Like most people, you rely on the intuition that there’s a “true identity” that survives the process of spending a lifetime embedded in a human brain, and then you question whether that “true identity” can survive various other processes.
This questioning of identity preservation also happens in the real world in cases of personality alteration or memory loss, but only when it’s unusually rapid or extreme.
For example, not many people experience the intuition that their ten-year-old child “isn’t the same person” as the infant they gave birth to. (That is, they assume that “true identity” has been preserved through this radical transformation.) But if their parent with Alzheimer’s Disease undergoes a no-more-radical transformation, they are more likely to feel that intuition challenged—to feel that their parent “just isn’t the same person anymore.”
Supposing I died and were reconstructed, and supposing that afterwards I didn’t feel significantly different than I do right now, you might still assert that my personal identity had not been preserved, I can’t think of a compelling argument I could use to convince you otherwise.
Similarly, if I meet someone who doesn’t believe I’m the same person I was when my body was born, I can’t think of a compelling argument I could use to convince them otherwise.
But… so what?
It’s all just dueling intuitions, and those don’t tend to lead to much progress. Hell, maybe I don’t have the same “true identity” I was born with… how would I know? Or maybe I suffer from a tragic degenerative “true identity” disease, and my “true identity” will degrade completely by the time I’m 45, with no observable consequences.
My own response to this is to discard the notion of “true identity” as hopelessly confused, and resolve not to care about it.
There must be a level of knowledge at which one intuition or the other (or perhaps neither) is vindicated by the facts. Not caring about true identity may be expedient in the present, but some of these questions must have answers, answers that require information we just don’t have yet. Some other questions will have more to do with choices, values perhaps, choices about what to identify with and what aspects of yourself to value. I don’t think that, even with a shared ontology, everyone will feel the same about the desirability of making a personal backup, and so on.
Examining myself, it seems that two things bother me. First, people who believe that cryonic suspension is just like going to sleep and then being woken up. Second, people choosing cryonics because they have wacky avantgarde ideas about identity not requiring continuity of existence. The first group seem to me naive; the second group seem to me mistaken in believing that the facts require us to jettison so many common-sense ideas about ourselves and what we are, which means that decisions made on the basis of that belief may be flawed.
There must be a level of knowledge at which one intuition or the other (or perhaps neither) is vindicated by the facts.
Yes. And when an intuition is confused enough, I generally conclude that the facts (once they are fully understood) will vindicate neither it nor its negation.
That said, I agree that many questions about identity will (and do) ground out into choices about what to identify with and what aspects of ourselves to value (although we’re not always able to implement those choices unaided, any more than I can easily choose what flavors of ice cream taste good to me), and that not everyone will (or does) share those choices.
Like most people, you rely on the intuition that there’s a “true identity” that survives the process of spending a lifetime embedded in a human brain, and then you question whether that “true identity” can survive various other processes.
This questioning of identity preservation also happens in the real world in cases of personality alteration or memory loss, but only when it’s unusually rapid or extreme.
For example, not many people experience the intuition that their ten-year-old child “isn’t the same person” as the infant they gave birth to. (That is, they assume that “true identity” has been preserved through this radical transformation.) But if their parent with Alzheimer’s Disease undergoes a no-more-radical transformation, they are more likely to feel that intuition challenged—to feel that their parent “just isn’t the same person anymore.”
Supposing I died and were reconstructed, and supposing that afterwards I didn’t feel significantly different than I do right now, you might still assert that my personal identity had not been preserved, I can’t think of a compelling argument I could use to convince you otherwise.
Similarly, if I meet someone who doesn’t believe I’m the same person I was when my body was born, I can’t think of a compelling argument I could use to convince them otherwise.
But… so what?
It’s all just dueling intuitions, and those don’t tend to lead to much progress. Hell, maybe I don’t have the same “true identity” I was born with… how would I know? Or maybe I suffer from a tragic degenerative “true identity” disease, and my “true identity” will degrade completely by the time I’m 45, with no observable consequences.
My own response to this is to discard the notion of “true identity” as hopelessly confused, and resolve not to care about it.
There must be a level of knowledge at which one intuition or the other (or perhaps neither) is vindicated by the facts. Not caring about true identity may be expedient in the present, but some of these questions must have answers, answers that require information we just don’t have yet. Some other questions will have more to do with choices, values perhaps, choices about what to identify with and what aspects of yourself to value. I don’t think that, even with a shared ontology, everyone will feel the same about the desirability of making a personal backup, and so on.
Examining myself, it seems that two things bother me. First, people who believe that cryonic suspension is just like going to sleep and then being woken up. Second, people choosing cryonics because they have wacky avantgarde ideas about identity not requiring continuity of existence. The first group seem to me naive; the second group seem to me mistaken in believing that the facts require us to jettison so many common-sense ideas about ourselves and what we are, which means that decisions made on the basis of that belief may be flawed.
Yes. And when an intuition is confused enough, I generally conclude that the facts (once they are fully understood) will vindicate neither it nor its negation.
That said, I agree that many questions about identity will (and do) ground out into choices about what to identify with and what aspects of ourselves to value (although we’re not always able to implement those choices unaided, any more than I can easily choose what flavors of ice cream taste good to me), and that not everyone will (or does) share those choices.