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!
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.