The problem with the computationalist view is that it confuses the representation with what is represented. No account of the structure of the brain is the brain. A detailed map of the neurons isn’t any better than a child’s crude drawing of a brain in this respect. The problem isn’t the level of detail, it’s that it makes no sense to claim a representation is the thing represented. Of course, the source of this confusion is the equally confused idea that the brain itself is a sort of computer and contains representations, information, etc. The confusions form a strange network that leads to a variety of absurd conclusions about representation, information, computation and brains (and even the universe).
Information about a brain might allow you to create something that functions like that brain or might allow you to alter another brain in some way that would make it more like the brain you collected information about (“like” is here relative), but it wouldn’t then be the brain. The only way cryonics could lead to survival is if it led to revival. Any account that involves a step where somebody has to create a description of the structure of your brain and then create a new brain (or simulation or device) from that, is death. The specifics of your biology do not enter into it.
Cyan’s post below demonstrates this confusion perfectly. A book does contain information in the relevant sense because somebody has written it there. The text is a representation. The book contains information only because we have a practice of representing language using letters. None of this applies to brains or could logically apply to brains. But two books can be said to be “the same” only for this reason and it’s a reason that cannot possibly apply to brains.
Just to make sure I’m following… your assertion is that my brain is not itself a sort of computer, does not contain representations, and does not contain information, my brain is some other kind of a thing, and so no amount of representations and information and computation can actually be my brain. They might resemble my brain in certain ways, they might even be used in order to delude some other brain into thinking of itself as me, but they are not my brain. And the idea that they might be is not even wrong, it’s just a confusion. The information, the representations, the belief-in-continuity, all that stuff, they are something else altogether, they aren’t my brain.
OK. Let’s suppose all this is true, just for the sake of comity. Let’s call that something else X.
On your account, should I prefer the preservation of my brain to the preservation of X, if forced to choose? If so, why?
That’s essentially correct. Preservation of your brain is preservation of your brain, whereas preservation of a representation of your brain (X) is not preservation of your brain or any aspect of you. The existence of a representation of you (regardless of detail) has no relationship to your survival whatsoever. Some people want to be remembered after they’re dead, so I suppose having a likeness of yourself created could be a way to achieve that (albeit an ethically questionable one if it involved creating a living being).
So, suppose I develop a life-threatening heart condition, and have the following conversation with my cardiologist: Her: We’ve developed this marvelous new artificial heart, and I recommend installing it in place of your damaged organic heart. Me: Oh, is it easier to repair my heart outside of my body? Her: No, no… we wouldn’t repair your heart, we’d replace it. Me: But what would happen to my heart? Her: Um… well, we typically incinerate it. Me: But that’s awful! It’s my heart. You’re proposing destroying my heart!!! Her: I don’t think you quite understand. The artificial heart can pump blood through your body just as well as your original heart… better, actually, given your condition. Me: Sure, I understand that, but that’s mere function. I believe you can replicate the functions of my heart, but if you don’t preserve my heart, what’s the value of that?
I infer that on your account, I’m being completely absurd in this example, since the artificial heart can facilitate my survival just as well (or better) as my original one, because really all I ought to value here is the functions. As long as my blood is pumping, etc., I should be content. (Yes? Or have I misrepresented your view of heart replacement?)
I also infer that you would further say that this example is nothing at all like a superficially similar example where it’s my brain that’s injured and my doctor is proposing replacing it with an artificial brain that merely replicates the functions of my brain (representation, information storage, computation and so forth). In that case, I infer, you would not consider my response absurd at all, since it really is the brain (and not merely its functions) that matter.
Am I correct?
If so, I conclude that I just have different values than you do. I don’t care about my brain, except insofar that it’s the only substrate I know of capable of implementing my X. If my survival requires the preservation of my brain, then it follows that I don’t care about my survival.
I do care about preserving my X, though. Give me a chance to do that, and I’ll take it, whether I survive or not.
I wouldn’t say that a brain transplant is nothing at all like a heart transplant. I don’t take the brain to have any special properties. However, this is one of those situations where identity can become vague. These things lie on a continuum. The brain is tied up with everything we do, all the ways in which we express our identity, so it’s more related to identity than the heart. People with severe brain damage can suffer a loss of identity (i.e., severe memory loss, severe personality change, permanent vegetative state, etc). You can be rough and ready when replacing the heart in a way you can’t be when replacing the brain.
Let me put it this way: The reason we talk of “brain death” is not because the brain is the seat of our identity but because it’s tied up with our identity in ways other organs are not. If the brain is beyond repair, typically the human being is beyond saving, even if the rest of the body is viable. So I don’t think the brain houses identity. In a sense, it’s just another organ, and, to the degree that that is true, a brain transplant wouldn’t be more problematic (logically) than a heart transplant, provided the dynamics underlying our behaviour could be somehow preserved. This is an extremely borderline case though.
So I’m not saying that you need to preserve your brain in order to preserve your identity. However, in the situation being discussed, nothing survives. It’s a clear case of death (we have a corpse) and then a new being is created from a description. This is quite different from organ replacement! What I’m objecting to is the idea that I am information or can be “transformed” or “converted” into information.
What you’re saying, as far as I can tell, is that you care more about “preserving” a hypothetical future description of yourself (hypothetical because presumably nobody has scanned you yet) than you do about your own life. These are very strange values to have—but I wish you luck!
People with severe brain damage can suffer a loss of identity (i.e., severe memory loss, severe personality change, permanent vegetative state, etc).
Wait up. On your account, why should we call those things (memory loss, personality change, loss of cognitive ability) “loss of identity”? If something that has my memories, personality, and cognitive abilities doesn’t have my identity, then it seems to follow that something lacking those things doesn’t lack my identity.
It seems that on your account those things are no more “loss of identity” than losing an arm or a kidney.
It’s the loss of faculties that constitutes the loss of identity, but faculties aren’t transferable. For example, a ball might lose its bounciness if it is deflated and regain it if it is reinflated, but there’s no such thing as transferring bounciness from one ball to another or one ball having the bounciness of another. The various faculties that constitute my identity can be lost and sometimes regained but cannot be transferred or stored. They have no separate existence.
Ah, gotcha. Yeah, here again, I just can’t imagine why I ought to care.
I mean, I agree that the attributes can’t be “stored” if I understand what you mean by that. When I remove the air from a ball, there is no more bounciness; when I add air to a ball, there is bounciness again; in between, there is no bounciness. If I do that carefully enough, the bounciness now is in-principle indistinguishable from the bounciness then, but that’s really all I can say. Sure.
That said, while I can imagine caring whether my ball bounces or not, and I can imagine caring whether my ball bounces in particular ways, if my ball bounces exactly the way it did five minutes ago I can’t imagine caring whether what it has now is the same bounciness, or merely in-principle indistinguishable bounciness.
To me, this seems like an obvious case of having distinctions between words that simply don’t map to distinctions between states of the world, and getting too caught up in the words.
By contrast, I can imagine caring whether I have the same faculties that constitute my identity as the guy who went to bed in my room last night, or merely in-principle indistinguishable faculties, in much the same way that I can imagine caring about whether my immortal soul goes to Heaven or Hell after I die. But it pretty much requires that I not think about the question carefully, because otherwise I conclude pretty quickly that I have no grounds whatsoever for caring, any more than I do about the ball.
So, yeah… I’d still much rather be survived by something that has memories, personality, and other identity-constituting faculties which are in-principle indistinguishable from my own, but doesn’t share any of my cells (all of which are now tied up in my rapidly-cooling corpse), than by something that shares all of my cells but loses a significant chunk of those faculties.
Which I suppose gets us back to the same question of incompatible values we had the other day. That is, you think the above is clear, but that it’s a strange preference for me to have, and you’d prefer the latter case, which I find equally strange. Yes?
Well, I would say the question of whether ball had the “same” bounciness when you filled it back up with air would either mean just that it bounces the same way (i.e., has the same amount of air in it) or is meaningless. The same goes for your faculties. I don’t think the question of whether you’re the same person when you wake up as when you went to sleep—absent your being abducted and replaced with a doppelgänger—is meaningful. What would “sameness” or “difference” here mean? That seems to me to be another case of conceiving of your faculties as something object-like, but in this case one set disappears and is replaced by another indistinguishable set. How does that happen? Or have they undergone change? Do they change without there being any physical change? With the ball we let the air out, but what could happen to me in the night that changes my identity? If I merely lost and regained by faculties in the night, they wouldn’t be different and it wouldn’t make sense to say they were indistinguishable either (except to mean that I have suffered no loss of faculties).
It’s correct that two balls can bounce in the same way, but quite wrong to think that if I replace one ball with the other (that bounces in the same way) I have the same ball. That’s true regardless of how many attributes they share in common: colour, size, material composition, etc. I can make them as similar as I like and they will never become the same! And so it goes with people. So while your doppelgänger might have the same faculties as you, it doesn’t make him the same human being as you, and, unlike you, he wasn’t the person who did X on your nth birthday, etc, and no amount of tinkering will ever make it so. Compare: I painstakingly review footage of a tennis ball bouncing at Wimbledon and carefully alter another tennis ball to make it bounce in just the same way. No amount of effort on my part will ever make it the ball I saw bounce at Wimbledon! Not even the finest molecular scan would do the trick. Perhaps that is the scenario you prefer, but, you’re quite right, I find it very odd.
I don’t think the question of whether you’re the same person when you wake up as when you went to sleep [..] is meaningful.
I’m content to say that, though I’d also be content to say that sufficient loss of faculties (e.g., due to a stroke while I slept) can destroy my identity, making me no longer the same person. Ultimately I consider this a question about words, not about things.
Do [your faculties] change without there being any physical change?
Well, physical change is constant in living systems, so the whole notion of “without physical change” is somewhat bewildering. But I’m not assuming the absence of any particular physical change.
I can make them as similar as I like and they will never become the same! And so it goes with people.
Sure, that’s fine. I don’t insist otherwise.
I just don’t think the condition you refer to as “being the same person” is a condition that matters. I simply don’t care whether they’re the same person or not, as long as various other conditions obtain. Same-person-ness provides no differential value on its own, over and above the sum of the value of the various attributes that it implies. I don’t see any reason to concern myself with it, and I think the degree to which you concern yourself with it here is unjustified, and the idea that there’s some objective sense in which its valuable is just goofy.
So while your doppelgänger might have the same faculties as you, it doesn’t make him the same human being as you, and, unlike you, he wasn’t the person who did X on your nth birthday, etc, and no amount of tinkering will ever make it so.
Again: so what? Why should I care? I don’t claim that your understanding of sameness is false, nor do I claim it’s meaningless, I just claim it’s valueless. OK, he’s not the same person. So what? What makes sameness important?
To turn it around: suppose I am informed right now that I’m not the same person who did X on Dave’s 9th birthday, that person died in 2012 and I’m a duplicate with all the same memories, personality, etc. I didn’t actually marry my husband, I didn’t _actually_buy my house, I’m not actually my dog’s owner, I wasn’t actually hired to do my job.
This is certainly startling, and I’d greet such a claim with skepticism, but ultimately: why in the world should I care? What difference does it make?
Perhaps that is the scenario you prefer, but, you’re quite right, I find it very odd.
Prefer to what?
So, as above, I’m informed that I’m actually a duplicate of Dave.
Do I prefer this state of affairs to the one where Dave didn’t die in 2012 and I was never created? No, not especially… I’m rather indifferent between them.
Do I prefer this state of affairs to the one where Dave died in 2012 and I was never created? Absolutely!
Do I prefer this state of affairs to the one where Dave continued to live and I was created anyway? Probably not, although the existence of two people in 2013 who map in such detailed functional ways to one person in 2012 will take some getting used to.
Similarly: I am told I’m dying, and given the option of creating such a duplicate. My preferences here seem symmetrical. That is:
Do I prefer that option to not dying and not having a duplicate? No, not especially, though the more confident I am of the duplicate’s similarity to me the more indifferent I become.
Do I prefer it to dying and not having a duplicate? Absolutely!
Do I prefer it to having a duplicate and not-dying? Probably not, though I will take some getting used to.
Which of those preferences seem odd to you? What is odd about them?
The preferences aren’t symmetrical. Discovering that you’re a duplicate involves discovering that you’ve been deceived or that you’re delusional, whereas dying is dying. From the point of view of the duplicate, what you’re saying amounts to borderline solipsism; you don’t care if any of your beliefs, memories, etc, match up with reality. You think being deluded is acceptable as long as the delusion is sufficiently complete. From your point of view, you don’t care about your survival, as long as somebody is deluded into thinking they’re you.
There’s no delusion or deception involved in any of the examples I gave.
In each example the duplicate knows it’s the duplicate, the original knows it’s the original; at no time does the duplicate believe it’s the original. The original knows it’s going to die. The duplicate does not believe that its memories reflect events that occurred to its body; it knows perfectly well that those events occurred to a different body.
Everyone in each of those examples knows everything relevant.
From your point of view, you don’t care about your survival, as long as somebody is deluded into thinking they’re you.
No, this isn’t true. There are lots of scenarios in which I would greatly prefer my survival to someone being deluded into thinking that they’re me after my death. And, as I said above, the scenarios I describe don’t involve anyone being deluded about anything; the duplicate knows perfectly well that it’s the duplicate and not the original.
If the duplicate says “I did X on my nth birthday” it’s not true since it didn’t even exist. If I claim that I met Shakespeare you can say, “But you weren’t even born!” So what does the duplicate say when I point out that it didn’t exist at that time? “I did but in a different body” (or “I was a different body”)? That implies that something has been transferred. Or does it say, “A different body did, not me”? But then it has no relationship with that body at all. Or perhaps it says, “The Original did X on their nth birthday and the Original has given me permission to carry on its legacy, so if you have a question about those events, I am the authority on them now”? It gets very difficult to call this “memory.” I suppose you could say that the duplicate doesn’t have the original’s memories but rather has knowledge of what the original did, but then in what sense is it a duplicate?
If the duplicate says “I did X on my nth birthday” it’s not true since it didn’t even exist.
Correct.
So what does the duplicate say when I point out that it didn’t exist at that time?
When talking to you, or someone who shares your attitude, my duplicate probably says something like “You’re right, of course. I’m in the habit of talking about my original’s experiences as though they’re mine, because I experience them as though they were, and both I and my original are perfectly happy talking that way and will probably keep doing so. But technically speaking you’re quite correct… I didn’t actually do X on my 9th birthday, nor did I have a 9th birthday to do anything on in the first place. Thanks for pointing that out.”
Which is closest to your last option, I suppose.
Incidentally, my duplicate likely does this in roughly the same tone of voice that an adoptive child might say analogous things when someone corrects their reference to “my parents” by claiming that no, their parents didn’t do any of that, their adoptive parents did. If you were to infer a certain hostility from that tone, you would not be incorrect.
It gets very difficult to call this “memory.”
It’s not difficult for me to call this a memory at all… it’s the original’s memory, which has been copied to and is being experienced by the duplicate. But if you’d rather come up with some special word for that to avoid confusion with a memory experienced by the same body that formed it in the first place, that’s OK with me too. (I choose not to refer to it as “knowledge of what the original did”, both because that’s unwieldy and because it ignores the experiential nature of memory,, which I value.)
but then in what sense is it a duplicate?
Sufficient similarity to the original. Which is what we typically mean when we say that X is a duplicate of Y.
“I’m in the habit of talking about my original’s experiences as though they’re mine, because I experience them as though they were” appears to be a form of delusion to me. If somebody went around pretending to be Napoleon (answering to the name Napoleon, talking about having done the things Napoleon did, etc) and answered all questions as if they were Napoleon but, when challenged, reassured you that of course they’re not Napoleon, they just have the habit of talking as if they are Napoleon because they experience life as Napoleon would, would you consider them delusional? Or does anything go as long as they’re content?
To be honest, I’m not really sure what you mean by the experience of memory. Mental imagery?
It has nothing to do with being content. If someone believes they are Napoleon, I consider them deluded, whether they are content or not. Conversely, if they don’t believe they are Napoleon, I don’t consider them deluded, whether they are content or not.
In the example you give, I would probably suspect the person of lying to me.
More generally: before I call something a delusion, I require that someone actually believe it’s true.
I’m not really sure what you mean by the experience of memory.
At this moment, you and I both know that I wrote this comment… we both have knowledge of what I did. In addition to that, I can remember writing it, and you can’t. I can have the experience of that memory; you can’t. The experience of memory isn’t the same thing as the knowledge of what I did.
Though on further consideration, I suppose I could summarize our whole discussion as about whether I am content or not… the noun, that is, not the adjective. I mostly consider myself to be content, and would be perfectly content to choose distribution networks for that content based on their functional properties.
However, in the situation being discussed, nothing survives.
Lots of things survive. They just don’t happen to be part of the original body.
What you’re saying, as far as I can tell, is that you care more about “preserving” a hypothetical future description of yourself (hypothetical because presumably nobody has scanned you yet) than you do about your own life.
Yes, I think given your understanding of those words, that’s entirely correct. My life with that “description” deleted is not worth very much to me; the continued development of that “description” is worth a lot more.
These are very strange values to have—but I wish you luck!
Not necessarily less you. Why even replace? What about augment?
Add an extra “blank” artificial brain. Keep refining the design until the biological brain reports feeling an expanded memory capacity, or enhanced clarity of newly formed memories, or enhanced cognition. Let the old brain assimilate this new space in whatever as-yet poorly understood pattern and whatever rate comes naturally to it.
With the patient’s consent, reversibly switch off various functional units in the biological region of the brain and see if the function is reconstituted elsewhere in the synthetic region. If it is, this is evidence that the technique is working. If not, the technique may need to be refined. At some point the majority of the patient’s brain activity is happening in the synthetic regions. Temporarily induce unconsciousness in the biological part; during and after the biological part’s unconsciousness, interview the patient about what subjective changes they felt, if any.
An agreement of external measurements and the patient’s subjective assessment that continuity was preserved would be strong evidence to me that such a technique is a reliable means to migrate a consciousness from one substrate to another.
Migration should only be speeded up as a standard practice to the extent that it is justified by ample data from many different volunteers (or patients whose condition requires it) undergoing incrementally faster migrations measured as above.
As far as cryonics goes, the above necessarily requires actual revival before migration. The above approach rules out plastination and similar destructive techniques.
I agree with all this, except maybe the last bit. Once the process of migration is well understood and if it is possible to calculate the structure of the synthetic part from the structure of the biological part, this knowledge can be used to skip the training steps and build a synthetic brain from a frozen/plastinated one, provided the latter still contains enough structure.
Anyway, my original question was to scientism, who rejected anything like that because
Any account that involves a step where somebody has to create a description of the structure of your brain and then create a new brain (or simulation or device) from that, is death. The specifics of your biology do not enter into it.
It’s not clear to me whether scientism believes that the mind is a process that cannot take place on any substrate other than a brain, or whether he’s shares my and (I think) Mitchell Porter’s more cautious point of view that our consciousness can in principle exist somewhere other than a brain, but we don’t yet know enough about neuroscience to be confident about what properties such a system must have.
I, for one, would be sceptical of there being no substrate possible at all except the brain, because it’s a strong unsupported assertion on the same order as the (perhaps straw-man) patternist assertion that binary computers are an adequate substrate (or the stronger-still assertion that any computational substrate is adequate).
If I have understood scientism’s comments, they believe neither of the possibilities you list in your first paragraph.
I think they believe that whether or not a mind can take place on a non-brain substrate, our consciousness(es) cannot exist somewhere other than a brain, because they are currently instantiated in brains, and cannot be transferred (whether to another brain, or anything else).
This does not preclude some other mind coming to exist on a non-brain substrate.
Here is a thought experiment that might not be a thought experiment in the foreseeable future:
Grow some neurons in vitro and implant them in a patient. Over time, will that patient’s brain recruit those neurons?
If so, the more far-out experiment I earlier proposed becomes a matter of scaling up this experiment. I’d rather be on a more resilient substrate than neurons, but I’ll take what I can get.
I’m betting that the answer to this will be “yes”, following a similar line of reasoning that Drexler used to defend the plausibility of nanotech: the existence of birds implied the feasibility of aircraft; the existence of ribosomes implies the feasibility of nanotech… neurogenesis occurring during development and over the last few decades found to be possible in adulthood implies the feasibility of replacing damaged brains or augmenting healthy ones.
build a synthetic brain from a frozen/plastinated one
I’m unconvinced that cryostasis wll preserve the experience of continuity. Because of the thought experiment with the non-destructive copying of a terminal patient, I am convinced that plastination will fail to preserve it (I remain the unlucky copy, and in addition to that, dead).
My ideal scenario is one where I can undergo a gradual migration before I actually need to be preserved by either method.
You’ve been non-destructively scanned, and the scan was used to construct a brand new healthy you who does everything you would do, loves the people you love, etc. Well, that’s great for him, but you are still suffering from a fatal illness.
So your issue is that a copy of you is not you? And you would treat star trek-like transporter beams as murder? But you are OK with a gradual replacement of your brain, just not with a complete one? How fast would the parts need to be replaced to preserve this “experience of continuity”? Do drugs which knock you unconscious break continuity enough to be counted as making you into not-you?
Basically, what I am unclear on is whether your issue is continuity of experience or cloning.
So your issue is that a copy of you is not you? And you would treat star trek-like transporter beams as murder?
Nothing so melodramatic, but I wouldn’t use them. UNLESS they were in fact manipulating my wave function directly somehow causing my amplitude to increase in one place and decrease in another. Probably not what the screenplay writers had in mind, though.
But you are OK with a gradual replacement of your brain, just not with a complete one?
Maybe even a complete one eventually. If the vast majority of my cognition has migrated to the synthetic regions, it may not seem as much of a loss when parts of the biological brain break down and have to be replaced. Hard to speak on behalf of my future self with only what I know now. This is speculation.
How fast would the parts need to be replaced to preserve this “experience of continuity”?
This is an empirical question that could be answered if/when it becomes possible perform for real the thought experiment I described (the second one, with the blank brain being attached to the existing brain).
Basically, what I am unclear on is whether your issue is continuity of experience or cloning.
Continuity. I’m not opposed to non-destructive copies of me, but I don’t see them as inherently beneficial to me either.
The point of cryonics is that it could lead to revival.
Any account that involves a step where somebody has to create a description of the structure of your brain and then create a new brain (or simulation or device) from that, is death.
Obviously. That’s not what Mitchell_Porter’s post was about, though.
Any account that involves a step where somebody has to create a description of the structure of your brain and then create a new brain (or simulation or device) from that, is death.
You seem to think that creating a description of the structure of a brain is necessarily a destructive process. I don’t know of any reason to assume that. If a non-destructive scan exists and is carried out, then there’s no “death”, howsoever defined. Right?
But anyway, let’s grant your implicit assumption of a destructive scan, and suppose that this process has actually occurred to your brain, and “something that functions like [your] brain” has been created. Who is the resulting being? Who do they think they are? What do they do next? Do they do the sorts of things you would do? Love the people you love?
I grant that you do not consider this hypothetical being you—after all, you are hypothetically dead. But surely there is no one else better qualified to answer these questions, so it’s you that I ask.
I was referring cryonics scenarios where the brain is being scanned because you cannot be revived and a new entity is being created based on the scan, so I was assuming that your brain is no longer viable rather than that the scan is destructive.
The resulting being, if possible, would be a being that is confused about its identity. It would be a cruel joke played on those who know me and, possibly, on the being itself (depending on the type of being it is). I am not my likeness.
Consider that, if you had this technology, you could presumably create a being that thinks it is a fictional person. You could fool it into thinking all kinds of nonsensical things. Convincing it that it has the same identity as a dead person is just one among many strange tricks you could play on it.
I was referring cryonics scenarios where the brain is being scanned because you cannot be revived and a new entity is being created based on the scan, so I was assuming that your brain is no longer viable rather than that the scan is destructive.
Fair enough.
The resulting being, if possible, would be a being that is confused about its identity. [...] Consider that, if you had this technology, you could presumably create a being that thinks it is a fictional person. You could fool it into thinking all kinds of nonsensical things.
I’m positing that the being has been informed about how it was created; it knows that it is not the being it remembers, um, being. So it has the knowledge to say of itself, if it were so inclined, “I am a being purposefully constructed ab initio with all of the memories and cognitive capacities of scientism, RIP.”
Would it be so inclined? If so, what would it do next? (Let us posit that it’s a reconstructed embodied human being.) For example, would it call up your friends and introduce itself? Court your former spouse (if you have one), fully acknowledging that it is not the original you? Ask to adopt your children (if you have any)?
It would have false memories, etc, and having my false memories, it would presumably know that these are false memories and that it has no right to assume my identity, contact my friends and family, court my spouse, etc, simply because it (falsely) thinks itself to have some connection with me (to have had my past experiences). It might still contact them anyway, given that I imagine its emotional state would be fragile; it would surely be a very difficult situation to be in. A situation that would probably horrify everybody involved.
I suppose, to put myself in that situation, I would, willpower permitting, have the false memories removed (if possible), adopt a different name and perhaps change my appearance (or at least move far away). But I see the situation as unimaginably cruel. You’re creating a being—presumably a thinking, feeling being—and tricking it into thinking it did certain things in the past, etc, that it did not do. Even if it knows that it was created, that still seems like a terrible situation to be in, since it’s essentially a form of (inflicted) mental illness.
!!… I hope you mean explicit memory but not implicit memory—otherwise there wouldn’t be much of a being left afterwards...
“tricking” it into thinking it did certain things in the past
For a certain usage of “tricking” this is true, but that usage is akin to the way optical illusions trick one’s visual system rather than denoting a falsehood deliberately embedded in one’s explicit knowledge.
I would point out that the source of all the hypothetical suffering in this situation would the being’s (and your) theory of identity rather than the fact of anyone’s identity (or lack thereof). If this isn’t obvious, just posit that the scenario is conceivable but hasn’t actually happened, and some bastard deceives you into thinking it has—or even just casts doubt on the issue in either case.
Of course that doesn’t mean the theory is false—but I do want to say that from my perspective it appears that the emotional distress would come from reifying a naïve notion of personal identity. Even the word “identity”, with its connotations of singleness, stops being a good one in the hypothetical.
Have you seen John Weldon’s animated short To Be? You might enjoy it. If you watch it, I have a question for you: would you exculpate the singer of the last song?
I take it that my death and the being’s ab initio creation are both facts. These aren’t theoretical claims. The claim that I am “really” a description of my brain (that I am information, pattern, etc) is as nonsensical as the claim that I am really my own portrait, and so couldn’t amount to a theory. In fact, the situation is analogous to someone taking a photo of my corpse and creating a being based on its likeness. The accuracy of the resulting being’s behaviour, its ability to fool others, and its own confused state doesn’t make any difference to the argument. It’s possible to dream up scenarios where identity breaks down, but surely not ones where we have a clear example of death.
I would also point out that there are people who are quite content with severe mental illness. You might have delusions of being Napoleon and be quite happy about it. Perhaps such a person would argue that “I feel like Napoleon and that’s good enough for me!”
In the animation, the woman commits suicide and the woman created by the teleportation device is quite right that she isn’t responsible for anything the other woman did, despite resembling her.
I take it that my death and the being’s ab initio creation are both facts.
In the hypothetical, your brain has stopped functioning. Whether this is sufficient to affirm that you died is precisely the question at issue. Personally, it doesn’t matter to me if my brain’s current structure is the product of biological mechanisms operating continuously by physical law or is the product of, say, a 3D printer and a cryonically-created template—also operating by physical law. Both brains are causally related to my past self in enough detail to make the resulting brain me in every way that matters to me.
In the animation, the woman commits suicide and the woman created by the teleportation device is quite right that she isn’t responsible for anything the other woman did, despite resembling her.
Curious that she used the transmission+reconstruction module while committing “suicide”, innit? She didn’t have to—it was a deliberate choice.
The brain constructed in your likeness is only normatively related to your brain. That’s the point I’m making. The step where you make a description of the brain is done according to a practice of representation. There is no causal relationship between the initial brain and the created brain. (Or, rather, any causal relationship is massively disperse through human society and history.) It’s a human being, or perhaps a computer programmed by human beings, in a cultural context with certain practices of representation, that creates the brain according to a set of rules.
This is obvious when you consider how the procedure might be developed. We would have to have a great many trial runs and would decide when we had got it right. That decision would be based on a set of normative criteria, a set of measurements. So it would only be “successful” according to a set of human norms. The procedure would be a cultural practice rather than a physical process. But there is just no such thing as something physical being “converted” or “transformed” into a description (or information or a pattern or representation) - because these are all normative concepts—so such a step cannot possibly conserve identity.
As I said, the only way the person in cryonic suspension can continue to live is through a standard process of revival—that is, one that doesn’t involve the step of being described and then having a likeness created—and if such a revival doesn’t occur, the person is dead. This is because the process of being described and then having a likeness created isn’t any sort of revival at all and couldn’t possibly be. It’s a logical impossibility.
My response to this is very simple, but it’s necessary to know beforehand that the brain’s operation is robust to many low-level variations, e.g., thermal noise that triggers occasional random action potentials at a low rate.
We would have to have a great many trial runs and would decide when we had got it right.
Suppose our standard is that we get it right when the reconstructed brain is more like the original brain just before cryonic preservation than a brain after a good night’s sleep is like that same brain before sleeping—within the subset of brain features that are not robust to variation. Further suppose that that standard is achieved through a process that involves a representation of the structure of the brain. Albeit that the representation is indeed a “cultural practice”, the brute fact of the extreme degree of similarity of the pre- and post-process brains would seem much more relevant to the question of preservation of any aspect of the brain worthy of being called “identity”.
ETA: Thinking about this a bit more, I see that the notion of “similarity” in the above argument is also vulnerable to the charge of being a mere cultural practice. So let me clarify that the kind of similarity I have in mind basically maps to reproducibility of the input-output relation of a low-level functional unit, up to, say, the magnitude of thermal noise. Reproducibility in this sense has empirical content; it is not merely culturally constructed.
I don’t see how using more detailed measurements makes it any less a cultural practice. There isn’t a limit you can pass where doing something according to a standard suddenly becomes a physical relationship. Regardless, consider that you could create as many copies to that standard as you wished, so you now have a one-to-many relationship of “identity” according to your scenario. Such a type-token relationship is typical of norm-based standards (such as mediums of representation) because they are norm-based standards (that is, because you can make as many according to the standard as you wish).
I don’t see how using more detailed measurements makes it any less a cultural practice.
I’m not saying it’s not a cultural practice. I’m saying that the brute fact of the extreme degree of similarity (and resulting reproducibility of functionality) of the pre- and post-process brains seems like a much more relevant fact. I don’t know why I should care that the process is a cultural artifact if the pre- and post-process brains are so similar that for all possible inputs, they produce the same outputs. That I can get more brains out than I put in is a feature, not a bug, even though it makes the concept of a singular identity obsolete.
It’s possible to dream up scenarios where identity breaks down, but surely not ones where we have a clear example of death.
I don’t know what the word “clear” in that sentence actually means.
If you’re simply asserting that what has occurred in this example is your death, then no, it isn’t clear, any more than if I assert that I actually died 25 minutes ago, that’s clear evidence that Internet commenting after death is possible.
I’m not saying you’re necessarily wrong… I mean, sure, it’s possible that you’re correct, and in your hypothetical scenario you actually are dead, despite the continued existence of something that acts like you and believes itself to be you. It’s also possible that in my hypothetical scenario I’m correct and I really did die 25 minutes ago, despite the continued existence of something that acts like me and believes itself to be me.
I’m just saying it isn’t clear… in other words, that it’s also possible that one or both of us is confused/mistaken about what it means for us to die and/or remain alive.
In the example being discussed we have a body. I can’t think of a clearer example of death than one where you can point to the corpse or remains. You couldn’t assert that you died 25 minutes ago—since death is the termination of your existence and so logically precludes asserting anything (nothing could count as evidence for you doing anything after death, although your corpse might do things) - but if somebody else asserted that you died 25 minutes ago then they could presumably point to your remains, or explain what happened to them. If you continued to post on the Internet, that would be evidence that you hadn’t died. Although the explanation that someone just like you was continuing to post on the Internet would be consistent with your having died.
Now, if I understand the “two particles of the same type are identical” argument in the context of uploading/copying, it shouldn’t be relevant because two huge multi-particle configurations are not going to be identical. You cannot measure the state of each particle in the original and you cannot precisely force each particle in the copy into that state. And no amount of similar is enough, the two of you have to be identical in the sense that two electrons are identical if we’re talking about being Feynman paths that your amplitude would be summed over. And that rules out digital simulations altogether.
But I didn’t really expect any patternists to defend the first way you could be right in my post. Whereas, the second way you might be right amounts to, by my definition, proving to me that I am already dead or that I die all the time. If that’s the case, all bets are off, everything I care about is due for a major reassessment.
I’d still want toknow the truth of course. But the strong form of that argument (that I already experience on a recurring basis the same level of death as you would if you were destructively scanned) is not yet proven to be the truth. Only a plausible for which (or against which) I have not yet seen much evidence.
But the strong form of that argument (that I already experience on a recurring basis the same level of death as you would if you were destructively scanned) is not yet proven to be the truth.
Can you taboo “level of death” for me? Also, what sorts of experiences would count as evidence for or against the proposition?
Discontinuity. Interruption of inner narrative. You know how the last thing you remember was puking over the toilet bowl and then you wake up on the bathroom floor and it’s noon? Well, that but minus everything that goes after the word “bowl”.
Or the technical angle—whatever routine occurrence it is that supposedly disrupts my brain state as much as a destructive scan and rounding to the precision limit of whatever substrate my copy would be running on.
Darn it. I asked two questions—sorry, my mistake—and I find I can’t unequivocally assign your response to one question or the other (or different parts of your response to both).
I guess this would be my attempt to answer your first question: articulating what I meant without the phrase “level of death”.
My answer to your second question it tougher. Somewhat compelling evidence that whatever I value has been preserved would be simultaneously experiencing life from the point of view of two different instances. This could be accomplished perhaps through frequent or continuous synchronization of the memories and thoughts of the two brains. Another convincing experience (though less so) would be gradual replacement of individual biological components that would have otherwise died, with time for the replacement parts to be assimilated into the existing system of original and earlier-replaced components.
If I abruptly woke up in a new body with all my old memories, I would be nearly certain that the old me has experienced death if they are not around, or if they are still around (without any link to each others’ thoughts), that I am the only one who has tangibly benefited from whatever the rejuvenating/stabilizing effects of the replication/uploading might be, and they have not. If I awoke from cryostasis in my old body (or head, as the case may be) even then I would only ever be 50% sure that the individual entering cryostasis is not experiencing waking up (unless there was independent evidence of weak activity in my brain during cryostasis).
The way for me to be convinced, not that continuity has been preserved but rather that my desire for continuity is impossible, does double duty with my answer to the first question:
whatever routine occurrence it is that supposedly disrupts my brain state as much as a destructive scan and rounding to the precision limit of whatever substrate my copy would be running on.
Actually, let’s start by supposing a non-destructive scan.
The resulting being is someone who is identical to you, but diverges at the point where the scan was performed.
Let’s say your problem is that you have a fatal illness. You’ve been non-destructively scanned, and the scan was used to construct a brand new healthy you who does everything you would do, loves the people you love, etc. Well, that’s great for him, but you are still suffering from a fatal illness. One of the brainscan technicians helpfully suggests they could euthanize you, but if that’s a solution to your problem then why bother getting scanned and copied in the first place? Your could achieve the same subjective outcome by going straight to the euthanasia step.
Now, getting back to the destructive scan. The only thing that’s different is you skip the conversation with the technician and go straight to the euthanasia step. Again, an outcome you could have achieved more cheaply with a bottle of sleeping pills and a bottle of Jack Daniels.
After the destructive scan, a being exists that remembers being me up to the point of that scan, values all the things I value, loves the people I love and will be there for them. Regardless of anyone’s opinion about whether that being is me, that’s an outcome I desire, and I can’t actually achieve it with a bottle of sleeping pills and a bottle of Jack Daniels. Absolutely the same goes for the non-destructive scan scenario.
I want to accomplish both goals: have them be reunited with me, and for myself to experience being reunited with them. Copying only accomplishes the first goal, and so is not enough. So long as there is any hope of actual revival, I do not wish to be destructively scanned nor undergo any preservation technique that is incompatible with actual revival. I don’t have a problem with provably non-destructive scans. Hell, put me on Gitorious for people to download, just delete the porn first.
My spouse will probably outlive me, and hopefully if my kids have to get suspended at all, it will be after they have lived to a ripe old age. So everyone will have had some time to adjust to my absence, and would not be too upset about having to wait a little longer. Otherwise, we could form a pact where we revive whenever the conditions for the last of our revivals are met. I should remember to run this idea by them when they wake up. Well, at least the ones of them who talk in full sentences.
Or maybe this is all wishful thinking—someone who thinks that what we believe is silly will just fire up the microtome and create some uploads that are “close enough” and tell them it was for their own good.
Sticking with the non-destructive scan + terminal illness scenario: before the scan is carried out, do you anticipate (i) experiencing being reunited with your loved ones; (ii) requesting euthanasia to avoid a painful terminal disease; (iii) both (but not both simultaneously for the same instance of “you”)?
Probably (iii) is the closest to the truth, but without euthenasia. I’d just eventually die, fighting it to the very end. Apparently this is an unusual opinion or something because people have such a hard time grasping this simple point: what I care about is the continuation of my inner narrative for as long as possible. Even if it’s filled with suffering. I don’t care. I want to live. Forever if possible, for an extra minute if that’s all there is.
A copy may accomplish my goal of helping my family, but it does absolutely nothing to accomplish my goal of survival. As a matter of self-preservation I have to set the record straight whenever someone claims otherwise.
what I care about is the continuation of my inner narrative for as long as possible
Okay—got it. What I don’t grasp is why you would care about the inner narrative of any particular instance of “you” when the persistence of that instance makes negligible material difference to all the other things you care about.
To put it another way: if there’s only a single instance of “me”—the only extant copy of my particular values and abilities—then its persistence cannot be immaterial to all the other things I care about, and that’s why I currently care about my persistence more-or-less unconditionally. If there’s more than one copy of “me” kicking around, then “more-or-less unconditionally” no longer applies. My own internal narrative doesn’t enter into the question, and I’m confused as to why anyone else would give their own internal narrative any consideration.
Okay—got it. What I don’t grasp is why you would care about the inner narrative of any particular instance of “you” when the persistence of that instance makes negligible material difference to all the other things you care about.
Maybe the same why as why do some people care more about their families than about other people’s families. Why some people care more about themselves than about strangers. What I can’t grasp is how one would manage to so thoroughly eradicate or suppress such a fundamental drive.
I don’t understand the response. Are you saying that the reason you don’t have an egocentric world view and I do is in some way because of kin selection?
If we both agree as to what would actually be happening in these hypothetical scenarios, but disagree about what we value, then clauses like “patternists could be wrong” refer to an orthogonal issue.
Patternists/computationalists make the, in principle, falsifiable assertion that if I opt for plastination and am successfully reconstructed, that I will wake up in the future just as I will if I opt for cryonics and am successfully revived without copying/uploading/reconstruction. My assertion is that if I opt for plastination I will die and be replaced by someone hard or impossible to distinguish from me. Since it takes more resources to maintain cryosuspension, and probably a more advanced technology level to thaw and reanimate the patient, if the patternists are right, plastination is a better choice. If I’m right, it is not an acceptable choice at all.
The problem is that, so far, the only being in the universe who could falsify this assertion is the instantiation of me that is writing this post. Perhaps with increased understanding of neuroscience, there will be additional ways to test the patternist hypothesis.
the, in principle, falsifiable assertion that if I opt for plastination that I will wake up in the future with an equal or greater probability than if I opt for cryonics
I’m not sure what you mean here. Probability statements aren’t falsifiable; Popper would have had a rather easier time if they were. Relative frequencies are empirical, and statements about them are falsifiable...
My assertion is that I will die and be replaced by someone hard or impossible to distinguish from me.
At the degree of resolution we’re talking about, talking about you/not-you at all seems like a blegg/rube distinction. It’s just not a useful way of thinking about what’s being contemplated, which in essence is that certain information-processing systems are running, being serialized, stored, loaded, and run again.
Suppose your brain has ceased functioning, been recoverably preserved and scanned, and then revived and copied. The two resulting brains are indistinguishable in the sense that for all possible inputs, they give identical outputs. (Posit that this is a known fact about the processes that generated them in their current states.) What exactly is it that makes the revived brain you and the copied brain not-you?
So, I mean, the utility function is not up for grabs.
And yet, what is to be done if your utility function is dissolved by the truth? How do we know that there even exist utility functions that retain their currency down to the level of timeless wave functions?
I haven’t thought really deeply about that, but it seems to me that if Egan’s Law doesn’t offer you some measure of protection and also a way to cope with failures of your map, you’re probably doing it wrong.
A witty quote from an great book by a brilliant author is awesome, but does not have the status of any sort of law.
What do we mean by “normality”? What you observe around you every day? If you are wrong about the unobserved causal mechanisms underlying your observations, you will make wrong decisions. If you walk on hot coals because you believe God will not let you burn, the normality that quantum mechanics adds up to diverges enough from your normality that there will be tangible consequences. Are goals part of normality? If not, they certainly depend on assumptions you make about your model of normality. Either way, when you discover that God can’t/won’t make you fireproof, some subset of your goals will (and should) come tumbling down. This too has tangible consequences.
Some subset of the remaining goals relies on more subtle errors in your model of normality and they too will at some point crumble.
What evidence do we have that any goals at all are stable at every level? Why should the goals of a massive blob of atoms have such a universality?
I can see the point of “it all adds up to normality” if you’re encouraging someone to not be reluctant to learn new facts. But how does it help answer the question of “what goal do we pursue if we find proof that all our goals are bullshit”?
My vague notion is that if your goals don’t have ramifications in the realm of the normal, you’re doing it wrong. If they do, and some aspect of your map upon which goals depend gets altered in a way that invalidates some of your goals, you can still look at the normal-realm ramifications and try to figure out if they are still things you want, and if so, what your goals are now in the new part of your map.
Keep in mind that your “map” here is not one fixed notion about the way the world works. It’s a probability distribution over all the ways the world could work that are consistent with your knowledge and experience. In particular, if you’re not sure whether “patternists” (whatever those are) are correct or not, this is a fact about your map that you can start coping with right now.
It might be that the Dark Lords of the Matrix are just messing with you, but really, the unknown unknowns would have to be quite extreme to totally upend your goal system.
The problem with the computationalist view is that it confuses the representation with what is represented. No account of the structure of the brain is the brain. A detailed map of the neurons isn’t any better than a child’s crude drawing of a brain in this respect. The problem isn’t the level of detail, it’s that it makes no sense to claim a representation is the thing represented. Of course, the source of this confusion is the equally confused idea that the brain itself is a sort of computer and contains representations, information, etc. The confusions form a strange network that leads to a variety of absurd conclusions about representation, information, computation and brains (and even the universe).
Information about a brain might allow you to create something that functions like that brain or might allow you to alter another brain in some way that would make it more like the brain you collected information about (“like” is here relative), but it wouldn’t then be the brain. The only way cryonics could lead to survival is if it led to revival. Any account that involves a step where somebody has to create a description of the structure of your brain and then create a new brain (or simulation or device) from that, is death. The specifics of your biology do not enter into it.
Cyan’s post below demonstrates this confusion perfectly. A book does contain information in the relevant sense because somebody has written it there. The text is a representation. The book contains information only because we have a practice of representing language using letters. None of this applies to brains or could logically apply to brains. But two books can be said to be “the same” only for this reason and it’s a reason that cannot possibly apply to brains.
Just to make sure I’m following… your assertion is that my brain is not itself a sort of computer, does not contain representations, and does not contain information, my brain is some other kind of a thing, and so no amount of representations and information and computation can actually be my brain. They might resemble my brain in certain ways, they might even be used in order to delude some other brain into thinking of itself as me, but they are not my brain. And the idea that they might be is not even wrong, it’s just a confusion. The information, the representations, the belief-in-continuity, all that stuff, they are something else altogether, they aren’t my brain.
OK. Let’s suppose all this is true, just for the sake of comity. Let’s call that something else X.
On your account, should I prefer the preservation of my brain to the preservation of X, if forced to choose?
If so, why?
That’s essentially correct. Preservation of your brain is preservation of your brain, whereas preservation of a representation of your brain (X) is not preservation of your brain or any aspect of you. The existence of a representation of you (regardless of detail) has no relationship to your survival whatsoever. Some people want to be remembered after they’re dead, so I suppose having a likeness of yourself created could be a way to achieve that (albeit an ethically questionable one if it involved creating a living being).
OK., I think I understand your position.
So, suppose I develop a life-threatening heart condition, and have the following conversation with my cardiologist:
Her: We’ve developed this marvelous new artificial heart, and I recommend installing it in place of your damaged organic heart.
Me: Oh, is it easier to repair my heart outside of my body?
Her: No, no… we wouldn’t repair your heart, we’d replace it.
Me: But what would happen to my heart?
Her: Um… well, we typically incinerate it.
Me: But that’s awful! It’s my heart. You’re proposing destroying my heart!!!
Her: I don’t think you quite understand. The artificial heart can pump blood through your body just as well as your original heart… better, actually, given your condition.
Me: Sure, I understand that, but that’s mere function. I believe you can replicate the functions of my heart, but if you don’t preserve my heart, what’s the value of that?
I infer that on your account, I’m being completely absurd in this example, since the artificial heart can facilitate my survival just as well (or better) as my original one, because really all I ought to value here is the functions. As long as my blood is pumping, etc., I should be content. (Yes? Or have I misrepresented your view of heart replacement?)
I also infer that you would further say that this example is nothing at all like a superficially similar example where it’s my brain that’s injured and my doctor is proposing replacing it with an artificial brain that merely replicates the functions of my brain (representation, information storage, computation and so forth). In that case, I infer, you would not consider my response absurd at all, since it really is the brain (and not merely its functions) that matter.
Am I correct?
If so, I conclude that I just have different values than you do. I don’t care about my brain, except insofar that it’s the only substrate I know of capable of implementing my X. If my survival requires the preservation of my brain, then it follows that I don’t care about my survival.
I do care about preserving my X, though. Give me a chance to do that, and I’ll take it, whether I survive or not.
I wouldn’t say that a brain transplant is nothing at all like a heart transplant. I don’t take the brain to have any special properties. However, this is one of those situations where identity can become vague. These things lie on a continuum. The brain is tied up with everything we do, all the ways in which we express our identity, so it’s more related to identity than the heart. People with severe brain damage can suffer a loss of identity (i.e., severe memory loss, severe personality change, permanent vegetative state, etc). You can be rough and ready when replacing the heart in a way you can’t be when replacing the brain.
Let me put it this way: The reason we talk of “brain death” is not because the brain is the seat of our identity but because it’s tied up with our identity in ways other organs are not. If the brain is beyond repair, typically the human being is beyond saving, even if the rest of the body is viable. So I don’t think the brain houses identity. In a sense, it’s just another organ, and, to the degree that that is true, a brain transplant wouldn’t be more problematic (logically) than a heart transplant, provided the dynamics underlying our behaviour could be somehow preserved. This is an extremely borderline case though.
So I’m not saying that you need to preserve your brain in order to preserve your identity. However, in the situation being discussed, nothing survives. It’s a clear case of death (we have a corpse) and then a new being is created from a description. This is quite different from organ replacement! What I’m objecting to is the idea that I am information or can be “transformed” or “converted” into information.
What you’re saying, as far as I can tell, is that you care more about “preserving” a hypothetical future description of yourself (hypothetical because presumably nobody has scanned you yet) than you do about your own life. These are very strange values to have—but I wish you luck!
Though, now that I think about it...
Wait up. On your account, why should we call those things (memory loss, personality change, loss of cognitive ability) “loss of identity”? If something that has my memories, personality, and cognitive abilities doesn’t have my identity, then it seems to follow that something lacking those things doesn’t lack my identity.
It seems that on your account those things are no more “loss of identity” than losing an arm or a kidney.
It’s the loss of faculties that constitutes the loss of identity, but faculties aren’t transferable. For example, a ball might lose its bounciness if it is deflated and regain it if it is reinflated, but there’s no such thing as transferring bounciness from one ball to another or one ball having the bounciness of another. The various faculties that constitute my identity can be lost and sometimes regained but cannot be transferred or stored. They have no separate existence.
Ah, gotcha. Yeah, here again, I just can’t imagine why I ought to care.
I mean, I agree that the attributes can’t be “stored” if I understand what you mean by that. When I remove the air from a ball, there is no more bounciness; when I add air to a ball, there is bounciness again; in between, there is no bounciness. If I do that carefully enough, the bounciness now is in-principle indistinguishable from the bounciness then, but that’s really all I can say. Sure.
That said, while I can imagine caring whether my ball bounces or not, and I can imagine caring whether my ball bounces in particular ways, if my ball bounces exactly the way it did five minutes ago I can’t imagine caring whether what it has now is the same bounciness, or merely in-principle indistinguishable bounciness.
To me, this seems like an obvious case of having distinctions between words that simply don’t map to distinctions between states of the world, and getting too caught up in the words.
By contrast, I can imagine caring whether I have the same faculties that constitute my identity as the guy who went to bed in my room last night, or merely in-principle indistinguishable faculties, in much the same way that I can imagine caring about whether my immortal soul goes to Heaven or Hell after I die. But it pretty much requires that I not think about the question carefully, because otherwise I conclude pretty quickly that I have no grounds whatsoever for caring, any more than I do about the ball.
So, yeah… I’d still much rather be survived by something that has memories, personality, and other identity-constituting faculties which are in-principle indistinguishable from my own, but doesn’t share any of my cells (all of which are now tied up in my rapidly-cooling corpse), than by something that shares all of my cells but loses a significant chunk of those faculties.
Which I suppose gets us back to the same question of incompatible values we had the other day. That is, you think the above is clear, but that it’s a strange preference for me to have, and you’d prefer the latter case, which I find equally strange. Yes?
Well, I would say the question of whether ball had the “same” bounciness when you filled it back up with air would either mean just that it bounces the same way (i.e., has the same amount of air in it) or is meaningless. The same goes for your faculties. I don’t think the question of whether you’re the same person when you wake up as when you went to sleep—absent your being abducted and replaced with a doppelgänger—is meaningful. What would “sameness” or “difference” here mean? That seems to me to be another case of conceiving of your faculties as something object-like, but in this case one set disappears and is replaced by another indistinguishable set. How does that happen? Or have they undergone change? Do they change without there being any physical change? With the ball we let the air out, but what could happen to me in the night that changes my identity? If I merely lost and regained by faculties in the night, they wouldn’t be different and it wouldn’t make sense to say they were indistinguishable either (except to mean that I have suffered no loss of faculties).
It’s correct that two balls can bounce in the same way, but quite wrong to think that if I replace one ball with the other (that bounces in the same way) I have the same ball. That’s true regardless of how many attributes they share in common: colour, size, material composition, etc. I can make them as similar as I like and they will never become the same! And so it goes with people. So while your doppelgänger might have the same faculties as you, it doesn’t make him the same human being as you, and, unlike you, he wasn’t the person who did X on your nth birthday, etc, and no amount of tinkering will ever make it so. Compare: I painstakingly review footage of a tennis ball bouncing at Wimbledon and carefully alter another tennis ball to make it bounce in just the same way. No amount of effort on my part will ever make it the ball I saw bounce at Wimbledon! Not even the finest molecular scan would do the trick. Perhaps that is the scenario you prefer, but, you’re quite right, I find it very odd.
I’m content to say that, though I’d also be content to say that sufficient loss of faculties (e.g., due to a stroke while I slept) can destroy my identity, making me no longer the same person. Ultimately I consider this a question about words, not about things.
Well, physical change is constant in living systems, so the whole notion of “without physical change” is somewhat bewildering. But I’m not assuming the absence of any particular physical change.
Sure, that’s fine. I don’t insist otherwise.
I just don’t think the condition you refer to as “being the same person” is a condition that matters. I simply don’t care whether they’re the same person or not, as long as various other conditions obtain. Same-person-ness provides no differential value on its own, over and above the sum of the value of the various attributes that it implies. I don’t see any reason to concern myself with it, and I think the degree to which you concern yourself with it here is unjustified, and the idea that there’s some objective sense in which its valuable is just goofy.
Again: so what? Why should I care? I don’t claim that your understanding of sameness is false, nor do I claim it’s meaningless, I just claim it’s valueless. OK, he’s not the same person. So what? What makes sameness important?
To turn it around: suppose I am informed right now that I’m not the same person who did X on Dave’s 9th birthday, that person died in 2012 and I’m a duplicate with all the same memories, personality, etc. I didn’t actually marry my husband, I didn’t _actually_buy my house, I’m not actually my dog’s owner, I wasn’t actually hired to do my job.
This is certainly startling, and I’d greet such a claim with skepticism, but ultimately: why in the world should I care? What difference does it make?
Prefer to what?
So, as above, I’m informed that I’m actually a duplicate of Dave.
Do I prefer this state of affairs to the one where Dave didn’t die in 2012 and I was never created? No, not especially… I’m rather indifferent between them.
Do I prefer this state of affairs to the one where Dave died in 2012 and I was never created? Absolutely!
Do I prefer this state of affairs to the one where Dave continued to live and I was created anyway? Probably not, although the existence of two people in 2013 who map in such detailed functional ways to one person in 2012 will take some getting used to.
Similarly: I am told I’m dying, and given the option of creating such a duplicate. My preferences here seem symmetrical. That is:
Do I prefer that option to not dying and not having a duplicate? No, not especially, though the more confident I am of the duplicate’s similarity to me the more indifferent I become.
Do I prefer it to dying and not having a duplicate? Absolutely!
Do I prefer it to having a duplicate and not-dying? Probably not, though I will take some getting used to.
Which of those preferences seem odd to you? What is odd about them?
The preferences aren’t symmetrical. Discovering that you’re a duplicate involves discovering that you’ve been deceived or that you’re delusional, whereas dying is dying. From the point of view of the duplicate, what you’re saying amounts to borderline solipsism; you don’t care if any of your beliefs, memories, etc, match up with reality. You think being deluded is acceptable as long as the delusion is sufficiently complete. From your point of view, you don’t care about your survival, as long as somebody is deluded into thinking they’re you.
There’s no delusion or deception involved in any of the examples I gave.
In each example the duplicate knows it’s the duplicate, the original knows it’s the original; at no time does the duplicate believe it’s the original. The original knows it’s going to die. The duplicate does not believe that its memories reflect events that occurred to its body; it knows perfectly well that those events occurred to a different body.
Everyone in each of those examples knows everything relevant.
No, this isn’t true. There are lots of scenarios in which I would greatly prefer my survival to someone being deluded into thinking that they’re me after my death. And, as I said above, the scenarios I describe don’t involve anyone being deluded about anything; the duplicate knows perfectly well that it’s the duplicate and not the original.
If the duplicate says “I did X on my nth birthday” it’s not true since it didn’t even exist. If I claim that I met Shakespeare you can say, “But you weren’t even born!” So what does the duplicate say when I point out that it didn’t exist at that time? “I did but in a different body” (or “I was a different body”)? That implies that something has been transferred. Or does it say, “A different body did, not me”? But then it has no relationship with that body at all. Or perhaps it says, “The Original did X on their nth birthday and the Original has given me permission to carry on its legacy, so if you have a question about those events, I am the authority on them now”? It gets very difficult to call this “memory.” I suppose you could say that the duplicate doesn’t have the original’s memories but rather has knowledge of what the original did, but then in what sense is it a duplicate?
Correct.
When talking to you, or someone who shares your attitude, my duplicate probably says something like “You’re right, of course. I’m in the habit of talking about my original’s experiences as though they’re mine, because I experience them as though they were, and both I and my original are perfectly happy talking that way and will probably keep doing so. But technically speaking you’re quite correct… I didn’t actually do X on my 9th birthday, nor did I have a 9th birthday to do anything on in the first place. Thanks for pointing that out.”
Which is closest to your last option, I suppose.
Incidentally, my duplicate likely does this in roughly the same tone of voice that an adoptive child might say analogous things when someone corrects their reference to “my parents” by claiming that no, their parents didn’t do any of that, their adoptive parents did. If you were to infer a certain hostility from that tone, you would not be incorrect.
It’s not difficult for me to call this a memory at all… it’s the original’s memory, which has been copied to and is being experienced by the duplicate. But if you’d rather come up with some special word for that to avoid confusion with a memory experienced by the same body that formed it in the first place, that’s OK with me too. (I choose not to refer to it as “knowledge of what the original did”, both because that’s unwieldy and because it ignores the experiential nature of memory,, which I value.)
Sufficient similarity to the original. Which is what we typically mean when we say that X is a duplicate of Y.
“I’m in the habit of talking about my original’s experiences as though they’re mine, because I experience them as though they were” appears to be a form of delusion to me. If somebody went around pretending to be Napoleon (answering to the name Napoleon, talking about having done the things Napoleon did, etc) and answered all questions as if they were Napoleon but, when challenged, reassured you that of course they’re not Napoleon, they just have the habit of talking as if they are Napoleon because they experience life as Napoleon would, would you consider them delusional? Or does anything go as long as they’re content?
To be honest, I’m not really sure what you mean by the experience of memory. Mental imagery?
It has nothing to do with being content. If someone believes they are Napoleon, I consider them deluded, whether they are content or not.
Conversely, if they don’t believe they are Napoleon, I don’t consider them deluded, whether they are content or not. In the example you give, I would probably suspect the person of lying to me.
More generally: before I call something a delusion, I require that someone actually believe it’s true.
At this moment, you and I both know that I wrote this comment… we both have knowledge of what I did.
In addition to that, I can remember writing it, and you can’t. I can have the experience of that memory; you can’t.
The experience of memory isn’t the same thing as the knowledge of what I did.
Though on further consideration, I suppose I could summarize our whole discussion as about whether I am content or not… the noun, that is, not the adjective. I mostly consider myself to be content, and would be perfectly content to choose distribution networks for that content based on their functional properties.
Lots of things survive. They just don’t happen to be part of the original body.
Yes, I think given your understanding of those words, that’s entirely correct. My life with that “description” deleted is not worth very much to me; the continued development of that “description” is worth a lot more.
Right back atcha.
Suppose a small chunk of your brain is replaced with its functional equivalent, is the resulting chimera less “you”? If so, how can one tell?
Not necessarily less you. Why even replace? What about augment?
Add an extra “blank” artificial brain. Keep refining the design until the biological brain reports feeling an expanded memory capacity, or enhanced clarity of newly formed memories, or enhanced cognition. Let the old brain assimilate this new space in whatever as-yet poorly understood pattern and whatever rate comes naturally to it.
With the patient’s consent, reversibly switch off various functional units in the biological region of the brain and see if the function is reconstituted elsewhere in the synthetic region. If it is, this is evidence that the technique is working. If not, the technique may need to be refined. At some point the majority of the patient’s brain activity is happening in the synthetic regions. Temporarily induce unconsciousness in the biological part; during and after the biological part’s unconsciousness, interview the patient about what subjective changes they felt, if any.
An agreement of external measurements and the patient’s subjective assessment that continuity was preserved would be strong evidence to me that such a technique is a reliable means to migrate a consciousness from one substrate to another.
Migration should only be speeded up as a standard practice to the extent that it is justified by ample data from many different volunteers (or patients whose condition requires it) undergoing incrementally faster migrations measured as above.
As far as cryonics goes, the above necessarily requires actual revival before migration. The above approach rules out plastination and similar destructive techniques.
I agree with all this, except maybe the last bit. Once the process of migration is well understood and if it is possible to calculate the structure of the synthetic part from the structure of the biological part, this knowledge can be used to skip the training steps and build a synthetic brain from a frozen/plastinated one, provided the latter still contains enough structure.
Anyway, my original question was to scientism, who rejected anything like that because
It’s not clear to me whether scientism believes that the mind is a process that cannot take place on any substrate other than a brain, or whether he’s shares my and (I think) Mitchell Porter’s more cautious point of view that our consciousness can in principle exist somewhere other than a brain, but we don’t yet know enough about neuroscience to be confident about what properties such a system must have.
I, for one, would be sceptical of there being no substrate possible at all except the brain, because it’s a strong unsupported assertion on the same order as the (perhaps straw-man) patternist assertion that binary computers are an adequate substrate (or the stronger-still assertion that any computational substrate is adequate).
If I have understood scientism’s comments, they believe neither of the possibilities you list in your first paragraph.
I think they believe that whether or not a mind can take place on a non-brain substrate, our consciousness(es) cannot exist somewhere other than a brain, because they are currently instantiated in brains, and cannot be transferred (whether to another brain, or anything else).
This does not preclude some other mind coming to exist on a non-brain substrate.
Here is a thought experiment that might not be a thought experiment in the foreseeable future:
Grow some neurons in vitro and implant them in a patient. Over time, will that patient’s brain recruit those neurons?
If so, the more far-out experiment I earlier proposed becomes a matter of scaling up this experiment. I’d rather be on a more resilient substrate than neurons, but I’ll take what I can get.
I’m betting that the answer to this will be “yes”, following a similar line of reasoning that Drexler used to defend the plausibility of nanotech: the existence of birds implied the feasibility of aircraft; the existence of ribosomes implies the feasibility of nanotech… neurogenesis occurring during development and over the last few decades found to be possible in adulthood implies the feasibility of replacing damaged brains or augmenting healthy ones.
Yes, I agree with all of this.
I’m unconvinced that cryostasis wll preserve the experience of continuity. Because of the thought experiment with the non-destructive copying of a terminal patient, I am convinced that plastination will fail to preserve it (I remain the unlucky copy, and in addition to that, dead).
My ideal scenario is one where I can undergo a gradual migration before I actually need to be preserved by either method.
link?
http://lesswrong.com/lw/iul/looking_for_opinions_of_people_like_nick_bostrom/9x47
Ah, ok:
So your issue is that a copy of you is not you? And you would treat star trek-like transporter beams as murder? But you are OK with a gradual replacement of your brain, just not with a complete one? How fast would the parts need to be replaced to preserve this “experience of continuity”? Do drugs which knock you unconscious break continuity enough to be counted as making you into not-you?
Basically, what I am unclear on is whether your issue is continuity of experience or cloning.
Nothing so melodramatic, but I wouldn’t use them. UNLESS they were in fact manipulating my wave function directly somehow causing my amplitude to increase in one place and decrease in another. Probably not what the screenplay writers had in mind, though.
Maybe even a complete one eventually. If the vast majority of my cognition has migrated to the synthetic regions, it may not seem as much of a loss when parts of the biological brain break down and have to be replaced. Hard to speak on behalf of my future self with only what I know now. This is speculation.
This is an empirical question that could be answered if/when it becomes possible perform for real the thought experiment I described (the second one, with the blank brain being attached to the existing brain).
Continuity. I’m not opposed to non-destructive copies of me, but I don’t see them as inherently beneficial to me either.
No.
The point of cryonics is that it could lead to revival.
Obviously. That’s not what Mitchell_Porter’s post was about, though.
You seem to think that creating a description of the structure of a brain is necessarily a destructive process. I don’t know of any reason to assume that. If a non-destructive scan exists and is carried out, then there’s no “death”, howsoever defined. Right?
But anyway, let’s grant your implicit assumption of a destructive scan, and suppose that this process has actually occurred to your brain, and “something that functions like [your] brain” has been created. Who is the resulting being? Who do they think they are? What do they do next? Do they do the sorts of things you would do? Love the people you love?
I grant that you do not consider this hypothetical being you—after all, you are hypothetically dead. But surely there is no one else better qualified to answer these questions, so it’s you that I ask.
I was referring cryonics scenarios where the brain is being scanned because you cannot be revived and a new entity is being created based on the scan, so I was assuming that your brain is no longer viable rather than that the scan is destructive.
The resulting being, if possible, would be a being that is confused about its identity. It would be a cruel joke played on those who know me and, possibly, on the being itself (depending on the type of being it is). I am not my likeness.
Consider that, if you had this technology, you could presumably create a being that thinks it is a fictional person. You could fool it into thinking all kinds of nonsensical things. Convincing it that it has the same identity as a dead person is just one among many strange tricks you could play on it.
Fair enough.
I’m positing that the being has been informed about how it was created; it knows that it is not the being it remembers, um, being. So it has the knowledge to say of itself, if it were so inclined, “I am a being purposefully constructed ab initio with all of the memories and cognitive capacities of scientism, RIP.”
Would it be so inclined? If so, what would it do next? (Let us posit that it’s a reconstructed embodied human being.) For example, would it call up your friends and introduce itself? Court your former spouse (if you have one), fully acknowledging that it is not the original you? Ask to adopt your children (if you have any)?
It would have false memories, etc, and having my false memories, it would presumably know that these are false memories and that it has no right to assume my identity, contact my friends and family, court my spouse, etc, simply because it (falsely) thinks itself to have some connection with me (to have had my past experiences). It might still contact them anyway, given that I imagine its emotional state would be fragile; it would surely be a very difficult situation to be in. A situation that would probably horrify everybody involved.
I suppose, to put myself in that situation, I would, willpower permitting, have the false memories removed (if possible), adopt a different name and perhaps change my appearance (or at least move far away). But I see the situation as unimaginably cruel. You’re creating a being—presumably a thinking, feeling being—and tricking it into thinking it did certain things in the past, etc, that it did not do. Even if it knows that it was created, that still seems like a terrible situation to be in, since it’s essentially a form of (inflicted) mental illness.
!!… I hope you mean explicit memory but not implicit memory—otherwise there wouldn’t be much of a being left afterwards...
For a certain usage of “tricking” this is true, but that usage is akin to the way optical illusions trick one’s visual system rather than denoting a falsehood deliberately embedded in one’s explicit knowledge.
I would point out that the source of all the hypothetical suffering in this situation would the being’s (and your) theory of identity rather than the fact of anyone’s identity (or lack thereof). If this isn’t obvious, just posit that the scenario is conceivable but hasn’t actually happened, and some bastard deceives you into thinking it has—or even just casts doubt on the issue in either case.
Of course that doesn’t mean the theory is false—but I do want to say that from my perspective it appears that the emotional distress would come from reifying a naïve notion of personal identity. Even the word “identity”, with its connotations of singleness, stops being a good one in the hypothetical.
Have you seen John Weldon’s animated short To Be? You might enjoy it. If you watch it, I have a question for you: would you exculpate the singer of the last song?
I take it that my death and the being’s ab initio creation are both facts. These aren’t theoretical claims. The claim that I am “really” a description of my brain (that I am information, pattern, etc) is as nonsensical as the claim that I am really my own portrait, and so couldn’t amount to a theory. In fact, the situation is analogous to someone taking a photo of my corpse and creating a being based on its likeness. The accuracy of the resulting being’s behaviour, its ability to fool others, and its own confused state doesn’t make any difference to the argument. It’s possible to dream up scenarios where identity breaks down, but surely not ones where we have a clear example of death.
I would also point out that there are people who are quite content with severe mental illness. You might have delusions of being Napoleon and be quite happy about it. Perhaps such a person would argue that “I feel like Napoleon and that’s good enough for me!”
In the animation, the woman commits suicide and the woman created by the teleportation device is quite right that she isn’t responsible for anything the other woman did, despite resembling her.
In the hypothetical, your brain has stopped functioning. Whether this is sufficient to affirm that you died is precisely the question at issue. Personally, it doesn’t matter to me if my brain’s current structure is the product of biological mechanisms operating continuously by physical law or is the product of, say, a 3D printer and a cryonically-created template—also operating by physical law. Both brains are causally related to my past self in enough detail to make the resulting brain me in every way that matters to me.
Curious that she used the transmission+reconstruction module while committing “suicide”, innit? She didn’t have to—it was a deliberate choice.
The brain constructed in your likeness is only normatively related to your brain. That’s the point I’m making. The step where you make a description of the brain is done according to a practice of representation. There is no causal relationship between the initial brain and the created brain. (Or, rather, any causal relationship is massively disperse through human society and history.) It’s a human being, or perhaps a computer programmed by human beings, in a cultural context with certain practices of representation, that creates the brain according to a set of rules.
This is obvious when you consider how the procedure might be developed. We would have to have a great many trial runs and would decide when we had got it right. That decision would be based on a set of normative criteria, a set of measurements. So it would only be “successful” according to a set of human norms. The procedure would be a cultural practice rather than a physical process. But there is just no such thing as something physical being “converted” or “transformed” into a description (or information or a pattern or representation) - because these are all normative concepts—so such a step cannot possibly conserve identity.
As I said, the only way the person in cryonic suspension can continue to live is through a standard process of revival—that is, one that doesn’t involve the step of being described and then having a likeness created—and if such a revival doesn’t occur, the person is dead. This is because the process of being described and then having a likeness created isn’t any sort of revival at all and couldn’t possibly be. It’s a logical impossibility.
My response to this is very simple, but it’s necessary to know beforehand that the brain’s operation is robust to many low-level variations, e.g., thermal noise that triggers occasional random action potentials at a low rate.
Suppose our standard is that we get it right when the reconstructed brain is more like the original brain just before cryonic preservation than a brain after a good night’s sleep is like that same brain before sleeping—within the subset of brain features that are not robust to variation. Further suppose that that standard is achieved through a process that involves a representation of the structure of the brain. Albeit that the representation is indeed a “cultural practice”, the brute fact of the extreme degree of similarity of the pre- and post-process brains would seem much more relevant to the question of preservation of any aspect of the brain worthy of being called “identity”.
ETA: Thinking about this a bit more, I see that the notion of “similarity” in the above argument is also vulnerable to the charge of being a mere cultural practice. So let me clarify that the kind of similarity I have in mind basically maps to reproducibility of the input-output relation of a low-level functional unit, up to, say, the magnitude of thermal noise. Reproducibility in this sense has empirical content; it is not merely culturally constructed.
I don’t see how using more detailed measurements makes it any less a cultural practice. There isn’t a limit you can pass where doing something according to a standard suddenly becomes a physical relationship. Regardless, consider that you could create as many copies to that standard as you wished, so you now have a one-to-many relationship of “identity” according to your scenario. Such a type-token relationship is typical of norm-based standards (such as mediums of representation) because they are norm-based standards (that is, because you can make as many according to the standard as you wish).
I’m not saying it’s not a cultural practice. I’m saying that the brute fact of the extreme degree of similarity (and resulting reproducibility of functionality) of the pre- and post-process brains seems like a much more relevant fact. I don’t know why I should care that the process is a cultural artifact if the pre- and post-process brains are so similar that for all possible inputs, they produce the same outputs. That I can get more brains out than I put in is a feature, not a bug, even though it makes the concept of a singular identity obsolete.
I don’t know what the word “clear” in that sentence actually means.
If you’re simply asserting that what has occurred in this example is your death, then no, it isn’t clear, any more than if I assert that I actually died 25 minutes ago, that’s clear evidence that Internet commenting after death is possible.
I’m not saying you’re necessarily wrong… I mean, sure, it’s possible that you’re correct, and in your hypothetical scenario you actually are dead, despite the continued existence of something that acts like you and believes itself to be you. It’s also possible that in my hypothetical scenario I’m correct and I really did die 25 minutes ago, despite the continued existence of something that acts like me and believes itself to be me.
I’m just saying it isn’t clear… in other words, that it’s also possible that one or both of us is confused/mistaken about what it means for us to die and/or remain alive.
In the example being discussed we have a body. I can’t think of a clearer example of death than one where you can point to the corpse or remains. You couldn’t assert that you died 25 minutes ago—since death is the termination of your existence and so logically precludes asserting anything (nothing could count as evidence for you doing anything after death, although your corpse might do things) - but if somebody else asserted that you died 25 minutes ago then they could presumably point to your remains, or explain what happened to them. If you continued to post on the Internet, that would be evidence that you hadn’t died. Although the explanation that someone just like you was continuing to post on the Internet would be consistent with your having died.
OK, I think I understand what you mean by “clear” now. Thanks.
Now, if I understand the “two particles of the same type are identical” argument in the context of uploading/copying, it shouldn’t be relevant because two huge multi-particle configurations are not going to be identical. You cannot measure the state of each particle in the original and you cannot precisely force each particle in the copy into that state. And no amount of similar is enough, the two of you have to be identical in the sense that two electrons are identical if we’re talking about being Feynman paths that your amplitude would be summed over. And that rules out digital simulations altogether.
But I didn’t really expect any patternists to defend the first way you could be right in my post. Whereas, the second way you might be right amounts to, by my definition, proving to me that I am already dead or that I die all the time. If that’s the case, all bets are off, everything I care about is due for a major reassessment.
I’d still want to know the truth of course. But the strong form of that argument (that I already experience on a recurring basis the same level of death as you would if you were destructively scanned) is not yet proven to be the truth. Only a plausible for which (or against which) I have not yet seen much evidence.
Can you taboo “level of death” for me? Also, what sorts of experiences would count as evidence for or against the proposition?
Discontinuity. Interruption of inner narrative. You know how the last thing you remember was puking over the toilet bowl and then you wake up on the bathroom floor and it’s noon? Well, that but minus everything that goes after the word “bowl”.
Or the technical angle—whatever routine occurrence it is that supposedly disrupts my brain state as much as a destructive scan and rounding to the precision limit of whatever substrate my copy would be running on.
Darn it. I asked two questions—sorry, my mistake—and I find I can’t unequivocally assign your response to one question or the other (or different parts of your response to both).
I guess this would be my attempt to answer your first question: articulating what I meant without the phrase “level of death”.
My answer to your second question it tougher. Somewhat compelling evidence that whatever I value has been preserved would be simultaneously experiencing life from the point of view of two different instances. This could be accomplished perhaps through frequent or continuous synchronization of the memories and thoughts of the two brains. Another convincing experience (though less so) would be gradual replacement of individual biological components that would have otherwise died, with time for the replacement parts to be assimilated into the existing system of original and earlier-replaced components.
If I abruptly woke up in a new body with all my old memories, I would be nearly certain that the old me has experienced death if they are not around, or if they are still around (without any link to each others’ thoughts), that I am the only one who has tangibly benefited from whatever the rejuvenating/stabilizing effects of the replication/uploading might be, and they have not. If I awoke from cryostasis in my old body (or head, as the case may be) even then I would only ever be 50% sure that the individual entering cryostasis is not experiencing waking up (unless there was independent evidence of weak activity in my brain during cryostasis).
The way for me to be convinced, not that continuity has been preserved but rather that my desire for continuity is impossible, does double duty with my answer to the first question:
[Unambiguous, de-mystifying neurological characterization of...]
Actually, let’s start by supposing a non-destructive scan.
The resulting being is someone who is identical to you, but diverges at the point where the scan was performed.
Let’s say your problem is that you have a fatal illness. You’ve been non-destructively scanned, and the scan was used to construct a brand new healthy you who does everything you would do, loves the people you love, etc. Well, that’s great for him, but you are still suffering from a fatal illness. One of the brainscan technicians helpfully suggests they could euthanize you, but if that’s a solution to your problem then why bother getting scanned and copied in the first place? Your could achieve the same subjective outcome by going straight to the euthanasia step.
Now, getting back to the destructive scan. The only thing that’s different is you skip the conversation with the technician and go straight to the euthanasia step. Again, an outcome you could have achieved more cheaply with a bottle of sleeping pills and a bottle of Jack Daniels.
After the destructive scan, a being exists that remembers being me up to the point of that scan, values all the things I value, loves the people I love and will be there for them. Regardless of anyone’s opinion about whether that being is me, that’s an outcome I desire, and I can’t actually achieve it with a bottle of sleeping pills and a bottle of Jack Daniels. Absolutely the same goes for the non-destructive scan scenario.
...maybe you don’t have kids?
Oh, I do, and a spouse.
I want to accomplish both goals: have them be reunited with me, and for myself to experience being reunited with them. Copying only accomplishes the first goal, and so is not enough. So long as there is any hope of actual revival, I do not wish to be destructively scanned nor undergo any preservation technique that is incompatible with actual revival. I don’t have a problem with provably non-destructive scans. Hell, put me on Gitorious for people to download, just delete the porn first.
My spouse will probably outlive me, and hopefully if my kids have to get suspended at all, it will be after they have lived to a ripe old age. So everyone will have had some time to adjust to my absence, and would not be too upset about having to wait a little longer. Otherwise, we could form a pact where we revive whenever the conditions for the last of our revivals are met. I should remember to run this idea by them when they wake up. Well, at least the ones of them who talk in full sentences.
Or maybe this is all wishful thinking—someone who thinks that what we believe is silly will just fire up the microtome and create some uploads that are “close enough” and tell them it was for their own good.
Sticking with the non-destructive scan + terminal illness scenario: before the scan is carried out, do you anticipate (i) experiencing being reunited with your loved ones; (ii) requesting euthanasia to avoid a painful terminal disease; (iii) both (but not both simultaneously for the same instance of “you”)?
Probably (iii) is the closest to the truth, but without euthenasia. I’d just eventually die, fighting it to the very end. Apparently this is an unusual opinion or something because people have such a hard time grasping this simple point: what I care about is the continuation of my inner narrative for as long as possible. Even if it’s filled with suffering. I don’t care. I want to live. Forever if possible, for an extra minute if that’s all there is.
A copy may accomplish my goal of helping my family, but it does absolutely nothing to accomplish my goal of survival. As a matter of self-preservation I have to set the record straight whenever someone claims otherwise.
Okay—got it. What I don’t grasp is why you would care about the inner narrative of any particular instance of “you” when the persistence of that instance makes negligible material difference to all the other things you care about.
To put it another way: if there’s only a single instance of “me”—the only extant copy of my particular values and abilities—then its persistence cannot be immaterial to all the other things I care about, and that’s why I currently care about my persistence more-or-less unconditionally. If there’s more than one copy of “me” kicking around, then “more-or-less unconditionally” no longer applies. My own internal narrative doesn’t enter into the question, and I’m confused as to why anyone else would give their own internal narrative any consideration.
ETA: So, I mean, the utility function is not up for grabs. If we both agree as to what would actually be happening in these hypothetical scenarios, but disagree about what we value, then clauses like “patternists could be wrong” refer to an orthogonal issue.
Maybe the same why as why do some people care more about their families than about other people’s families. Why some people care more about themselves than about strangers. What I can’t grasp is how one would manage to so thoroughly eradicate or suppress such a fundamental drive.
What, kin selection? Okay, let me think through the implications...
I don’t understand the response. Are you saying that the reason you don’t have an egocentric world view and I do is in some way because of kin selection?
You said,
And why do people generally care more about their families than about other people’s families? Kin selection.
Patternists/computationalists make the, in principle, falsifiable assertion that if I opt for plastination and am successfully reconstructed, that I will wake up in the future just as I will if I opt for cryonics and am successfully revived without copying/uploading/reconstruction. My assertion is that if I opt for plastination I will die and be replaced by someone hard or impossible to distinguish from me. Since it takes more resources to maintain cryosuspension, and probably a more advanced technology level to thaw and reanimate the patient, if the patternists are right, plastination is a better choice. If I’m right, it is not an acceptable choice at all.
The problem is that, so far, the only being in the universe who could falsify this assertion is the instantiation of me that is writing this post. Perhaps with increased understanding of neuroscience, there will be additional ways to test the patternist hypothesis.
I’m not sure what you mean here. Probability statements aren’t falsifiable; Popper would have had a rather easier time if they were. Relative frequencies are empirical, and statements about them are falsifiable...
At the degree of resolution we’re talking about, talking about you/not-you at all seems like a blegg/rube distinction. It’s just not a useful way of thinking about what’s being contemplated, which in essence is that certain information-processing systems are running, being serialized, stored, loaded, and run again.
Oops, you’re right. I have now revised it.
Suppose your brain has ceased functioning, been recoverably preserved and scanned, and then revived and copied. The two resulting brains are indistinguishable in the sense that for all possible inputs, they give identical outputs. (Posit that this is a known fact about the processes that generated them in their current states.) What exactly is it that makes the revived brain you and the copied brain not-you?
And yet, what is to be done if your utility function is dissolved by the truth? How do we know that there even exist utility functions that retain their currency down to the level of timeless wave functions?
I haven’t thought really deeply about that, but it seems to me that if Egan’s Law doesn’t offer you some measure of protection and also a way to cope with failures of your map, you’re probably doing it wrong.
A witty quote from an great book by a brilliant author is awesome, but does not have the status of any sort of law.
What do we mean by “normality”? What you observe around you every day? If you are wrong about the unobserved causal mechanisms underlying your observations, you will make wrong decisions. If you walk on hot coals because you believe God will not let you burn, the normality that quantum mechanics adds up to diverges enough from your normality that there will be tangible consequences. Are goals part of normality? If not, they certainly depend on assumptions you make about your model of normality. Either way, when you discover that God can’t/won’t make you fireproof, some subset of your goals will (and should) come tumbling down. This too has tangible consequences.
Some subset of the remaining goals relies on more subtle errors in your model of normality and they too will at some point crumble.
What evidence do we have that any goals at all are stable at every level? Why should the goals of a massive blob of atoms have such a universality?
I can see the point of “it all adds up to normality” if you’re encouraging someone to not be reluctant to learn new facts. But how does it help answer the question of “what goal do we pursue if we find proof that all our goals are bullshit”?
My vague notion is that if your goals don’t have ramifications in the realm of the normal, you’re doing it wrong. If they do, and some aspect of your map upon which goals depend gets altered in a way that invalidates some of your goals, you can still look at the normal-realm ramifications and try to figure out if they are still things you want, and if so, what your goals are now in the new part of your map.
Keep in mind that your “map” here is not one fixed notion about the way the world works. It’s a probability distribution over all the ways the world could work that are consistent with your knowledge and experience. In particular, if you’re not sure whether “patternists” (whatever those are) are correct or not, this is a fact about your map that you can start coping with right now.
It might be that the Dark Lords of the Matrix are just messing with you, but really, the unknown unknowns would have to be quite extreme to totally upend your goal system.