I’m going to pull my parenthetical about spells of unconsciousness out in a separate comment, because the point seems to have been lost in the course of the discussion:
DanArmak, you seem to propose that the key process which defines the identity of a person at one time with a person at the other time is the thread of consciousness trailing through spacetime from one to the other. How does your model deal with human beings—individual human organisms! - which undergo literal loss of consciousness? I do not refer to sleep, but to the actual shutdown of conscious perception, such as occurred to Jo Walton (papersky) when she hit her head and (I have heard) to many people under general anesthesia. In these cases, the persons describing their memories explicitly state that there is a finite period of time during which no conscious recollection occurs. Does that imply that the speculative fiction writer named Jo Walton living in Montreal on February 20th, 2006 is a different individual than the speculative fiction writer named Jo Walton living in Montreal on February 22nd, 2006? If not, why not?
To address the loss of consciousness scenario: I can’t speak from experience, and as I said, my theory is not formal and strict and provable enough to be sure of things outside my experience.
The basic problem here is discontinuity. If the loss of consciousness is brief enough (a fraction of a second) and does not affect my future mental processes, it seems likely “I” will continue to exist. Any other boundary (of length and severity of unconsciousness) would be arbitrary, and so unlikely.
But my experience is discrete. I always have exactly one experience at a time (if conscious), so I always experience being “me”, not three-quarters me. “Me” is whatever “I” experience at the time :-) This is no good as a definition, but it’s a description every human understands. How to reconcile the two? I have no clear idea.
As I said before, my theory is far from complete—it’s more a list of facts than a structured model. It only describes those things that happen in typical human life. It may not be extensible to events like loss of consciousness, let alone cloning. In fact I’ve been pretty much convinced by this whole thread that my naive model probably can’t be fixed and extended to describe the entire space of physical and experential possibilities. I’ll drop it happily for a better alternative—please give me one!
Any new theory has got to include the fact that I have actual experiences of being me. The theories being proposed here of anticipating equally to “become” one of my future clones, smack to me of just doing away with the conception of anticipation entirely.
As I said before, my theory is far from complete—it’s more a list of facts than a structured model. It only describes those things that happen in typical human life. It may not be extensible to events like loss of consciousness, let alone cloning. In fact I’ve been pretty much convinced by this whole thread that my naive model probably can’t be fixed and extended to describe the entire space of physical and experential possibilities. I’ll drop it happily for a better alternative—please give me one!
I think we have, at least in sketch form—here’s Alicorn’s nutshell summary, and here’s mine. Both of our theories, if they are distinct, fit this intuition of yours—that a person is not destroyed and a new person created after a spell of unconsciousness—better that the thread of consciousness approach.
As for the rest, quite frankly you should expect to get weird results in weird situations like duplication. One weird result I expect is that, if you are duplicated, there will be two people afterwards, both of whose experiences suggest that they are DanArmak.
I took the time to think all this through before replying. I think I grok now your and Alicorn and the other posters’ theory(s). And I pretty much accept it now. Thanks for your explanations.
The problem with my old approach, as I now see it, is the impossibility of empirically distinguishing it from infinitely many other possible theories. In such a situation, it is indeed best to choose an approach that optimizes outcome over all my configuration-descendants, because I might subjectively become any of them.
Of course, if I give up personal continuity, then the above statement becomes merely “because each of them will have memories indicating it is my descendant”. But I am forced to this point of view due to the apparent impossibility of describing a personal continuity in terms of physics, which does not break down in the face of (arbitrarily short) lapses of consciousness.
Thanks again to everyone else who participated and helped convince me.
I’m going to pull my parenthetical about spells of unconsciousness out in a separate comment, because the point seems to have been lost in the course of the discussion:
DanArmak, you seem to propose that the key process which defines the identity of a person at one time with a person at the other time is the thread of consciousness trailing through spacetime from one to the other. How does your model deal with human beings—individual human organisms! - which undergo literal loss of consciousness? I do not refer to sleep, but to the actual shutdown of conscious perception, such as occurred to Jo Walton (papersky) when she hit her head and (I have heard) to many people under general anesthesia. In these cases, the persons describing their memories explicitly state that there is a finite period of time during which no conscious recollection occurs. Does that imply that the speculative fiction writer named Jo Walton living in Montreal on February 20th, 2006 is a different individual than the speculative fiction writer named Jo Walton living in Montreal on February 22nd, 2006? If not, why not?
To address the loss of consciousness scenario: I can’t speak from experience, and as I said, my theory is not formal and strict and provable enough to be sure of things outside my experience.
The basic problem here is discontinuity. If the loss of consciousness is brief enough (a fraction of a second) and does not affect my future mental processes, it seems likely “I” will continue to exist. Any other boundary (of length and severity of unconsciousness) would be arbitrary, and so unlikely.
But my experience is discrete. I always have exactly one experience at a time (if conscious), so I always experience being “me”, not three-quarters me. “Me” is whatever “I” experience at the time :-) This is no good as a definition, but it’s a description every human understands. How to reconcile the two? I have no clear idea.
As I said before, my theory is far from complete—it’s more a list of facts than a structured model. It only describes those things that happen in typical human life. It may not be extensible to events like loss of consciousness, let alone cloning. In fact I’ve been pretty much convinced by this whole thread that my naive model probably can’t be fixed and extended to describe the entire space of physical and experential possibilities. I’ll drop it happily for a better alternative—please give me one!
Any new theory has got to include the fact that I have actual experiences of being me. The theories being proposed here of anticipating equally to “become” one of my future clones, smack to me of just doing away with the conception of anticipation entirely.
I think we have, at least in sketch form—here’s Alicorn’s nutshell summary, and here’s mine. Both of our theories, if they are distinct, fit this intuition of yours—that a person is not destroyed and a new person created after a spell of unconsciousness—better that the thread of consciousness approach.
As for the rest, quite frankly you should expect to get weird results in weird situations like duplication. One weird result I expect is that, if you are duplicated, there will be two people afterwards, both of whose experiences suggest that they are DanArmak.
I took the time to think all this through before replying. I think I grok now your and Alicorn and the other posters’ theory(s). And I pretty much accept it now. Thanks for your explanations.
The problem with my old approach, as I now see it, is the impossibility of empirically distinguishing it from infinitely many other possible theories. In such a situation, it is indeed best to choose an approach that optimizes outcome over all my configuration-descendants, because I might subjectively become any of them.
Of course, if I give up personal continuity, then the above statement becomes merely “because each of them will have memories indicating it is my descendant”. But I am forced to this point of view due to the apparent impossibility of describing a personal continuity in terms of physics, which does not break down in the face of (arbitrarily short) lapses of consciousness.
Thanks again to everyone else who participated and helped convince me.