[ExI] Uploads are self

[Ben Zaiboc]

I thought it might be worth giving a background to my answers to certain questions, as they seem to be less obvious than I think they should be.

As far as I understand, we have a number of mental models that implement 'theory of mind': the ability to predict what other people are thinking, so as to better anticipate their actions. You could think of these as being models of other people. At some point in our evolution, we developed a model like this that was used to refer to 'this person' (the system containing the model), rather than others, so it became self-referential. This is what we call self-awareness, and leads us to say things like 'me', 'my mind', etc., and to regard ourselves as a distinct individual. (Maybe this is the answer to the question "How do I know I am me?").

"My personal identity" is another, more long-winded, way of saying the same thing: It's a way of referring to ourselves.

So if we have a Philosophy of mind, it will naturally include this concept of personal identity, or self. There's no need for an additional Philosophy to just deal with that single aspect of minds. We don't have an additional 'philosophy of memory', and a 'philosophy of attention', 'philosophy of sensory perception', etc., etc., just as we have Geology instead of a collection of '-ologys' dealing separately with mountains, rivers, seabeds, alluvial plains, etc.

Creating an extra, unnecessary field of philosophy for this particular aspect of the mind but not others, strikes me as motivated by dualism. I'm inclined to label it as a type of crypto-dualism.

Just because it's a part of the mind that we are all aware of, and maybe give more prominence to than, say, memory mechanisms, is no more reason to treat it separately than the fact that mountains are tall is a reason to create a separate field of study for them, away from the rest of geology.

There is no ghost in the machine, there's just the machine, so we do need to study machines, and we don't need to study ghosts.

If you feel the need for a philosophy (rather than just being guided by what neuroscience is clearly telling us, which seems to me to be the sensible thing to do), then philosophy of mind is the one to take notice of, the other one is not needed, and as far as I can see, full of ghostly nonsense.

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Ben