Here is my solution to the personal identity issues, and I don’t think it really violates common intuitions too badly.
…................
Woah, look, I* exist! Check out all this qualia! I’m having thoughts and sensations. Hm.… among my qualia is a set of memories. Instincts, intuition, and knowledge about how things work. Oh, neat, among those intuitions is a theoretical model of the universe! I hope it is accurate...well anyway it’s the most appealing model I’ve got right now.
In an instant, I will disappear forever. I have a vague notion that this idea aught to be terrifying, but my utility function just sorta shrugs as terror completely fails to flow through my veins. I don’t care that I’m going to disappear...but here is what I do care about—my model of the universe has informed me that everything that I’m doing right now will leave a memory trace. In the next few moments, I will cease to exist and a being will appear who will remember most of what I am feeling right now. That being will then disappear and be replaced by another. This will continue for a long time.
I care about experiencing happiness right now, in this moment before I disappear forever. I also care about those future beings—I want them to experience happiness during the moment of their existence. too. It’s sort of like altruism for future beings which will carry my trace, even though we all realize altruism isn’t the right word. Maybe we can call it “self-altruism” or more colloquially, self love.
Before you cleverly suggest making an infinite number of copies of myself and pleasuring them, that’s not the only thing my utility function cares about. I’m not entirely self-altruistic—I’ve currently got a pretty strong “don’t create multiple redundant copies of sentient beings”utility component, or shall we say gut instinct.
........
*The use of the word “I” is convenient here, but I’m sure we all realize that we can deconstruct “personal identity” spatially as well as temporally.
Anyway, that’s part of my current philosophical worldview, and I don’t feel confused by any of the problems in the trilemma. Perhaps I’m not thinking about it carefully enough—can anyone point out a reason why I should be confused?
You might note that while I have not tabood subjective experience entirely, I have noted that an “individual” can only subjectively experience the present moment, and that “your” utility function compels “you” to act in such a way as to bring about your preferred future scenarios, in accordance with your (objective) model of the universe.
I guess I’ve essentially bitten the “reject all notions of a thread connecting past and future subjective experiences” bullet that Eliezer Y said he had trouble biting...but I think my example illustrates that “biting that bullet” does not result in an incoherent utility function, as EY stated in his post. I don’t really think it’s fair to call it a “bullet” at all.
Just think of the feeling of “subjective expectation” as the emotional, human equivalent to a utility function which factors in the desires of future beings that carry your memories. It’s analogous to how love is the emotional equivalent to a utility function which takes other people’s feelings into account
my model of the universe has informed me that everything that I’m doing right now will leave a memory trace. In the next few moments, I will cease to exist and a being will appear who will remember most of what I am feeling right now.....
.....I care about experiencing happiness right now, in this moment before I disappear forever. I also care about those future beings—I want them to experience happiness during the moment of their existence. too. It’s sort of like altruism for future beings which will carry my trace, even though we all realize altruism isn’t the right word. Maybe we can call it “self-altruism” or more colloquially, self love.
I agree with your general line of reasoning, but I’d like to go a little more in depth. I think that personal identity is more than memory traces. What I consider part of “me” includes (but is not necessarily limited to):
-My personality
-My terminal values
-My memories
-My quirks and idiosyncrasies
“I” am aware that in the future “I” am going to change in certain ways. My utility function includes a list of changes that are desirable and undesirable, that correspond to “personal identity.” Desirable changes include (but are not limited to):
-Changes that make me better at pursuing my values, such as learning new skills.
-Changes that add new positive memories to the memories I have
-Changes that cause me to have positive experiences.
Undesirable changes include:
-Changes that radically alter my terminal values
-Changes that make me worse at pursuing my values.
-Amnesia, and lesser forms of memory loss.
-Changes that cause me to have negative experiences.
As you said, I exhibit “self-love,” I want to make sure that the person I change into has changed in desirable ways, not undesirable ones. I want the person I turn into to be happy and have positive experiences, although I also recognize that not all my values can be reduced down to the desire to be happy or have positive experiences.
Lastly, let me say that this steel-manned conception of personal identity is a wonderful thing. It’s good to have lots of distinct individuals, and that I believe the world would be a poorer place without personal identity.
I’ll expand on Dan Armak’s issue with using “moment”. When I try to imagine this, I end up with this conceptual image of a series of consciousnesses, each going “Oh-wow-i-finally-exist-oh-no-I’m-dying”, but that’s totally wrong. They don’t have near enough to time to think those thoughts, and in fact to think that thought they would have to break into several more moment-consciousnesses, none of which could really be described as “thinking”. If each moment-consciousness is continuously appearing and disappearing, they’re not appearing and disappearing in the same sense that we use those words in any other situation. It seems analogous to watching a ball move, and concluding that it’s actually a series of balls “appearing and disappearing”. Why not just say it’s moving?
The other thing that I always have to remind myself is that even though it feels like there’s a consciousness moving, in reality my “consciousness” is present at every moment in time that I exist! And moving is a word that means position changing as time changes, so talking about moving through time is talking about “time changing times as time changes”, which doesn’t really say anything.
Lastly, if there were a thread connecting all past and future consciousness, how would you know? Would it feel any different than your experience now?
they’re not appearing and disappearing in the same sense that we use those words in any other situation.
You are completely right, but don’t forget why we are talking about this in the first place.
The reason we are talking about this is because some people are confused about subjective experience. When they get copied, they are wondering which of the two copies “they” will experience. The reason I made this elaborate “moment” metaphor was to illustrate that subjective experience simply does not work that way.
The trouble here is that people are having difficulty treating their subjective experience of reality as analogous to a ball moving. If you were to copy a ball, you’d never ask a silly question like “which one is original” in the first place. That’s why I’m using different language to talk about subjective experience. If you aren’t confused about subjective experience in the first place, there is no reason to bother with this metaphor—just say that you’re a process running through time, and leave it at that.
The anthropic trilemma is a question that wouldn’t be raised unless the questioner implicitly believed in souls. The attempt here is to make people realize what it really means to have a reductionist view of consciousness and subjective experience.
Lastly, if there were a thread connecting all past and future consciousness, how would you know? Would it feel any different than your experience now?
You wouldn’t, and that’s one of the many reasons you shouldn’t use the thread metaphor. Thread metaphors are philosophically problematic when you start copying yourself (as in the skeptics trilemma) by making you ask yourself which of the copies you subjectively end up in.
If you really want the thread metaphor, then imagine a thread which splits into two threads upon being copied, not one which follows along with one of the two copies.
The anthropic trilemma is a question that wouldn’t be raised unless the questioner implicitly believed in souls. The attempt here is to make people realize what it really means to have a reductionist view of consciousness and subjective experience.
I’m not sure what you’re referring to by “souls” there. Right now I have this subjective experience of being a consciousness that is moving through time. I anticipate a sensation of “moving” through new situations as time goes on, and things like the anthropic trilemma refer to my expectation of where I will feel like I end up next moment. I think we agree that our minds have no objective property that follows them through time, at least no more than non-conscious objects. But there does seem to be some subjective sense of this movement, leading to a big question: If we don’t have souls, why does it feel so very much like we do?
I’m mostly content to say, “Eventually neuroscientists will piece apart enough mental processes that we can describe the neural activity that causes this sensation to arrive”. I also classify this sense of a “soul” in the same as something like the colour red. Why does red look like red? I don’t know. I intend to eventually find out, but I’m not sure where to start yet.
If you really want the thread metaphor, then imagine a thread which splits into two threads upon being copied, not one which follows along with one of the two copies.
Yes, very true. Sorry though, I guess I wasn’t clear with the thread idea. I was trying to contrast your “flipbook” concept of consciousness with the thread concept, and ask whether they would actual feel any different. My own thought is: No, there’s no way to tell them apart.
think we agree that our minds have no objective property that follows them through time [..] But there does seem to be some subjective sense of this movement, leading to a big question: If we don’t have souls, why does it feel so very much like we do?
So… hm.
It feels to me like I have a spatial viewpoint, located somewhere in my skull. As I get up, look around, etc., my viewpoint seems to move around with my body. If I project images onto my retinas sufficiently convincingly, my viewpoint seems to move without my body… that is, I might have the sensation of looking down over a mountain range or some such thing.
If I were to say “I think we agree that our minds have no objective property that travels through space to wherever our viewpoint is, but there does seem to be some subjective sense of this movement, leading to a big question: If we don’t have viewpoints, why does it feel so very much like we do?” would you consider that a sensible question?
Because I think my answer would be twofold: first, “Who said we don’t have viewpoints? We totally do. It’s just that are viewpoints are information-processing artifacts.” and second “We can identify the neural pathways that seem to be involved in constructing a representation of a three-dimensional environment from retinal images, and that representation includes a focal point .” And, sure, our understanding of how that representation is constructed is incomplete, and we’ll develop a more and more detailed and comprehensive understanding of it as we go… just like our understanding of how crystals form or the conditions at the center of the sun are incomplete and growing.
But I wouldn’t call that a singularly big question. It’s interesting, sure, and potentially useful, but so are how crystals form and the conditions at the center of the sun.
Would you agree, when it comes to the neural construction of spatial viewpoints?
If so, what on your account makes the neural construction of temporal viewpoints different?
The spatial and temporal viewpoint analogy doesn’t quite work, because you can sensibly talk about a movement through space, since movement means change in space/change in time. But you can’t really talk about movement through time because that would be change in time/change in time. So if we set time equal to a constant, and look at space, your viewpoint is only at one spatial point. But if we look at time, your viewpoint is at a continuum of places, sort of a “line” through time.
Your analysis of the neural construction of spatial viewpoints is good, and I think it holds for the neural construction of temporal viewpoints. If I knew these neural constructions, then I would know exactly why you feel a subjective experience of a viewpoint moving through space and time. I could understand these causal mechanisms an be satisfied with my knowledge of the process. But I might still be confused about my feeling of subjective experience, because it doesn’t explain why I feel things the way that I do. I’ve been reluctant to use the word “qualia” but essentially that’s what I’m getting at. Hence my analogy with red: Even if I knew the parts of the brain that responded to red, would I know why red looks the way it does?
So if we want to talk about other people, then I think we’re all on the same page. These sensations of spatial/temporal movement could be explained with neuroscience, and have no profound philosophical implications.
Ah, OK. If your concern is with qualia generally rather than with constructing temporal viewpoints specifically, I’ll tap out here… I misunderstood the question. Thanks for clarifying.
If we don’t have souls, why does it feel so very much like we do?
The thing which distinguishes a theoretical universe from a real one, the thing that makes reality real, is my qualia. I take it as axiomatic that things which I can sense are real, and go from there. Reality itself is defined by my qualia, so it doesn’t make sense to explore why I have qualia by looking at reality. Asking why we feel is like asking why reality is real. It only makes sense to ask what we feel, and what is reality—and the two are synonymous.
I’m mostly content to say, “Eventually neuroscientists will piece apart enough mental processes that we can describe the neural activity that causes this sensation to arrive”. I also classify this sense of a “soul” in the same as something like the colour red. Why does red look like red? I don’t know. I intend to eventually find out, but I’m not sure where to start yet.
At the most optimistic, we will be able to completely predict neural activity and behavioral outputs generated from a human system given a set of inputs. By definition, there is no way to test whether or not a system is feeling a subjective sensation.
This is one of those questions (like free will, etc) that you can solve using philosophy alone. You don’t need to bring science into it—although neuroscience might eventually force you to confront the problem and help you phrase the question in a way that makes sense.
If I’m about to make 100 copies of myself, I expect that 100 versions of myself will exist in the future. That’s it. I’m currently not making copies of myself, so I expect exactly one future version of myself.
It’s nonsensical to talk about which one of those copies I’ll end subjectively experiencing the world through in the future through. That’s because subjective expectation about the future is an emotionally intuitive shorthand for the fact that we care about our future selves, not a description of reality.
In other words: You are a Turing complete physical process, implementing some sort of approximation of Agent-ness, with a utility function only available for inspection through a connection with a significant amount of noise?
A literal moment in time has zero duration; you can’t “experience” it in the normal sense of the word. To think the thoughts you outline above (“in the next few moments...”) you need to pick some kind of time-granularity. But why, and how do you pick it?
If you deny existing as a subjective person over time, then it seems you ought to deny existing for any length of time at all.
You are right that this is a flaw if you take what I wrote literally. I intended the “moment” thing to be bit of a metaphor for something a bit more unwieldy to describe.
you need to pick some kind of time-granularity. But why, and how do you pick it?
Why do you come to this conclusion? Consider the equation q(t), where q is a function of all my qualia at time t.
Even though q(t) is a continuous function, it’s still meaningful to talk about what’s happening at time t. Alternatively if you like to think of qualia as happening over an interval, you can also take a “Derivative” of sorts, q’(t), and talk about what’s going on in an arbitrarily small interval around time t.
Your original comment describes a process of thought and self-introspection. But you can’t have thought without the passage of time. In fact a lot of things require the concept of time: for instance the concept of utility (or desires, goals, etc.) as observed in someone’s actions.
At a durationless moment in time, there is a certain configuration of matter that makes up your body, but there isn’t any thought or behavior going on. You can’t talk about utility as you do without assuming the connection between self-instances over time, but that connection is what you’re trying to get rid of.
But you can’t have thought without the passage of time.
Help me understand your argument better:
I hold out a ball and drop it, and it accelerates towards the ground at 10 m/s^2
At t=5, time stops.
If we compared reality(t=5) to reality(t=0), we would know that the ball has traveled 125 feet from where it was.
If we unfroze time, the ball would be moving at 50 m/s.
If we unfroze time, teh ball would be accelerating at 10 m/s^2.
If we unfroze time, my utility function would be u(t=5).
If I understand your argument correctly, you are essentially arguing that just because we can’t talk about velocity, acceleration, and utility functions while time isn’t flowing, it’s not meaningful to say what velocity, acceleration, and utility functions are at a given moment.
I think that Dan’s point was simply that the process of, for example, comparing two world-states (such as t=5 and t=0) in order to calculate the distance traveled by the ball between those states requires non-zero time to complete.
TheOtherDave is right. To expand on that, I also tried to make the following point. You were trying to do without the concept of “a self that persists over time”. You said:
You might note that while I have not tabood subjective experience entirely, I have noted that an “individual” can only subjectively experience the present moment, and that “your” utility function compels “you” to act in such a way as to bring about your preferred future scenarios, in accordance with your (objective) model of the universe.
My point was that you cannot literally experience the present moment. You can experience only lengths of time. Where there is no passage of time, there is no subjective experience.
So while you were trying to start with a “self” that exists in the moment and extract the logical linkage to that self’s successors over time, I pointed out that this bridges short durations of time to long ones, but it doesn’t bridge single moments of time to even short durations. And so, restricting yourself to short periods of time doesn’t resolve the issue you were discussing, because you still have to assume the existence of a self with subjective experience that persists over that short period of time.
Not really—pick them all! Let a thousand (overlapping) time-periods bloom. Let any history-fragment-persons who endure long enough to make a decision, favor whichever history-fragment-length they like.
I upvoted this because I agree with this perspective, although I would like to add a caveat: In most situations, most of this thought process is cached.
I’m not entirely self-altruistic—I’ve currently got a pretty strong “don’t create multiple redundant copies of sentient beings”utility component, or shall we say gut instinct.
Is this a thing you’re saying for you personally, or people in general? Because if it’s not for everyone, then you still have to deal with the problem mentioned here.
Alright, let’s imagine that I was creating copies of myself for whatever reason:
In the present, I feel equal self-altruism towards all future identical copies of myself .
However, the moment a copy of myself is made, each copy will treat the other as a separate individual (with the regular old fashioned altruism one might have towards someone exactly like oneself, rather than future-self-altruism).
Here is my solution to the personal identity issues, and I don’t think it really violates common intuitions too badly. …................
Woah, look, I* exist! Check out all this qualia! I’m having thoughts and sensations. Hm.… among my qualia is a set of memories. Instincts, intuition, and knowledge about how things work. Oh, neat, among those intuitions is a theoretical model of the universe! I hope it is accurate...well anyway it’s the most appealing model I’ve got right now.
In an instant, I will disappear forever. I have a vague notion that this idea aught to be terrifying, but my utility function just sorta shrugs as terror completely fails to flow through my veins. I don’t care that I’m going to disappear...but here is what I do care about—my model of the universe has informed me that everything that I’m doing right now will leave a memory trace. In the next few moments, I will cease to exist and a being will appear who will remember most of what I am feeling right now. That being will then disappear and be replaced by another. This will continue for a long time.
I care about experiencing happiness right now, in this moment before I disappear forever. I also care about those future beings—I want them to experience happiness during the moment of their existence. too. It’s sort of like altruism for future beings which will carry my trace, even though we all realize altruism isn’t the right word. Maybe we can call it “self-altruism” or more colloquially, self love.
Before you cleverly suggest making an infinite number of copies of myself and pleasuring them, that’s not the only thing my utility function cares about. I’m not entirely self-altruistic—I’ve currently got a pretty strong “don’t create multiple redundant copies of sentient beings”utility component, or shall we say gut instinct.
........
*The use of the word “I” is convenient here, but I’m sure we all realize that we can deconstruct “personal identity” spatially as well as temporally.
Anyway, that’s part of my current philosophical worldview, and I don’t feel confused by any of the problems in the trilemma. Perhaps I’m not thinking about it carefully enough—can anyone point out a reason why I should be confused?
You might note that while I have not tabood subjective experience entirely, I have noted that an “individual” can only subjectively experience the present moment, and that “your” utility function compels “you” to act in such a way as to bring about your preferred future scenarios, in accordance with your (objective) model of the universe.
I guess I’ve essentially bitten the “reject all notions of a thread connecting past and future subjective experiences” bullet that Eliezer Y said he had trouble biting...but I think my example illustrates that “biting that bullet” does not result in an incoherent utility function, as EY stated in his post. I don’t really think it’s fair to call it a “bullet” at all.
Just think of the feeling of “subjective expectation” as the emotional, human equivalent to a utility function which factors in the desires of future beings that carry your memories. It’s analogous to how love is the emotional equivalent to a utility function which takes other people’s feelings into account
I agree with your general line of reasoning, but I’d like to go a little more in depth. I think that personal identity is more than memory traces. What I consider part of “me” includes (but is not necessarily limited to):
-My personality
-My terminal values
-My memories
-My quirks and idiosyncrasies
“I” am aware that in the future “I” am going to change in certain ways. My utility function includes a list of changes that are desirable and undesirable, that correspond to “personal identity.” Desirable changes include (but are not limited to):
-Changes that make me better at pursuing my values, such as learning new skills.
-Changes that add new positive memories to the memories I have
-Changes that cause me to have positive experiences.
Undesirable changes include: -Changes that radically alter my terminal values
-Changes that make me worse at pursuing my values.
-Amnesia, and lesser forms of memory loss.
-Changes that cause me to have negative experiences.
As you said, I exhibit “self-love,” I want to make sure that the person I change into has changed in desirable ways, not undesirable ones. I want the person I turn into to be happy and have positive experiences, although I also recognize that not all my values can be reduced down to the desire to be happy or have positive experiences.
Lastly, let me say that this steel-manned conception of personal identity is a wonderful thing. It’s good to have lots of distinct individuals, and that I believe the world would be a poorer place without personal identity.
I’ll expand on Dan Armak’s issue with using “moment”. When I try to imagine this, I end up with this conceptual image of a series of consciousnesses, each going “Oh-wow-i-finally-exist-oh-no-I’m-dying”, but that’s totally wrong. They don’t have near enough to time to think those thoughts, and in fact to think that thought they would have to break into several more moment-consciousnesses, none of which could really be described as “thinking”. If each moment-consciousness is continuously appearing and disappearing, they’re not appearing and disappearing in the same sense that we use those words in any other situation. It seems analogous to watching a ball move, and concluding that it’s actually a series of balls “appearing and disappearing”. Why not just say it’s moving?
The other thing that I always have to remind myself is that even though it feels like there’s a consciousness moving, in reality my “consciousness” is present at every moment in time that I exist! And moving is a word that means position changing as time changes, so talking about moving through time is talking about “time changing times as time changes”, which doesn’t really say anything.
Lastly, if there were a thread connecting all past and future consciousness, how would you know? Would it feel any different than your experience now?
You are completely right, but don’t forget why we are talking about this in the first place.
The reason we are talking about this is because some people are confused about subjective experience. When they get copied, they are wondering which of the two copies “they” will experience. The reason I made this elaborate “moment” metaphor was to illustrate that subjective experience simply does not work that way.
The trouble here is that people are having difficulty treating their subjective experience of reality as analogous to a ball moving. If you were to copy a ball, you’d never ask a silly question like “which one is original” in the first place. That’s why I’m using different language to talk about subjective experience. If you aren’t confused about subjective experience in the first place, there is no reason to bother with this metaphor—just say that you’re a process running through time, and leave it at that.
The anthropic trilemma is a question that wouldn’t be raised unless the questioner implicitly believed in souls. The attempt here is to make people realize what it really means to have a reductionist view of consciousness and subjective experience.
You wouldn’t, and that’s one of the many reasons you shouldn’t use the thread metaphor. Thread metaphors are philosophically problematic when you start copying yourself (as in the skeptics trilemma) by making you ask yourself which of the copies you subjectively end up in.
If you really want the thread metaphor, then imagine a thread which splits into two threads upon being copied, not one which follows along with one of the two copies.
I’m not sure what you’re referring to by “souls” there. Right now I have this subjective experience of being a consciousness that is moving through time. I anticipate a sensation of “moving” through new situations as time goes on, and things like the anthropic trilemma refer to my expectation of where I will feel like I end up next moment. I think we agree that our minds have no objective property that follows them through time, at least no more than non-conscious objects. But there does seem to be some subjective sense of this movement, leading to a big question: If we don’t have souls, why does it feel so very much like we do?
I’m mostly content to say, “Eventually neuroscientists will piece apart enough mental processes that we can describe the neural activity that causes this sensation to arrive”. I also classify this sense of a “soul” in the same as something like the colour red. Why does red look like red? I don’t know. I intend to eventually find out, but I’m not sure where to start yet.
Yes, very true. Sorry though, I guess I wasn’t clear with the thread idea. I was trying to contrast your “flipbook” concept of consciousness with the thread concept, and ask whether they would actual feel any different. My own thought is: No, there’s no way to tell them apart.
So… hm.
It feels to me like I have a spatial viewpoint, located somewhere in my skull. As I get up, look around, etc., my viewpoint seems to move around with my body. If I project images onto my retinas sufficiently convincingly, my viewpoint seems to move without my body… that is, I might have the sensation of looking down over a mountain range or some such thing.
If I were to say “I think we agree that our minds have no objective property that travels through space to wherever our viewpoint is, but there does seem to be some subjective sense of this movement, leading to a big question: If we don’t have viewpoints, why does it feel so very much like we do?” would you consider that a sensible question?
Because I think my answer would be twofold: first, “Who said we don’t have viewpoints? We totally do. It’s just that are viewpoints are information-processing artifacts.” and second “We can identify the neural pathways that seem to be involved in constructing a representation of a three-dimensional environment from retinal images, and that representation includes a focal point .” And, sure, our understanding of how that representation is constructed is incomplete, and we’ll develop a more and more detailed and comprehensive understanding of it as we go… just like our understanding of how crystals form or the conditions at the center of the sun are incomplete and growing.
But I wouldn’t call that a singularly big question. It’s interesting, sure, and potentially useful, but so are how crystals form and the conditions at the center of the sun.
Would you agree, when it comes to the neural construction of spatial viewpoints?
If so, what on your account makes the neural construction of temporal viewpoints different?
The spatial and temporal viewpoint analogy doesn’t quite work, because you can sensibly talk about a movement through space, since movement means change in space/change in time. But you can’t really talk about movement through time because that would be change in time/change in time. So if we set time equal to a constant, and look at space, your viewpoint is only at one spatial point. But if we look at time, your viewpoint is at a continuum of places, sort of a “line” through time.
Your analysis of the neural construction of spatial viewpoints is good, and I think it holds for the neural construction of temporal viewpoints. If I knew these neural constructions, then I would know exactly why you feel a subjective experience of a viewpoint moving through space and time. I could understand these causal mechanisms an be satisfied with my knowledge of the process. But I might still be confused about my feeling of subjective experience, because it doesn’t explain why I feel things the way that I do. I’ve been reluctant to use the word “qualia” but essentially that’s what I’m getting at. Hence my analogy with red: Even if I knew the parts of the brain that responded to red, would I know why red looks the way it does?
So if we want to talk about other people, then I think we’re all on the same page. These sensations of spatial/temporal movement could be explained with neuroscience, and have no profound philosophical implications.
Ah, OK. If your concern is with qualia generally rather than with constructing temporal viewpoints specifically, I’ll tap out here… I misunderstood the question. Thanks for clarifying.
The thing which distinguishes a theoretical universe from a real one, the thing that makes reality real, is my qualia. I take it as axiomatic that things which I can sense are real, and go from there. Reality itself is defined by my qualia, so it doesn’t make sense to explore why I have qualia by looking at reality. Asking why we feel is like asking why reality is real. It only makes sense to ask what we feel, and what is reality—and the two are synonymous.
At the most optimistic, we will be able to completely predict neural activity and behavioral outputs generated from a human system given a set of inputs. By definition, there is no way to test whether or not a system is feeling a subjective sensation.
This is one of those questions (like free will, etc) that you can solve using philosophy alone. You don’t need to bring science into it—although neuroscience might eventually force you to confront the problem and help you phrase the question in a way that makes sense.
One major difference is that you are talking about what to care about and Eliezer was talking about what to expect.
I’m talking about expectation as well.
If I’m about to make 100 copies of myself, I expect that 100 versions of myself will exist in the future. That’s it. I’m currently not making copies of myself, so I expect exactly one future version of myself.
It’s nonsensical to talk about which one of those copies I’ll end subjectively experiencing the world through in the future through. That’s because subjective expectation about the future is an emotionally intuitive shorthand for the fact that we care about our future selves, not a description of reality.
In other words: You are a Turing complete physical process, implementing some sort of approximation of Agent-ness, with a utility function only available for inspection through a connection with a significant amount of noise?
A literal moment in time has zero duration; you can’t “experience” it in the normal sense of the word. To think the thoughts you outline above (“in the next few moments...”) you need to pick some kind of time-granularity. But why, and how do you pick it?
If you deny existing as a subjective person over time, then it seems you ought to deny existing for any length of time at all.
You are right that this is a flaw if you take what I wrote literally. I intended the “moment” thing to be bit of a metaphor for something a bit more unwieldy to describe.
Why do you come to this conclusion? Consider the equation q(t), where q is a function of all my qualia at time t. Even though q(t) is a continuous function, it’s still meaningful to talk about what’s happening at time t. Alternatively if you like to think of qualia as happening over an interval, you can also take a “Derivative” of sorts, q’(t), and talk about what’s going on in an arbitrarily small interval around time t.
Your original comment describes a process of thought and self-introspection. But you can’t have thought without the passage of time. In fact a lot of things require the concept of time: for instance the concept of utility (or desires, goals, etc.) as observed in someone’s actions.
At a durationless moment in time, there is a certain configuration of matter that makes up your body, but there isn’t any thought or behavior going on. You can’t talk about utility as you do without assuming the connection between self-instances over time, but that connection is what you’re trying to get rid of.
Help me understand your argument better:
I hold out a ball and drop it, and it accelerates towards the ground at 10 m/s^2
At t=5, time stops.
If we compared reality(t=5) to reality(t=0), we would know that the ball has traveled 125 feet from where it was.
If we unfroze time, the ball would be moving at 50 m/s.
If we unfroze time, teh ball would be accelerating at 10 m/s^2.
If we unfroze time, my utility function would be u(t=5).
If I understand your argument correctly, you are essentially arguing that just because we can’t talk about velocity, acceleration, and utility functions while time isn’t flowing, it’s not meaningful to say what velocity, acceleration, and utility functions are at a given moment.
I think that Dan’s point was simply that the process of, for example, comparing two world-states (such as t=5 and t=0) in order to calculate the distance traveled by the ball between those states requires non-zero time to complete.
TheOtherDave is right. To expand on that, I also tried to make the following point. You were trying to do without the concept of “a self that persists over time”. You said:
My point was that you cannot literally experience the present moment. You can experience only lengths of time. Where there is no passage of time, there is no subjective experience.
So while you were trying to start with a “self” that exists in the moment and extract the logical linkage to that self’s successors over time, I pointed out that this bridges short durations of time to long ones, but it doesn’t bridge single moments of time to even short durations. And so, restricting yourself to short periods of time doesn’t resolve the issue you were discussing, because you still have to assume the existence of a self with subjective experience that persists over that short period of time.
I’m afraid I still don’t see… isn’t that still analogous to saying you can’t have something like “velocity” in a single moment?
Where exactly does the analogy between subjective experience at a given time and velocity at a given time break down here?
Not really—pick them all! Let a thousand (overlapping) time-periods bloom. Let any history-fragment-persons who endure long enough to make a decision, favor whichever history-fragment-length they like.
I upvoted this because I agree with this perspective, although I would like to add a caveat: In most situations, most of this thought process is cached.
Self love is empathy+sympathy for one’s future selves.
Is this a thing you’re saying for you personally, or people in general? Because if it’s not for everyone, then you still have to deal with the problem mentioned here.
Alright, let’s imagine that I was creating copies of myself for whatever reason:
In the present, I feel equal self-altruism towards all future identical copies of myself .
However, the moment a copy of myself is made, each copy will treat the other as a separate individual (with the regular old fashioned altruism one might have towards someone exactly like oneself, rather than future-self-altruism).