That being said, Seth does present the reader with the good old cloning thought experiment. Seth asks the reader to imagine a machine that is capable of creating a perfect clone of someone and then asks if the clone is the same person or someone else. He completely ignores the No-cloning theorem in quantum mechanics. I don’t understand the point of these “thought experiments” when physics has ruled them out. Seth criticises Chalmers’ philosophical zombies but then makes the same mistake.
I think you’re nitpicking here about no-cloning. Here are his exact words:
Imagine that a future version of me, perhaps not so far away, offers you the deal of a lifetime. I can replace your brain with a machine that is its equal in every way, so that from the outside, nobody could tell the difference. This new machine has many advantages – it is immune to decay, and perhaps it will allow you to live forever.
But there’s a catch. Since even future-me is not sure how real brains give rise to consciousness, I can’t guarantee that you will have any conscious experiences at all, should you take up this offer. Maybe you will, if consciousness depends only on functional capacity, on the power and complexity of the brain’s circuitry, but maybe you won’t, if consciousness depends on a specific biological material – neurons, for example. Of course, since your machine-brain leads to identical behaviour in every way, when I ask new-yo whether you are conscious, new-you will say yes. But what if, despite this answer, life – for you – is no longer in the first person?
Maybe he shouldn’t have said “equal in every way” because that kinda implies “down to the last quantum fluctuation of the last quark”. But in context, I think it’s pretty clear that he means that the operations only need to be similar enough to get out indistinguishable-from-the-outside behavior. Most people (including me … in fact including almost everyone but Roger Penrose) think that there’s no important information stored in the exact quantum state of a biological system at a particular moment. After all, everything is getting randomly knocked around by water molecules every nanosecond, which changes the quantum state in random ways, but the system still functions fine. So if you (in principle) measure the state of the brain at or near the quantum limit (but not beyond the quantum limit), and then run that simulation forward using the most accurate microscopic physics simulation currently available, I’m confident that this would be good enough to get indistinguishable-from-the-outside simulated behavior. (In fact, I think it would be massive overkill.)
On some further thought, although the quote you shared is relevant, it is not exactly the part of the book that I was referring to. I was referring to the teleportation thought experiment in chapter 8 “Expect Yourself”:
One day, there’s a hitch. The vaporisation module in London malfunctions and Eva – the Eva who is in London, anyway – feels like nothing’s happened and that she’s still in the transportation facility. A minor inconvenience. They’ll have to reboot the machine and try again, or maybe leave it until the following day. But then a technician shuffles into the room, carrying a gun. He mumbles something along the lines of ‘Don’t worry, you’ve been safely teletransported to Mars, just like normal, it’s just that the regulations say that we still need to … and, look here, you signed this consent form …’ He slowly raises his weapon and Eva has a feeling she’s never had before, that maybe this teletransportation malarkey isn’t quite so straightforward after all.
The point of this thought experiment, which is called the ‘teletransportation paradox’, is to unearth some of the biases most of us have when we think about what it means to be a self.
... Is the Eva on Mars (let’s call her Eva2) the same person as Eva1 (the Eva still in London)? It’s tempting to say, yes, she is: Eva2 would feel in every way as Eva1 would have felt had she actually been transported instantaneously from London to Mars. What seems to matter for this kind of personal identity is psychological continuity, not physical continuity.* But then if Eva1 has not been vaporised, which is the real Eva? I think the correct – but admittedly strange – answer is that both are the real Eva.
My disagreement relating to the no-cloning theorem aside, I have another disagreement about Seth’s conclusion here. Claiming that the “correct” answer is that they are both the same person really stretches the idea of selfhood. Seth doesn’t justify convincingly why he thinks this is the “correct” answer.
If the teleportation paradox is physically possible (if this imaginary machine must destroy the body to clone it, then how could it malfunction and still perform the cloning?), then I find DerekParfit’sanswer (YouTube version) to the teleportation paradox more persuasive.
Parfit argues that any criteria we attempt to use to determine sameness of person will be lacking, because there is no further fact. What matters, to Parfit, is simply “Relation R”, psychological connectedness, including memory, personality, and so on.
The “selfhood” relation doesn’t necessarily have to be symmetric or transitive, but the term is used as if it is, and I think this causes a lot of problems in discussion.
Eva1 and Eva2 likely both consider Eva0 (who walked into the machine) to be their past self, but that doesn’t mean that they must automatically consider themselves to be the same person as each other. It also doesn’t mean that Eva0 would agree with one or both of them.
I also think there is not any objective, external way to determine this relation: it’s purely psychological.
However, if I think further into a future where people could copy themselves, and later psychologically integrate both sets of memories, behaviour, and so on, then Eva1 and Eva2 in such a world may well consider themselves to be the same person as each other, and also some future Eva3,4, and so on. The thought of this few minutes branch of herself not contributing to her future self’s memories might not be so horrible, but I don’t think she’d merely take the word of a technician that Eva2 actually exists to carry on her survival.
Excellent points. I hadn’t given much thought to the psychological vs external sameness of selfhood.
One is naturally lead to wonder about how such dilemma would be dealt with in legal proceedings. Your assertion about the lack of an external objective criteria for the sameness of selfhood implies that if Eva1 committed a crime then we cannot reasonably convict Eva2 for it.
As Seth justly states, immediately after the cloning, all the Eva’s become different persons because they acquire different experiences. They do share a common history but they will soon start telling different stories about this history just as different people do.
Yes, legal identity is an even bigger can of worms. Even in some cases in the real world, you can already lose your continuity of “legal identity” in some corner cases. Being able to duplicate people would just make it even messier.
Do duplicates “inherit” into some sort of joint ownership of property? Is the property divided like inheritance? Are they new people entirely with no claims on property at all? What about citizenship? If Eva0 committed a crime, should we hold both Eva1 and Eva2 responsible for it? If after duplication Eva2 committed a crime that strongly benefits Eva1, but killed herself before conviction, can the prosecution go after Eva1? Do they need to prove beyond reasonable doubt that the intent was in the mind of Eva0 before duplication?
Being able to “merge” mind states would make it very much messier still.
Do they need to prove beyond reasonable doubt that the intent was in the mind of Eva0 before duplication?
That’s gnarly.
Another aspect that I’m led to contemplate is the ease of collusion with your clone. It’s reasonable to believe that Eva1 would collude with Eva2 more easily than with an entirely different person.
Very insightful comment, Steven. Putting it that way, I agree with you that the quantum fluctuations (most likely) don’t matter for our experiences.
I was indeed nitpicking, but the broader point I’m interested in is about the futility of thought experiments that ignore the constraints imposed by physics rather than about whether quantum fluctuations play a role in how consciousness works.
This quote from Frank Wilczek claims that we are yet to attribute any high-level phenomena to quantum fluctuations:
Consistency requires the metric field to be a quantum field, like all the others. That is, the metric field fluctuates spontaneously. We do not have a satisfactory theory of these fluctuations. We know that the effects of quantum fluctuations in the metric field are usually—in our experience so far, always—small in practice, simply because we get very successful theories by ignoring them! From delicate biochemistry to exotic goings-on at accelerators to the evolution of stars and the early moments of the big bang, we’ve been able to make precise predictions, and have seen them accurately verified, while ignoring possible quantum fluctuations in the metric field. Moreover, the modern GPS system maps out space and time directly. It doesn’t allow for quantum gravity, yet it works very well. Experimenters have worked very hard to discover any effect that could be ascribed to quantum fluctuations in the metric field, or, in other words, to quantum gravity. Nobel Prizes and everlasting glory would attend such a discovery. So far, it hasn’t happened.
I think you’re nitpicking here about no-cloning. Here are his exact words:
Maybe he shouldn’t have said “equal in every way” because that kinda implies “down to the last quantum fluctuation of the last quark”. But in context, I think it’s pretty clear that he means that the operations only need to be similar enough to get out indistinguishable-from-the-outside behavior. Most people (including me … in fact including almost everyone but Roger Penrose) think that there’s no important information stored in the exact quantum state of a biological system at a particular moment. After all, everything is getting randomly knocked around by water molecules every nanosecond, which changes the quantum state in random ways, but the system still functions fine. So if you (in principle) measure the state of the brain at or near the quantum limit (but not beyond the quantum limit), and then run that simulation forward using the most accurate microscopic physics simulation currently available, I’m confident that this would be good enough to get indistinguishable-from-the-outside simulated behavior. (In fact, I think it would be massive overkill.)
On some further thought, although the quote you shared is relevant, it is not exactly the part of the book that I was referring to. I was referring to the teleportation thought experiment in chapter 8 “Expect Yourself”:
My disagreement relating to the no-cloning theorem aside, I have another disagreement about Seth’s conclusion here. Claiming that the “correct” answer is that they are both the same person really stretches the idea of selfhood. Seth doesn’t justify convincingly why he thinks this is the “correct” answer.
If the teleportation paradox is physically possible (if this imaginary machine must destroy the body to clone it, then how could it malfunction and still perform the cloning?), then I find Derek Parfit’s answer (YouTube version) to the teleportation paradox more persuasive.
The “selfhood” relation doesn’t necessarily have to be symmetric or transitive, but the term is used as if it is, and I think this causes a lot of problems in discussion.
Eva1 and Eva2 likely both consider Eva0 (who walked into the machine) to be their past self, but that doesn’t mean that they must automatically consider themselves to be the same person as each other. It also doesn’t mean that Eva0 would agree with one or both of them.
I also think there is not any objective, external way to determine this relation: it’s purely psychological.
However, if I think further into a future where people could copy themselves, and later psychologically integrate both sets of memories, behaviour, and so on, then Eva1 and Eva2 in such a world may well consider themselves to be the same person as each other, and also some future Eva3,4, and so on. The thought of this few minutes branch of herself not contributing to her future self’s memories might not be so horrible, but I don’t think she’d merely take the word of a technician that Eva2 actually exists to carry on her survival.
Excellent points. I hadn’t given much thought to the psychological vs external sameness of selfhood.
One is naturally lead to wonder about how such dilemma would be dealt with in legal proceedings. Your assertion about the lack of an external objective criteria for the sameness of selfhood implies that if Eva1 committed a crime then we cannot reasonably convict Eva2 for it.
As Seth justly states, immediately after the cloning, all the Eva’s become different persons because they acquire different experiences. They do share a common history but they will soon start telling different stories about this history just as different people do.
Yes, legal identity is an even bigger can of worms. Even in some cases in the real world, you can already lose your continuity of “legal identity” in some corner cases. Being able to duplicate people would just make it even messier.
Do duplicates “inherit” into some sort of joint ownership of property? Is the property divided like inheritance? Are they new people entirely with no claims on property at all? What about citizenship? If Eva0 committed a crime, should we hold both Eva1 and Eva2 responsible for it? If after duplication Eva2 committed a crime that strongly benefits Eva1, but killed herself before conviction, can the prosecution go after Eva1? Do they need to prove beyond reasonable doubt that the intent was in the mind of Eva0 before duplication?
Being able to “merge” mind states would make it very much messier still.
That’s gnarly.
Another aspect that I’m led to contemplate is the ease of collusion with your clone. It’s reasonable to believe that Eva1 would collude with Eva2 more easily than with an entirely different person.
Very insightful comment, Steven. Putting it that way, I agree with you that the quantum fluctuations (most likely) don’t matter for our experiences.
I was indeed nitpicking, but the broader point I’m interested in is about the futility of thought experiments that ignore the constraints imposed by physics rather than about whether quantum fluctuations play a role in how consciousness works.
This quote from Frank Wilczek claims that we are yet to attribute any high-level phenomena to quantum fluctuations: