[ExI] Uploads are self

[Ben Zaiboc]

On 22/03/2026 11:33, Jason Resch wrote:
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> On Sun, Mar 22, 2026, 6:11 AM Ben Zaiboc via extropy-chat <extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org> wrote:
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>     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.
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>     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?").
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> Yes, words like me, now, and here, are all self-referential, or rather indexical. They are also are apt to lead to illusions whenever one believes they represent some privileged aspect of reality rather than just one of many equally valid frames.


What does 'privileged aspect of reality' mean?

How can "me" represent one of many equally valid frames? (and what do you mean by 'frame'?)


> If you think "this branch" of the multiverse is the only real one (all the others collapsed and ceased to be because you no longer see them) that leads to the illusion of wave function collapse and the Copenhagen interpretation (or other single universe maintaining interpretations).


I don't have any opinions about the multiverse. Maybe it means something, maybe not, maybe what it means actually exists, maybe not. I don't know, and don't really care. Let's leave the multiverse out of things.


> Likewise if you think "this time" in history is the only real one (the others ceased to be in the past, or remain in an unrealized future) this leads to the illusion of presentism.


I don't know what this even means.


> Finally, if you think "this consciousness experience I find myself in" (my body, my mind, my conscious state) is the only "me" and all the rest are others who are not you, this leads to the illusion of some unique transtemporal identity marker tied to some particular body/mind, i.e. closed individualism.


I reject dualism, so "this consciousness experience I find myself in" is a misleading statement. What it translates to is "I".
"I am the only me" is a sentence, I can admit that, but so is "What's the difference between a duck?". I can understand "I=I", although there's absolutely no need to or point in stating it.

"transtemporal identity marker" seems to be a fancy way of saying "oneself". I think (could you bring yourself, do you think, to use plain ordinary language instead of these florid and confusing phrases?). "Transtemporal", meaning 'through time', contributes nothing, because nobody exists only for one single moment of time (one planck time), then ceases to exist. (And if you're going to ask "How do you know?", I'm going to ignore it).

"Tied to some particular body/mind", well that's another non-sequitur. The self-referential agent model that is the cause of 'I' has to exist in a mind, and bodies (or at least one bodily organ) are necessary for the production of minds.

So you seem to be saying that "I=I" (which is just "I") is an illusion (I'm not arguing with that, but I suppose it depends on your definition of 'illusion'. Daniel Dennet says that consciousness is an illusion, as well), and that this is called 'closed individualism'.

So 'closed individualism' is a fancy way of saying 'I exist'. Ok.


> Seeing through this illusion that there's some transtemporal identity marker privileging some perspectives as me, and others as not me, leads to the idea that all conscious experiences are equally mine since every experience is felt as though it is mine to those finding themselves within that conscious state.


'Seeing through "I exist"'? I don't know what to make of that.

I think you're now saying that because there's me, and there's other people, that leads to the idea that I can experience what those other people experience, because I have my own experiences, and each of the other people has their own experiences.

Can you now see why I think this is nonsense? It's just playing with words. Because each person can say the same thing (I experience things) there is only one I?

We could also say that because there are many shiny things, there is only one shinyness. It would be wrong, of course, but we could say it.


> If Occam is your guiding principle, note that in every case we dispense with an indexical illusion, we eliminate assumptions and simplify the theory.


There's more than one 'indexical illusion'?
You need to explain what that actually means, because I don't know.


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>     "My personal identity" is another, more long-winded, way of saying the same thing: It's a way of referring to ourselves.
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>     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.
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>     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.
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> Whether you acknowledge it or not, having a position in philosophy of personal identity is unavoidable, once one commits to an opinion on whether or not you survive any particular scenario.


Only if you acknowledge the validity of 'philosophy of personal identity' in the first place.
If I think that the positions in this philosophy are silly, I'm obviously not going to adhere to any of them.


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>     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.
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> What tends to keep anything in philosophy is a lack of decisive empirical experiments. 
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> It is a very different approach from empiricism, but there are some questions that empiricism can't settle.
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> Just a few examples:
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> - Do people refer to the same things (same "qualia") when they refer to things like colors and tastes?


We can't know.


> - How do we (or can we) know what we take to be reality is physical reality or a simulation?


We can't know.


> - Can other material substrates support conscious states or do they result in unconscious automatons (sic) that merely act conscious without being so?


Strictly speaking, we don't know, but logically, we know that philosophical zombies can't exist.
When we do have minds running in non-biological substrates, we will be in the same position as we are now with regard to other people.


> These are situations are beyond empirical tests because they are all tied to limitations following from the subjective/objective divide. If we want to deal with such questions


You can't 'deal with' questions that are inherently undecidable. All you can do is either demonstrate that they are decidable after all, or leave them alone (ok, you can play games with them, see below).


>  we therefore must turn to other methods. It can be uncomfortable for strong empiricists to even acknowledge the legitimacy of such questions or the utility of other methods. But that doesn't stop the questions from existing, or mattering to some people.


Ok, I get that. People want to know stuff, even if the stuff is unknowable. Enter a human ability called 'imagination'. Aka 'fantasy'.
It doesn't actually solve anything, but it can make people happier.


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>     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.
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>     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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> Once all ghosts are exorcised, when there are no physical facts


 ... there's nothing left.


> , nor any further facts to maintain some notion of a unique identity over time, then it follows that all occurrances of minds, in whatever material, place, or time, and having whatever content of experience, minds are then simply raw conscious states which can be (and should be) regarded as self.


What's a 'raw conscious state'? We're not talking about pan-psychism here, are we? I don't /think/ so, but best to make sure.
Is it 'immaterial consciousness'?
And don't confuse 'consciousness' with 'self'. They are different things. There are creatures that display no sense of self that are still conscious (being conscious of other things, but not of themselves), as far as we can tell.

Self-awareness requires a self-referential model of an agent (e.g. a person, or a creature). Consciousness doesn't.


> Based on everything you have said about minds and illusory notion of self, I think your position fits best with open individualism, though I don't think you'll ever admit that.


Hm, I'd have thought my position fits best with 'closed individualism' (I exist), based on the above. Even though it's totally silly, at least it's coherent, unlike the rest.

-- 
Ben