[ExI] Uploading and selfhood

Lee Corbin lcorbin at rawbw.com
Tue Apr 1 16:46:15 UTC 2008


Jef writes

>>  We were closer back in the days when you'd agree that a 6 year
>>  old Alice was not the same person as the 86 year old Alice. But
>>  it seems to me that you are becoming increasingly vague and
>>  obscure.
> 
> On the contrary, I posted that little story about Aging Alice,
> <http://lists.extropy.org/pipermail/extropy-chat/2006-November/030182.html>,
> to show that the diachronic self entails /no/ difference of identity
> for the person or their society -- to the extent that agency is
> maintained.

Your Alice example is very much a step in the right direction. You
describe below the changes that occur to someone who we know
as Alice in your story.

To summarize what you've written below, let me excerpt

> Personal identity is a function of the extent to which an agent is
> perceived to act on behalf of a (personal) entity.
> 
> Regardless of changes in physical form; function lost or enhanced;
> memories lost, gained, modified or even "made up"; values cherished
> and then left behind, emotional response changing over minutes, hours,
> weeks, years; spatial change, temporal change, spatio-temporal
> replicas... None of this matters to personal identity, except to the
> extent it impacts agency.

Okay:  "None of this matters to personal identity, except to the
extent that it impacts agency."  Your continued emphasis and
apparent reliance on certain particular words like "agency" 
does create the suspicion that you lack other ways of describing
what you believe. 

So we are to conclude that this Alice is the same person---or,
perhaps shares the same personal identity---or, perhaps "the
original Alice still survives"---or, perhaps.... please do supply
other descriptions that don't use the word "agency".  Okay,
so I'll assume that the answer is "yes" to my suggested rephrasing
right there in this paragraph.

Here is another example:  Joe Glenn is a typical American Midwestern
boy who is very much into video games and sports, and doing his
best conscientiously on his school work.  Upon graduation from
high school, he enlists in the Marine Corps, gains weight, and
eventually becomes a drill instructor. He's not that interested 
anymore in visiting his little home town, and he seldom even
sees his family more than once in five years.  Without using the
word "agency", can you guess as to whether  (a) the original
Joe is still alive? (b) Joe has become a different person?  (c)
Joe has changed, but is still has the same personal identity?
and, if possible, other descriptions that would help us understand
your notion of "personal identity".

Now does the answer to that change if Joe adopts a different
name, now becoming "Mack Sullivan"?  Is the answer affected
if it's revealed that he has continued keeping the same journal
that he started in high school, and that he enjoys reading his
old journal entries, that he's still very much into the same video
games as before, and keeps in touch with the same gangs of
on-line game enthusiasts that he did before?

I'm not trying to expose any shortcomings in your views here;
just trying to understand how you'd phrase the evolution of
this human being.

Oh---and one more thing---unlike your posts, I'll spare the
insulting condescension of implying how hopeless it seems 
that your meandering intellect.... oops!  :-)  Well, I'm not
going to waste bandwidth with assaults on your ways of
thinking, or at least I'll keep it to a bare minimum. You 
should consider doing the same.

Lee

> I showed how Alice as a young girl, Alice as a young adult, Alice as a
> mature adult, and even Alice in old age could have substantial, even
> conflicting, differences in their memories, values, functions and
> ...
> operating according to principles outside your model, that you've
> chosen to ignore -- apparently because to do so would undermine the
> Key to Personal Survival you've been so tightly grasping and carefully
> polishing all these years.  You can't possibly come up with even an
> approximate function for relating physical/functional/pattern
> divergence....
> ...
> Physical/functional/pattern similarity is merely *correlated in our
> experience* with identity because it's the simplest, most probable
> example of personal agency, with that probability approaching absolute
> certainty as all differences approach indiscernibility.
> 
> Personal identity is not a function of physical/functional/pattern
> similarity -- that's only a special case.
> Personal identity is a function of the extent to which an agent is
> perceived to act on behalf of a (personal) entity.
> 
> Regardless of changes in physical form; function lost or enhanced;
> memories lost, gained, modified or even "made up"; values cherished
> and then left behind, emotional response changing over minutes, hours,
> weeks, years; spatial change, temporal change, spatio-temporal
> replicas... None of this matters to personal identity, except to the
> extent it impacts agency.
> ....
> realized I've said it all before.
> 
> When will I learn?





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