[extropy-chat] Agency as Prime Determinant of Personal Identity

[Lee Corbin]

Slawomir writes

> Jef Allbright:
>>> As an agent acting within a given environmental context, what is
>>> best from the point of view of that agent is not necessarily
>>> survival but that it influences its environment so as to promote its
>>> own values into the future, in effect acting to create a future world
>>> matching the model it would like to see.
> 
> Lee Corbin commenting on Jef's proposal:
>> Wow!  That sounds very idealistic to me (in the sense of willing
>> to give up something). "Survival" is what I'm talking about, as you
>> know.  Suppose that I determine that Eliezer or someone can more
>> effectively "promote my values into the future" than I can.  So I
>> should agree to stop being me, and let there be two of him? No
>> way!
> 
> I couldn't agree more. Jef's model is so abstract that it fails to capture the
> essence of survival...

You and I agree on that ,  :-)  yes.

> Jef Allbright commenting on Lee's model:
>> Lee, I presented the little story of Aging Alice in order to demonstrate
>> the incompleteness of the "patternist" view...While I agree that
>> this holds for any given instant (t=0), and that it supports the view
>> that an identical copy of a person is essentially that same person, this
>> definition appears to fail *immediately* and progressively with
>> increasing  divergence of two instances of the same person.
> 
> Correct. What Jef is pointing out here is that Lee's model fails with respect to
> identity over time. If we compare two patterns of the same active brain at two
> different times, say, 1s apart, these two patterns are almost certainly going to be
> different.

Yes, for the NTH TIME, the patterns at one second apart are *slightly*
different.  IT IS A MATTER OF DEGREE.  (Sorry for losing my temper,
but I have to keep saying this, in order for people to include it in their
model of my view!)

> And if so, then we must either accept that we're dying every second

PREPOSTEROUS!

> or that we're not dying every second because patterns do not determine personal
> identity in the first place.

Rubbish.  As your pattern *gradually* changes over time, you cease
to retain your identity to the same DEGREE, that's all.  Everyone knows
this!  Why should I be explaining it?  Everyone knows that an 80 year
old is hardly the same person he was at 8.  But everyone knows that
he is *very much* the same person that he was at 79.  This is not
rocket science.

Lee