<div dir="auto"><div><br><br><div class="gmail_quote gmail_quote_container"><div dir="ltr" class="gmail_attr">On Mon, Mar 23, 2026, 6:07 AM Ben Zaiboc 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:0 0 0 .8ex;border-left:1px #ccc solid;padding-left:1ex">On 22/03/2026 22:35, Jason Resch wrote:<br>
> On Sun, Mar 22, 2026, 2:05 PM Jason Resch <<a href="mailto:jasonresch@gmail.com" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer">jasonresch@gmail.com</a>> wrote:<br>
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> On Sun, Mar 22, 2026, 10:02 AM Ben Zaiboc via extropy-chat <<a href="mailto:extropy-chat@lists.extropy.org" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer">extropy-chat@lists.extropy.org</a>> wrote:<br>
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> > 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.<br>
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> 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.<br>
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> I would have put you there, except that in several cases you acknowledge surviving beyond a single moment in time.<br>
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How is it possible to not? Surviving (let's say 'existing', to avoid ambiguity) in only a single moment in time is not possible, not detectable, not even remotely feasible.<br></blockquote></div></div><div dir="auto"><br></div><div dir="auto">Okay good.</div><div dir="auto"><br></div><div dir="auto"><div class="gmail_quote gmail_quote_container"><blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="margin:0 0 0 .8ex;border-left:1px #ccc solid;padding-left:1ex">
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> I agree that empty-individualism is more consistent than closed-individualism. It avoids most of the problems closed-individualism gets into. The primary advantage then that open-individualism has over empty- is the probability arguments.<br>
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Who are you agreeing with here? Certainly not me. I think that all of these 'individualisms' are daft, to various degrees, and none of them are consistent with reality.<br></blockquote></div></div><div dir="auto"><br></div><div dir="auto">As I define them they're exhaustive. So at least one must consistent with reality. This is an especially important point. If you still disagree that logically one must be true you need to show why the three together so not span the realm of all logic possibilities.</div><div dir="auto"><br></div><div dir="auto">Think of it like this:</div><div dir="auto">Given at least one universe exists, then either:</div><div dir="auto">1. A single universe exists.</div><div dir="auto">2. 2-10 universes exist.</div><div dir="auto">3. More than 10 universes exist.</div><div dir="auto"><br></div><div dir="auto">Without doing a single experiment, we can know a priori that one of these 3 theories of how many universes there are, must be true.</div><div dir="auto"><br></div><div dir="auto">Do you agree?</div><div dir="auto"><br></div><div dir="auto">This is why I setup theories of person identity in an analogous way. Given a person is an entity with at least one consciousness experience, then either:</div><div dir="auto">1. A person has only a single conscious experience.</div><div dir="auto">2. A person has multiple, but not all, conscious experiences.</div><div dir="auto">3. A person has all conscious experiences.</div><div dir="auto"><br></div><div dir="auto">So again, we know one of these must be true.</div><div dir="auto"><br></div><div dir="auto">If you still think otherwise you should explain why the list is not exhaustive of all possibilities, or why you don't think being exhaustive provides sufficient reason to conclude the correct theory lies with the exhaustive set of theories.</div><div dir="auto"><br></div><div dir="auto"><div class="gmail_quote gmail_quote_container"><blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="margin:0 0 0 .8ex;border-left:1px #ccc solid;padding-left:1ex">
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> Correction: I misread what you said above, I thought you said you would have put yourself in empty-individualism, but I noticed you said closed-individualism.<br>
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> The reason I said you might fit best with open, rather than closed, is that you acknowledge material bodies don't matter for survival, duplicates (fission) doesn't matter for survival, and on a few occasions, you acknowledged perfect pattern preservation is not required for survival.<br>
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I shouldn't have said anything, it gives the mistaken impression that I take any of these categories seriously.<br>
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> To me, this leads to what I call, a permissive survival theory. That is, the view that you could survive in all of the following situations:<br>
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> Invasive brain surgery<br>
Depends on the nature and extent of the surgery<br>
> Partial and even total memory loss (amnesia)<br>
Depends on the extent of the loss<br>
> Personality changes<br>
Depends on the degree of change<br>
> Morphing into a completely different person<br>
You're the one who's saying 'different person' here.<br>
> A long term coma during which your body is metabolically replaced<br>
> A teleportation to another location<br>
> Destructive mind uploads into a robot brain and body<br>
> Having your body assembled from a different pile of atoms<br>
These would all result in the same person<br>
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> When neither perfect bodily or psychological continuity criteria are necessary to survival, this opens the door to survive as *similar but not identical instances*. And those similar but not identical instances are similar to still other, more distant instances. And so on, leading to possible survival via any mind across the total spectrum of possible instances of conscious minds.<br>
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By this logic, if you take a banjo and make various incremental changes to it so as to turn it into a tambourine, it's still a banjo.<br></blockquote></div></div><div dir="auto"><br></div><div dir="auto">You've changed substantially since you were a three year old. Do you think the three year old still lives on as you? Or do you think the three year old died somewhere along the way because too much information was added to his brain?</div><div dir="auto"><br></div><div dir="auto"><div class="gmail_quote gmail_quote_container"><blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="margin:0 0 0 .8ex;border-left:1px #ccc solid;padding-left:1ex">
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If you make lots of small changes, they become equivalent to one big change. I think the word 'survival' is causing problems here. You need to define what you want it to mean, as it's being used to mean several things, from 'the same as' to different degrees of 'derived from'.</blockquote></div></div><div dir="auto"><br></div><div dir="auto">I've defined it many times. Subjective survival, as I define it, refers to any situation where after some process, you emerge with the subjective feeling that you have survived the process.</div><div dir="auto"><br></div><div dir="auto">In my view you need not be the same after the process as before. You survive trips by train, you survive invasive brain surgery that leave you needing to relearn how to walk, etc.</div><div dir="auto"><br></div><div dir="auto"><div class="gmail_quote gmail_quote_container"><blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="margin:0 0 0 .8ex;border-left:1px #ccc solid;padding-left:1ex"> I think we'd get much greater clarity from ditching the word altogether, and in each case using a more exact term.<br>
To see what I mean, consider the question "If you become a different person, do you survive?".<br></blockquote></div></div><div dir="auto"><br></div><div dir="auto">If you become a different person do you "emerge with the subjective feeling that you have survived"?</div><div dir="auto"><br></div><div dir="auto">You've become a different person since you were 3. Do you have now the feeling that you have survived those intervening years?</div><div dir="auto"><br></div><div dir="auto"><div class="gmail_quote gmail_quote_container"><blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="margin:0 0 0 .8ex;border-left:1px #ccc solid;padding-left:1ex">
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> So we thereby reveal, that the contents of a conscious experience are a mere contingency, one of no more relevance to the question of your survival than the color of the shirt you are wearing. You can change it, and get you would still be there.<br>
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"Reveal"??<br>
Telling language, there.<br></blockquote></div></div><div dir="auto"><br></div><div dir="auto">If you follow the logic and reason as I've laid out, I don't see how the conclusion can be avoided. You have managed to avoid the conclusion by giving inconsistent answers to questions which should have the same answer.</div><div dir="auto"><br></div><div dir="auto"><div class="gmail_quote gmail_quote_container"><blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="margin:0 0 0 .8ex;border-left:1px #ccc solid;padding-left:1ex">
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You are not 'revealing' anything, you are drawing a conclusion. A confusing one. We were talking about minds, not isolated conscious experiences, and the word 'survive' can mean many different things.<br></blockquote></div></div><div dir="auto"><br></div><div dir="auto">Do you have a better definition for subjective survival than the one I have offered?</div><div dir="auto"><br></div><div dir="auto"><div class="gmail_quote gmail_quote_container"><blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="margin:0 0 0 .8ex;border-left:1px #ccc solid;padding-left:1ex">
Taken literally, that sentence seems to be saying nothing more than that someone can have different thoughts or experiences without them ceasing to exist, but I'm pretty sure that's not what you mean to say.<br></blockquote></div></div><div dir="auto"><br></div><div dir="auto"><br></div><div dir="auto">Yes that is what I am saying there. That there's no limit to the range of experiences that you can have.</div><div dir="auto"><br></div><div dir="auto">Jason </div><div dir="auto"><div class="gmail_quote gmail_quote_container"><blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="margin:0 0 0 .8ex;border-left:1px #ccc solid;padding-left:1ex">
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