<div dir="ltr">Open Individualism is starting to sound like Greg Egan's "Dust theory" from Permutation City.<div><br></div><div>To state that "You have to have a person before they can have an experience" isn't a counterargument against Dust theory, it's a naked and content-free denial of it.</div><div><br></div><div>The central claim of dust theory is, indeed, that "persons" are not ontologically primitive. That a "person" is nothing more and nothing less than a sequence of "experiences" [observer moments] that form a sequence. The sequence is defined by the fact that some observer moments are in the process of remembering other observer moments. [dust theory also holds that all possible observer moments exist, are ontologically primitive, and are, indeed, the only things that exist.]</div><div><br></div><div>Yes, their theory is radically non-materialist, and yes, it has unanswered questions, but it's not sufficiently out there that it can be trivially disposed of with a content-free denial asserting the trivial and obvious truth of the materialist paradigm. That's just begging the question.</div></div><br><div class="gmail_quote"><div dir="ltr" class="gmail_attr">On Sat, Jan 20, 2024 at 8:13 AM Jason Resch via extropy-chat <<a href="mailto:extropy-chat@lists.extropy.org">extropy-chat@lists.extropy.org</a>> wrote:<br></div><blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="margin:0px 0px 0px 0.8ex;border-left:1px solid rgb(204,204,204);padding-left:1ex"><div dir="auto"><div>Ben,</div><div dir="auto"><br></div><div dir="auto">I appreciate your insights and careful thinking on this topic. A few comments below:<br><br><div class="gmail_quote" dir="auto"><div dir="ltr" class="gmail_attr">On Sat, Jan 20, 2024, 7:27 AM Ben Zaiboc via extropy-chat <<a href="mailto:extropy-chat@lists.extropy.org" rel="noreferrer" target="_blank">extropy-chat@lists.extropy.org</a>> wrote:<br></div><blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="margin:0px 0px 0px 0.8ex;border-left:1px solid rgb(204,204,204);padding-left:1ex"><u></u>
<div>
On 20/01/2024 05:48, Jason Resch wrote:<br>
<blockquote type="cite">
<pre><div dir="auto">... one of the questions of personal identity is "which experiences are had by which persons?"</div><div dir="auto">
</div><div dir="auto">However we might define "person," I hope you agree that this question is meaningful.</div><div dir="auto">
</div><div dir="auto">Experiences are something we as persons have. So the question: which experiences
are mine? Which ones will I experience? Leads to the three-way split in
theories of personal identity. That is, how do we assign which observer
moments, are experiences that will be had by which persons?</div></pre>
</blockquote>
<br>
I don't think the question is very meaningful at all.<br>
<br>
It's treating 'experiences' and 'people' as separable things. I
don't think they are (I don't see how they could be).<br></div></blockquote></div></div><div dir="auto"><br></div><div dir="auto">I agree with you that experiences are not separable from the brain/mind that produces them. A particular kind of experience can only be had by a particular mind state with a particular pattern / organization.</div><div dir="auto"><br></div><div dir="auto"><div class="gmail_quote" dir="auto"><blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="margin:0px 0px 0px 0.8ex;border-left:1px solid rgb(204,204,204);padding-left:1ex"><div>
<br>
You have to have a person before they can have an experience. It's
like coloured blocks. You can have a blue Block and a yellow Block,
but you can't have 'a Blue' or 'a Yellow'. And experiences are
inherently personal. No-one else can possibly know what your
experiences are, so "which experiences are had by which persons?"
only has one answer: You have your experiences. I have mine. Each
person has their own.<br></div></blockquote></div></div><div dir="auto"><br></div><div dir="auto">But 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?</div><div dir="auto"><br></div><div dir="auto">(This is just one example, of many, which shows it isn't so clear cut which experiences belong to a person, because we need to define both what we mean by person, and what qualifies as survival of that person from one moment to the next. We must therefore define the necessary preconditions of what must be preserved for that person to be said to still exist.)</div><div dir="auto"><br></div><div dir="auto"><div class="gmail_quote" dir="auto"><blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="margin:0px 0px 0px 0.8ex;border-left:1px solid rgb(204,204,204);padding-left:1ex"><div>
<br>
'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 <i>have</i>
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.</div></blockquote></div></div><div dir="auto"><br></div><div dir="auto">I agree they aren't swappable or tradable like playing cards. There is a tight kinky between each experience and a particular mind state.</div><div dir="auto"><br></div><div dir="auto">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.</div><div dir="auto"><br></div><div dir="auto">It is this many-to-one relationship that creates the problem of assignment.</div><div dir="auto"><br></div><div dir="auto">To do so, we must be able to define the boundaries of a person's life:</div><div dir="auto"><br></div><div dir="auto">Is it a matter of their body being maintained?</div><div dir="auto">Is it a matter of their brain being maintained?</div><div dir="auto">Is it a matter of their psychology and personality being preserved?</div><div dir="auto">Is it a matter of their memories being preserved?</div><div dir="auto"><br></div><div dir="auto">If so to what extent? How much perturbation can be tolerated before we say, "that's no longer the same, or that person is dead" ?</div><div dir="auto"><br></div><div dir="auto"><div class="gmail_quote" dir="auto"><blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="margin:0px 0px 0px 0.8ex;border-left:1px solid rgb(204,204,204);padding-left:1ex"><div>X
is a label that we use to represent our experience, and we assume,
for convenience, that other people experience something like it that
they also call X (I strongly suspect that my X and your X could be
completely different, but lead to the same behaviour. It's the old
question about colours: "Is my blue the same as your yellow?" There
is no way to know).<br>
<br>
Apart from the label that we use to communicate (assuming we speak
the same language), there is no other link between my X and your X.
There is certainly no known mechanism that could implement such a
link. Your X is yours alone. We might agree that putting our fingers
into a fire causes us both to shout, withdraw the fingers, do a
little dance and never do that again, but we each can't know what
the other is actually experiencing. The likelihood is that our
shouts and dances are different in some ways, which does kind of
hint that there are going to be differences in our experiences. Even
if, by some ridiculous freak chance, the experiences were exactly
the same, there's no way to possibly know, and no actual link
between them.<br></div></blockquote></div></div><div dir="auto"><br></div><div dir="auto">I agree.</div><div dir="auto"><div class="gmail_quote" dir="auto"><blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="margin:0px 0px 0px 0.8ex;border-left:1px solid rgb(204,204,204);padding-left:1ex"><div>
<br>
There is no such thing as 'the experience of being happy' as a thing
in itself.</div></blockquote></div></div><div dir="auto"><br></div><div dir="auto">I agree.</div><div dir="auto"><br></div><div dir="auto"><div class="gmail_quote" dir="auto"><blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="margin:0px 0px 0px 0.8ex;border-left:1px solid rgb(204,204,204);padding-left:1ex"><div> John Smith being happy is not something that you can
separate into the John Smith and the Being Happy, as if they were
buckets and frogs. You can meaningfully ask which other buckets can
hold these frogs, but you can't meaningfully ask which other people
can experience this (John Smith's) happiness, because it's unique to
him, and inherently unknowable to anyone else.<br></div></blockquote></div></div><div dir="auto"><br></div><div dir="auto">That is all true, I have no problem with it.</div><div dir="auto"><br></div><div dir="auto"><br></div><div dir="auto"><div class="gmail_quote" dir="auto"><blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="margin:0px 0px 0px 0.8ex;border-left:1px solid rgb(204,204,204);padding-left:1ex"><div>
<br>
So the way I see it, this whole concept of 'theories of personal
identity' is built on a misconception of the nature of
'experiences'.<br></div></blockquote></div></div><div dir="auto"><br></div><div dir="auto"><br></div><div dir="auto">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.</div><div dir="auto"><br></div><div dir="auto">What circumstances are necessary for a person to arise, survive, or die, etc.</div><div dir="auto"><br></div><div dir="auto">There are easy, conventional answers to such questions, based on the presence or maintenance of some attribute.</div><div dir="auto"><br></div><div dir="auto">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.</div><div dir="auto"><br></div><div dir="auto">In the end, belief in the necessity of some attribute that is needed for "you to be you" is both unfounded and uneccesssry. It's a purely metaphysical assumption which Occam would remind us to dispense with.</div><div dir="auto"><br></div><div dir="auto">Jason </div></div>
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