All true, but it just strengthens the case for what you call “stipulating a new meaning for the words ‘survival’, ‘death’, etc”. Or perhaps, making up new words to replace those. Contemplating cases like these makes me realize that I have stopped caring about ‘death’ in its old exact meaning. In some scenarios “this will kill you” becomes a mere technicality.
Mere stipulation secures very little though. Consider the following scenario: I start wearing a medallion around my neck and stipulate that, so long as these medallion survives intact, I am to be considered alive, regardless of what befalls me. This is essentially equivalent to what you’d be doing in stipulating survival in the uploading scenario. You’d secure ‘survival’, perhaps, but the would-be uploader has a lot more work to do. You need also to stipulate that when the upload says “On my 6th birthday...” he’s referring to your 6th birthday, etc. I think this project will prove much more difficult. In general, these sort of uploading scenarios are relying on the notion of something being “transferred” from the person to the upload, and it’s this that secures identity and hence reference. But if you’re willing to concede that nothing is transferred—that identity isn’t transferrable—then you’ve got a lot of work to do in order to make the uploading scenario consistent. You’ve got to introduce revised versions of concepts of identity, memory, self-reference, etc. Doing so consistently is likely a formidable task.
I should have said this about the artificial brain transplant scenario too. While I think the scenario makes sense, it doesn’t secure all the traditional science fiction consequences. So having an artificial brain doesn’t automatically imply you can be “resleeved” if your body is destroyed, etc. Such scenarios tend to involve transferrable identity, which I’m denying. You can’t migrate to a server and live a purely software existence; you’re not now “in” the software. You can see the problems of reference in this scenario. For example, say you had a robot on Mars with an artificial brain with the same specifications as your own. You want to visit Mars, so you figure you’ll just transfer the software running on your artificial brain to the robot and wake up on Mars. But again, this assumes identity is transferrable in some sense, which it is not. But you might think that this doesn’t matter. You don’t care if it’s you on Mars, you’ll just send your software and bring it back, and then you’ll have the memories of being on Mars. This is where problems of reference come in, because “When I was on Mars...” would be false. You’d have at best a set of false memories. This might not seem like a problem, you’ll just compartmentalise the memories, etc. But say the robot fell in love on Mars. Can you truly compartmentalise that? Memories aren’t images you have stored away that you can examine dispassionately, they’re bound up with who you are, what you do, etc. You would surely gain deeply confused feelings about another person, engage in irrational behaviour, etc. This would be causing yourself a kind of harm; introducing a kind of mental illness.
Now, say you simply begin stipulating “by ‘I’ I mean...”, etc, until you’ve consistently rejiggered the whole conceptual scheme to get the kind of outcome the uploader wants. Could you really do this without serious consequences for basic notions of welfare, value, etc? I find this hard to believe. The fact that the Mars scenario abuts issues of value and welfare suggests that introducing new meanings here would also involve stipulating new meanings for these concepts. This then leads to a potential contradiction: it might not be rationally possible to engage in this kind of revisionary task. That is, from your current position, performing such a radical revision would probably count as harmful, damaging to welfare, identity destroying, etc. What does this say about the status of the revisionary project? Perhaps the revisionist would say, “From my revisionary perspective, nothing I have done is harmful.” But for everyone else, he is quite mad. Although I don’t have a knockdown argument against it, I wonder if this sort of revisionary project is possible at all, given the strangeness of having two such unconnected bubbles of rationality.
Now, say you simply begin stipulating “by ‘I’ I mean...”, etc, until you’ve consistently rejiggered the whole conceptual scheme to get the kind of outcome the uploader wants. Could you really do this without serious consequences for basic notions of welfare, value, etc?
No, and that is the point. There are serious drawbacks of the usual notions of welfare, at least in the high-tech future we are discussing, and they need serious correcting. Although, as I mentioned earlier, coining new words for the new concepts would probably facilitate communication better, especially when revisionaries and conservatives converse. So maybe “Yi” could be the pronoun for “miy” branching future, in which Yi go to Mars as well as staying home, to be merged later. There is no contradiction, either: my welfare is what I thought I cared about in a certain constellation of cares, but now Yi realize that was a mistake. Misconceptions of what we truly desire or like are, of course, par for the course for human beings; and so are corrections of those conceptions.
All true, but it just strengthens the case for what you call “stipulating a new meaning for the words ‘survival’, ‘death’, etc”. Or perhaps, making up new words to replace those. Contemplating cases like these makes me realize that I have stopped caring about ‘death’ in its old exact meaning. In some scenarios “this will kill you” becomes a mere technicality.
Mere stipulation secures very little though. Consider the following scenario: I start wearing a medallion around my neck and stipulate that, so long as these medallion survives intact, I am to be considered alive, regardless of what befalls me. This is essentially equivalent to what you’d be doing in stipulating survival in the uploading scenario. You’d secure ‘survival’, perhaps, but the would-be uploader has a lot more work to do. You need also to stipulate that when the upload says “On my 6th birthday...” he’s referring to your 6th birthday, etc. I think this project will prove much more difficult. In general, these sort of uploading scenarios are relying on the notion of something being “transferred” from the person to the upload, and it’s this that secures identity and hence reference. But if you’re willing to concede that nothing is transferred—that identity isn’t transferrable—then you’ve got a lot of work to do in order to make the uploading scenario consistent. You’ve got to introduce revised versions of concepts of identity, memory, self-reference, etc. Doing so consistently is likely a formidable task.
I should have said this about the artificial brain transplant scenario too. While I think the scenario makes sense, it doesn’t secure all the traditional science fiction consequences. So having an artificial brain doesn’t automatically imply you can be “resleeved” if your body is destroyed, etc. Such scenarios tend to involve transferrable identity, which I’m denying. You can’t migrate to a server and live a purely software existence; you’re not now “in” the software. You can see the problems of reference in this scenario. For example, say you had a robot on Mars with an artificial brain with the same specifications as your own. You want to visit Mars, so you figure you’ll just transfer the software running on your artificial brain to the robot and wake up on Mars. But again, this assumes identity is transferrable in some sense, which it is not. But you might think that this doesn’t matter. You don’t care if it’s you on Mars, you’ll just send your software and bring it back, and then you’ll have the memories of being on Mars. This is where problems of reference come in, because “When I was on Mars...” would be false. You’d have at best a set of false memories. This might not seem like a problem, you’ll just compartmentalise the memories, etc. But say the robot fell in love on Mars. Can you truly compartmentalise that? Memories aren’t images you have stored away that you can examine dispassionately, they’re bound up with who you are, what you do, etc. You would surely gain deeply confused feelings about another person, engage in irrational behaviour, etc. This would be causing yourself a kind of harm; introducing a kind of mental illness.
Now, say you simply begin stipulating “by ‘I’ I mean...”, etc, until you’ve consistently rejiggered the whole conceptual scheme to get the kind of outcome the uploader wants. Could you really do this without serious consequences for basic notions of welfare, value, etc? I find this hard to believe. The fact that the Mars scenario abuts issues of value and welfare suggests that introducing new meanings here would also involve stipulating new meanings for these concepts. This then leads to a potential contradiction: it might not be rationally possible to engage in this kind of revisionary task. That is, from your current position, performing such a radical revision would probably count as harmful, damaging to welfare, identity destroying, etc. What does this say about the status of the revisionary project? Perhaps the revisionist would say, “From my revisionary perspective, nothing I have done is harmful.” But for everyone else, he is quite mad. Although I don’t have a knockdown argument against it, I wonder if this sort of revisionary project is possible at all, given the strangeness of having two such unconnected bubbles of rationality.
No, and that is the point. There are serious drawbacks of the usual notions of welfare, at least in the high-tech future we are discussing, and they need serious correcting. Although, as I mentioned earlier, coining new words for the new concepts would probably facilitate communication better, especially when revisionaries and conservatives converse. So maybe “Yi” could be the pronoun for “miy” branching future, in which Yi go to Mars as well as staying home, to be merged later. There is no contradiction, either: my welfare is what I thought I cared about in a certain constellation of cares, but now Yi realize that was a mistake. Misconceptions of what we truly desire or like are, of course, par for the course for human beings; and so are corrections of those conceptions.