If all copies count as you, then that includes Boltzmann brains who die in the vacuum a second after their formation and copies of you who awaken inside a personally dedicated hell. And this is supposed to provide hope?
There is clearly a sense in which you do not experience what your copies experience. The instance of you who dies in a car crash on the way to your wedding never experiences the wedding itself; that is experienced by the second instance, created from a backup a few weeks later.
Any extension of identity beyond the “current instance” level is therefore an act of imagination or chosen affiliation. Identifying with your copies and almost-copies scattered throughout the multiverse, identifying with your descendants, and identifying with all beings who ever live, all have this in common—“you”, defined in the broad sense supplied by your expansive concept of identity, will experience things that “you”, defined in the narrow but practical sense of your local instance, will never experience.
Since it is a contradiction to say that you will experience things that you will never experience, it is desirable to perceive very clearly that these expansive identifications are being made by one local instance that is choosing to regard a multiplicity of other distinct beings as other parts of its extended self. Of course, once you perceive this distinction, between local self and global self, and especially once you notice that the same local self can have arbitrarily expansive or delimited beliefs about who gets to be a part of its global self… you might begin to doubt the meaningfulnss of any notion of global self other than “the whole of reality”, or indeed you might doubt the meaningfulness of any notion of “global self” at all. Perhaps in reality you are just your local self and that’s it; all other identifications are fantasy.
When that attitude is taken to its limit, it usually leads to disconnection between one moment and the next. Each moment’s experience is only had by that momentary self. You could make a slogan out of it: “instances are instantaneous”, meaning that if you apply this philosophy consistently, you have to deny that the “local self” extends in time.
But this part I don’t believe, because I do believe that experiences are extended in time. There is such a thing as change, the flow of one moment into the next, and not just a static difference between static moments each containing its own encapsulated illusion of flow-connectedness to other moments. The reduction of time to simply another spatial coordinate, and the consequent relegation of the experience of time passing to the category of illusion, results from the cultural hypertrophy (that’s the opposite of atrophy) of “logical perception” in scientific culture, at the expense of more “phenomenological” capacities, like a sensitivity to the actual form of consciousness. If people took appearances more seriously, their response to the difficulties of reconciling them with scientific theory would be to look for a better theory, not to call the appearances illusory or nonexistent. It’s not at all easy even to get the ontology of appearance right, let alone to conceptually reconstruct the ontology by means of which we understand our mathematical theories of nature, so as to include the ontology implied by appearance.
In fact, an extra layer of difficulty has been added by the attempted reduction of epistemology to computation—it means that the epistemological claims of phenomenology, e.g. that we can know that time really passes or that change is real, struggle to get a hearing. Computational epistemology in its existing forms presupposes an inadequate ontology, and therefore offers a new, methodological barrier to any truth from outside that ontology. One needs to remember that computation is about state transitions in state machines, and says nothing about the “intrinsic nature” of those states or how that intrinsic nature may be related to the causality of the state transitions. So any ontology featuring causal interactions between things with states contains computation, in the same way that any ontology containing multiple things contains arithmetic; but you can’t bootstrap your way from computation to ontology, just as you can’t bootstrap your way from arithmetic to physics.
In my polemic I have strayed far from the original topic of Yvain’s post, but any discussion of the ontology of persons eventually has to tackle these “hard problems”.
It doesn’t seem too much more distressing to believe that there are copies of me being tortured right now, than to believe that there are currently people in North Korea being tortured right now, or other similarly unpleasant facts everyone agrees to be true.
There’s a distinction between intuitive identity—my ability to get really upset about the idea that me-ten-minutes-from-now will be tortured—and philosophical identity—an ability to worry slightly about the idea that a copy of me in another universe is getting tortured. This difference isn’t just instrumentally based on the fact that it’s easier for me to save me-ten-minutes-from-now than me-in-another-universe; even if I were offered some opportunity to help me-in-another-universe, I would feel obligated to do so only on grounds of charity, not on grounds of selfishness. I’d ground that as some mental program that intuitively makes me care about me-ten-minutes-from-now which is much stronger than whatever rational kinship I can muster with me-in-another-universe. This mental program seems pretty good at dealing with minor breaks in continuity like sleep or coma.
The problem is, once death comes into the picture, the mental program can’t carry on business as usual—there won’t be any “me-ten-minutes-from-now”. And one reaction is to automatically switch allegiance to the closest copy of me—for example, cryonically-resurrected-me-a-century-from-now. I don’t think this allegiance-switching has any fundamental ontological basis, but I’m not prepared to say it’s stupid either. My point here is only that once you’re okay with switching allegiances, you might as well do it to the nearest other pre-existing copy of you, rather than go through all the trouble of creating a new one.
I agree that we can’t ground identity in individual moments. For one thing, the only reasonable candidate for “moment” is the Planck time, and there’s no experience that can happen on that short an interval. For another, static experiences don’t seem to be conscious: if I were frozen in time, I couldn’t think “Darnit, I’m frozen in time now!” because that thought involves a state change. I think this is what you’re saying your third to last paragraph but I’m not sure.
I’m leaning towards saying my identification with self-at-the-present-moment isn’t any more interesting or fundamental than my artificially created identification with me-ten-minutes-from-now, and that a feeling of being in the present is just a basis for other computational processes. As far as I can understand, this doesn’t seem to be your solution at all.
Do any of the various theories marketed as “timeless” here claim that the belief in a present moment is purely indexical—that is, a function of the randomly chosen observer-moment currently experienced as “me” being Yvain(2012) as opposed to Yvain(2013), in the same sense that seeing a quantum coin come up heads instead of tails is indexical? It seems like an elegant idea and would be relevant to this discussion.
The problem is, once death comes into the picture, the mental program can’t carry on business as usual—there won’t be any “me-ten-minutes-from-now”. And one reaction is to automatically switch allegiance to the closest copy of me—for example, cryonically-resurrected-me-a-century-from-now.
Once you get resurrected, wont the mental program continue carrying business as usual and so wont the “me-ten-minutes-from-now” keep being there?
If all copies count as you, then that includes Boltzmann brains who die in the vacuum a second after their formation and copies of you who awaken inside a personally dedicated hell. And this is supposed to provide hope?
There is clearly a sense in which you do not experience what your copies experience. The instance of you who dies in a car crash on the way to your wedding never experiences the wedding itself; that is experienced by the second instance, created from a backup a few weeks later.
Any extension of identity beyond the “current instance” level is therefore an act of imagination or chosen affiliation. Identifying with your copies and almost-copies scattered throughout the multiverse, identifying with your descendants, and identifying with all beings who ever live, all have this in common—“you”, defined in the broad sense supplied by your expansive concept of identity, will experience things that “you”, defined in the narrow but practical sense of your local instance, will never experience.
Since it is a contradiction to say that you will experience things that you will never experience, it is desirable to perceive very clearly that these expansive identifications are being made by one local instance that is choosing to regard a multiplicity of other distinct beings as other parts of its extended self. Of course, once you perceive this distinction, between local self and global self, and especially once you notice that the same local self can have arbitrarily expansive or delimited beliefs about who gets to be a part of its global self… you might begin to doubt the meaningfulnss of any notion of global self other than “the whole of reality”, or indeed you might doubt the meaningfulness of any notion of “global self” at all. Perhaps in reality you are just your local self and that’s it; all other identifications are fantasy.
When that attitude is taken to its limit, it usually leads to disconnection between one moment and the next. Each moment’s experience is only had by that momentary self. You could make a slogan out of it: “instances are instantaneous”, meaning that if you apply this philosophy consistently, you have to deny that the “local self” extends in time.
But this part I don’t believe, because I do believe that experiences are extended in time. There is such a thing as change, the flow of one moment into the next, and not just a static difference between static moments each containing its own encapsulated illusion of flow-connectedness to other moments. The reduction of time to simply another spatial coordinate, and the consequent relegation of the experience of time passing to the category of illusion, results from the cultural hypertrophy (that’s the opposite of atrophy) of “logical perception” in scientific culture, at the expense of more “phenomenological” capacities, like a sensitivity to the actual form of consciousness. If people took appearances more seriously, their response to the difficulties of reconciling them with scientific theory would be to look for a better theory, not to call the appearances illusory or nonexistent. It’s not at all easy even to get the ontology of appearance right, let alone to conceptually reconstruct the ontology by means of which we understand our mathematical theories of nature, so as to include the ontology implied by appearance.
In fact, an extra layer of difficulty has been added by the attempted reduction of epistemology to computation—it means that the epistemological claims of phenomenology, e.g. that we can know that time really passes or that change is real, struggle to get a hearing. Computational epistemology in its existing forms presupposes an inadequate ontology, and therefore offers a new, methodological barrier to any truth from outside that ontology. One needs to remember that computation is about state transitions in state machines, and says nothing about the “intrinsic nature” of those states or how that intrinsic nature may be related to the causality of the state transitions. So any ontology featuring causal interactions between things with states contains computation, in the same way that any ontology containing multiple things contains arithmetic; but you can’t bootstrap your way from computation to ontology, just as you can’t bootstrap your way from arithmetic to physics.
In my polemic I have strayed far from the original topic of Yvain’s post, but any discussion of the ontology of persons eventually has to tackle these “hard problems”.
It doesn’t seem too much more distressing to believe that there are copies of me being tortured right now, than to believe that there are currently people in North Korea being tortured right now, or other similarly unpleasant facts everyone agrees to be true.
There’s a distinction between intuitive identity—my ability to get really upset about the idea that me-ten-minutes-from-now will be tortured—and philosophical identity—an ability to worry slightly about the idea that a copy of me in another universe is getting tortured. This difference isn’t just instrumentally based on the fact that it’s easier for me to save me-ten-minutes-from-now than me-in-another-universe; even if I were offered some opportunity to help me-in-another-universe, I would feel obligated to do so only on grounds of charity, not on grounds of selfishness. I’d ground that as some mental program that intuitively makes me care about me-ten-minutes-from-now which is much stronger than whatever rational kinship I can muster with me-in-another-universe. This mental program seems pretty good at dealing with minor breaks in continuity like sleep or coma.
The problem is, once death comes into the picture, the mental program can’t carry on business as usual—there won’t be any “me-ten-minutes-from-now”. And one reaction is to automatically switch allegiance to the closest copy of me—for example, cryonically-resurrected-me-a-century-from-now. I don’t think this allegiance-switching has any fundamental ontological basis, but I’m not prepared to say it’s stupid either. My point here is only that once you’re okay with switching allegiances, you might as well do it to the nearest other pre-existing copy of you, rather than go through all the trouble of creating a new one.
I agree that we can’t ground identity in individual moments. For one thing, the only reasonable candidate for “moment” is the Planck time, and there’s no experience that can happen on that short an interval. For another, static experiences don’t seem to be conscious: if I were frozen in time, I couldn’t think “Darnit, I’m frozen in time now!” because that thought involves a state change. I think this is what you’re saying your third to last paragraph but I’m not sure.
I’m leaning towards saying my identification with self-at-the-present-moment isn’t any more interesting or fundamental than my artificially created identification with me-ten-minutes-from-now, and that a feeling of being in the present is just a basis for other computational processes. As far as I can understand, this doesn’t seem to be your solution at all.
Do any of the various theories marketed as “timeless” here claim that the belief in a present moment is purely indexical—that is, a function of the randomly chosen observer-moment currently experienced as “me” being Yvain(2012) as opposed to Yvain(2013), in the same sense that seeing a quantum coin come up heads instead of tails is indexical? It seems like an elegant idea and would be relevant to this discussion.
Once you get resurrected, wont the mental program continue carrying business as usual and so wont the “me-ten-minutes-from-now” keep being there?
I don’t understand why this is downvoted
“that is experienced by the second instance, created from a backup a few weeks later.” What scenario is this referring to?