfer to
that body’s brain of his pattern of memories. And yet one can also easily
imagine the person’s continuing in the same body with an experience of
amnesia or false memories. It seems that all such content of experience, in
different bodies or with differing mental states, could be mine."
-- Arnold Zuboff in “One Self: The Logic of Experience” (1990)

"The traditional, commonsense view that we are each a separate person
numerically identical to ourselves over time, i.e., that personal identity
is closed under known individuating and identifying borders—what the author
calls Closed Individualism—is shown to be incoherent. The demonstration
that personal identity is not closed but open points collectively in one of
two new directions: either there are no continuously existing,
self-identical persons over time in the sense ordinarily understood—the
sort of view developed by philosophers as diverse as Buddha, Hume and most
recently Derek Parfit, what the author calls Empty Individualism—or else
you are everyone, i.e., personal identity is not closed under known
individuating and identifying borders, what the author calls Open
Individualism."
-- Daniel Kolak in “I Am You: The Metaphysical Foundations for Global
Ethics” (2004)

*Probability Argument*

The following is the story of your coming into existence, as told by the
conventional view of personal identity (known as closed individualism):

According to this story, in order for you to have been born, and in order
for you to be conscious and alive right here, right now, a very specific
sperm had to meet a very specific egg. Had that not happened, then life for
you would be an eternal blank (nothingness forever).

We can roughly characterize the odds of your conception as approximately 1
in 200,000,000 sperm cells. Those were the odds that just the right sperm
hit just the right egg necessary for your existence.

But we can't stop here. Your parents each had to be born as well. They each
had to overcome 1 in 200,000,000 odds sperm cell lotteries. If we include
the improbability of your parents' conception, we are already up to 1 in
200,000,000^3 or 1 in 8,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000.

This is how improbable your existence is under the conventional view of
personal identity.

The unconventional view, to which I subscribe, is open individualism. This
theory of personal identity requires no contingencies on coming into
existence. You would be born, and alive, regardless of what atoms your mom
ate while she was pregnant, regardless of whether your genes coded for
brown eyes or blue, and regardless of any other material or genetic trait,
you would have been born as someone, you would be alive and seeing the
world through those eyes. This also means that you are bound to experience
the perspective of every conscious being born in this universe (or any
other).

This theory absolves the improbability of having to overcome sperm cell
lotteries. Applying Bayesian inference to the two alternative hypothesis:
closed individualism, vs. open individualism, and updating the probability
for closed individualism with its 1 in 8,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000
odds of being born, this shrinks the probability of closed individualism
(the conventional view) down to 0.0000000000000000000000125, and elevates
the probability of the alternative, open individualism to:
99.9999999999999999999999875%.

Video based on this argument: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dlVpRncWz8o

"Now, you may feel less than confident about the basic principles of
probability inferences. And inferences can be invented that are fishy or
plainly absurd. If, however, a coin has landed only heads in a random
sequence of one thousand consecutive flips, and either a fair coin or a
loaded coin was used, nobody can think other than that it is overwhelmingly
more probable that the loaded coin was used. And the overwhelmingly greater
probability of the easy game in each of the inferences I have described has
that same indubitable character. So, universalism is unavoidable."
-- Arnold Zuboff in "A Brief Proof That You Are Every Conscious Thing"
(2024)

Jason
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