[extropy-chat] Personal Identity (was: A view on cryonics)

[Slawomir Paliwoda]

> ### Somehow I don't recall any thought experiments of yours that would
> make my feeling of personal identity break down. Can you refresh my
memory?

Hi Rafal!

Don't you remember the one about two strangers whose minds, by pure chance,
merged into the same mind pattern? As far as I remember you told me the
moment their patterns became identical they must have shared the same
identity. Pretty dramatic stuff.


> If I recall correctly, at some point I had you claiming that forcibly
> erasing all your memories by rearranging synaptic strengths into a
> totally different personality wouldn't really kill you as long as your
> brain was going on living.Wasn't that a cool thought experiment?


Yeah, that was cool. And yes, I still claim that memories of your 5th
birthday party do not influence your identity one bit. The loss may
influence who you are as a person, to some extent, but not the identity.


> > Example: Suppose some person uploads his mind pattern onto 2 machines
> > which now
> > run his mind.
> >
> > Question: Do these coexisting uploads share the same PI?
> >
> > Answer: They do not, because each mind process is defined by parameters
> > (matter in space-time) that do not share the same exact values. These
> > uploads share the same *kind* of mind process but their identities are
> > different. They are not the same person but perfect clones only.
>
> ### If they are my uploads, they do, since I (and therefore each of  my
> copies) choose to treat my copies as self (I am a *kind* of mind, not a
> particular mind). If they are your uploads, then it's as you say.


Well, you're dead wrong on that, Rafal, and I'm sure you perceive my views
as dead wrong. But here's the thing. Now I know *why* we disagree and it has
everything to do with grounding identity in the correct definition of the
mind, which is something I talk about in my original post. The root of our
disagreement is that, while we both recognize that identity should be
grounded in the mind, your mind is defined by a *pattern* while I view it as
a *process*.

If you don't mind, let me quote a fragment of my original post where I talk
about this :

[In my view it is incorrect to define mind as a mind pattern because
patterns
are static and our minds are dynamic. The reason why "mind pattern" view is
not entirely false, but merely incomplete, is that it ignores the dynamic
nature of our minds. That dynamic manifests itself not as a pattern but as a
*process* that this pattern enters into. We are able to think and be
conscious not because our mind structures carry this or other pattern but
because there exists an process that executes on that pattern.

Analogously, mind pattern is just like a computer software loaded onto a
hardware (brain). If the power is cut to the computer, the machine just
sits there and does nothing. It is "dead". It comes to "life" only when the
electricity flows through hardware and forces software-defined processes to
take place. "Life", however, is not, in this case, a function of electricity
but the function of an overall process that happens within the system. The
mental existence likewise can only occur when electrical signals flow
through our brainware-software, i.e. that existence/life is totally
dependent on the process that executes on the mind pattern. Life is a
process, not a pattern.

Next step is to define the parameters of a process. Each process is defined
by matter flowing through space and time. Mind process can therefore be
defined as a function of the flow of matter in space and time also, and
since personal identity is grounded in the mind process, it can only be
defined by matter flowing through space-time.]



> > Question: If one of the uploads is damaged beyond repair (dies), does it
> > mean the damaged upload will still live because the other upload will?
> >
> > Answer: No, the damaged upload dies and won't live again unless you time
> > travel and physically transport it to the present. His subjective
> > experience
> > is now death (=nothingness).
> >
> ### Yesterday there was a man named Slawek. Today a man named
> Slawek-continuation writes a post. What is the subjective experience of
> yesterday's Slawek? Is he dead? Or is he writing a post?


I ground my definition of mind in the brain activity as opposed to brain
data. My subjective experience is a manifestation of my mind process which
exists in the present, and present only. My mind does not exist somewhere in
the past which we can access *right now*. The past does not exist.

My subjective experience is contained by my mind process carving the same
trajectory in the fabric of space-time, and it always exists exclusively in
the *now*. And since there are no multiple *nows*, I'm always the original
copy.

Slawomir