I wonder if the typical mind fallacy explains some of the varying philosophical views on personal identity.
I personally have a very strong sense of personal identity. On introspection I can definitely see that I possess certain characteristics that I consider my personal identity. I definitely think there is a “me” that persists in time.
Of course, introspection isn’t very reliable, so I examined old home videos of me as a child, and things I had written when I was little. It wasn’t hard at all to notice many characteristics that I still possess today. The child version of me had a similar personality, quirks, interests, values, and so on. He was obviously a “younger me,” not a different person.
However, I’ve heard other people argue that personal identity is obviously an illusion, that you aren’t the same person you were in the past. Such views seemed obviously insane to me at first, but it occurred to me that maybe other people lack the same sense of connectedness to their past self that I did. Maybe the philosophers who have argued against, or partially against personal identity (Hume, Parfit, and Giles for instance), have very weak senses of self. They mistakenly think everyone is like them and that other people are just under some sort of illusion.
What especially disturbs me about this instance of the typical mind fallacy is that some people have taken it to mean that personal identity has no moral significance. For instance, I’ve heard arguments that individual people don’t matter, all that matters is the total quantity of pleasure, experiences, or some other fake utility function the proponent has. It seems disturbing to think a simple instance of generalizing from one example could lead to such grave moral repercussions.
Huh, several years after the fact, without having read this comment at the time, I had come across the notion of Diachronic vs Episodic identity. (This post seems do a decent job explaining it).
But I hadn’t thought to connect this to broader beliefs people might be forming about what sorts of experiences are morally relevant.
I’m curious: if someone constructed entirely forged “home videos of your childhood,” using the environmental cues from your actual past (e.g. your house, your family, a child who appears to be you, etc.) but the behavioral script from some other kid’s home videos, how confident are you that you would not recognize that child’s behavior as that of a “younger you”?
For my part, I definitely have that sense of recognition you describe when I encounter artifacts of my childhood, but I’m pretty confident that I would equally “recognize” entirely fictitious artifacts. I wouldn’t therefore say that I actually am the other kid whose modeled behavior I recognized. So I don’t consider that sort of “recognition” terribly meaningful evidence about identity.
So, I wouldn’t say I lack the “sense of connectedness” you describe. I just don’t consider it to be especially meaningful or morally significant.
By way of analogy, I also have a sense of being at the center of the perceivable universe, but I don’t consider that to describe anything important about the world other than how I perceive it.
I’m curious: if someone constructed entirely forged “home videos of your childhood,” using the environmental cues from your actual past (e.g. your house, your family, a child who appears to be you, etc.) but the behavioral script from some other kid’s home videos, how confident are you that you would not recognize that child’s behavior as that of a “younger you”?
I have very distinct behavior patterns and personality, so I think that if I had to determine whether a series of videos was of me, or a bunch of randomly selected children made to look like me with SFX, my success rate would be significantly greater than chance.
I wouldn’t therefore say that I actually am the other kid whose modeled behavior I recognized. So I don’t consider that sort of “recognition” terribly meaningful evidence about identity.
I think a good steel man of the concept of “personal identity” is “the part of your utility function that contains preferences for how your mind, personality, values, etc, will change in the future.” I think this manages to contain all (or at least most) of the concepts related to personal identity that people care about, while simultaneously accounting for the fact that our brains are changing every second.
I have a very strong set of preferences for how my mind and general psychological makeup will change in the future. In order to see these preferences satisfied I am often willing to sacrifice other preferences, such as having positive experiences, feeling pleasure, etc. The very fact that I am willing to sacrifice some of my “having-experiences-related preferences” in order to avoid thwarting my “personal-identity-related” preferences is proof, that, for some people at least, personal identity is important, and that all my values cannot be reduced to the desire to have experiences.
So under my framework, saying “I am the same person as me1995” is saying “I am a person that me1995 would like to change into in the future, and me1995 is someone that I am glad changed into me.”
I suspect many people are similar. For instance, many people talk about “finding themselves” or try to see “who they really are.” Under my framework, what they are basically saying is “I want to determine the CEV of my personal-identity related preferences.”
However, it occurs to me that there might exist some people who either lack these strong preferences about personal identity, or who are unusually bad at introspection related to them and extrapolating them. These people might assume everyone else is like them, and think that all those people talking about personal identity are irrational or something.
So, I wouldn’t say I lack the “sense of connectedness” you describe. I just don’t consider it to be especially meaningful or morally significant.
Since I consider that sense of connectedness to be a manifestation of my personal-identity-preferences, I consider it very morally significant, because really, it seems like the satisfaction of other people’s preferences is one of the most important parts of morality. I consider the idea that our preferences can be reduced down to the desire to have experiences, irrespective of personal identity, to be the same kind of morally wrongheaded thinking as the idea that our preferences can be reduced to the desire to feel pleasure.
the idea that our preferences can be reduced down to the desire to have experiences, irrespective of personal identity [..] morally wrongheaded thinking... a good steel man of the concept of “personal identity” is “the part of your utility function that contains preferences for how your mind, personality, values, etc, will change in the future.”
For my own part, I agree that our preferences can’t be reduced to the desire to have experiences, but I wouldn’t say that they can be reduced to (the desire to have experiences + the desire to be a certain way in the future) either. Mostly my desire-to-be-a-certain-way is instrumental.
Since I consider that sense of connectedness to be a manifestation of my personal-identity-preferences, I consider it very morally significant, because really, it seems like the satisfaction of other people’s preferences is one of the most important parts of morality.
Sure, if your preferences are bound up with that sense of connectedness in a way that importantly defines your notion of morality, then that sense of connectedness will be morally significant to you. Agreed.
For my own part, I agree that our preferences can’t be reduced to the desire to have experiences, but I wouldn’t say that they can be reduced to (the desire to have experiences + the desire to be a certain way in the future) either.
I agree entirely, I wasn’t arguing that “desire to have experiences” and “desire to be a certain way” are all of what our preferences reduce to. I was just arguing that “desire to be a certain way” is a preference that is sometimes ignored when discussing moral philosophy. Obviously we can have even more kinds of preferences than that.
I wonder if the typical mind fallacy explains some of the varying philosophical views on personal identity.
I personally have a very strong sense of personal identity. On introspection I can definitely see that I possess certain characteristics that I consider my personal identity. I definitely think there is a “me” that persists in time.
Of course, introspection isn’t very reliable, so I examined old home videos of me as a child, and things I had written when I was little. It wasn’t hard at all to notice many characteristics that I still possess today. The child version of me had a similar personality, quirks, interests, values, and so on. He was obviously a “younger me,” not a different person.
However, I’ve heard other people argue that personal identity is obviously an illusion, that you aren’t the same person you were in the past. Such views seemed obviously insane to me at first, but it occurred to me that maybe other people lack the same sense of connectedness to their past self that I did. Maybe the philosophers who have argued against, or partially against personal identity (Hume, Parfit, and Giles for instance), have very weak senses of self. They mistakenly think everyone is like them and that other people are just under some sort of illusion.
What especially disturbs me about this instance of the typical mind fallacy is that some people have taken it to mean that personal identity has no moral significance. For instance, I’ve heard arguments that individual people don’t matter, all that matters is the total quantity of pleasure, experiences, or some other fake utility function the proponent has. It seems disturbing to think a simple instance of generalizing from one example could lead to such grave moral repercussions.
Huh, several years after the fact, without having read this comment at the time, I had come across the notion of Diachronic vs Episodic identity. (This post seems do a decent job explaining it).
But I hadn’t thought to connect this to broader beliefs people might be forming about what sorts of experiences are morally relevant.
I’m curious: if someone constructed entirely forged “home videos of your childhood,” using the environmental cues from your actual past (e.g. your house, your family, a child who appears to be you, etc.) but the behavioral script from some other kid’s home videos, how confident are you that you would not recognize that child’s behavior as that of a “younger you”?
For my part, I definitely have that sense of recognition you describe when I encounter artifacts of my childhood, but I’m pretty confident that I would equally “recognize” entirely fictitious artifacts. I wouldn’t therefore say that I actually am the other kid whose modeled behavior I recognized. So I don’t consider that sort of “recognition” terribly meaningful evidence about identity.
So, I wouldn’t say I lack the “sense of connectedness” you describe. I just don’t consider it to be especially meaningful or morally significant.
By way of analogy, I also have a sense of being at the center of the perceivable universe, but I don’t consider that to describe anything important about the world other than how I perceive it.
I have very distinct behavior patterns and personality, so I think that if I had to determine whether a series of videos was of me, or a bunch of randomly selected children made to look like me with SFX, my success rate would be significantly greater than chance.
I think a good steel man of the concept of “personal identity” is “the part of your utility function that contains preferences for how your mind, personality, values, etc, will change in the future.” I think this manages to contain all (or at least most) of the concepts related to personal identity that people care about, while simultaneously accounting for the fact that our brains are changing every second.
I have a very strong set of preferences for how my mind and general psychological makeup will change in the future. In order to see these preferences satisfied I am often willing to sacrifice other preferences, such as having positive experiences, feeling pleasure, etc. The very fact that I am willing to sacrifice some of my “having-experiences-related preferences” in order to avoid thwarting my “personal-identity-related” preferences is proof, that, for some people at least, personal identity is important, and that all my values cannot be reduced to the desire to have experiences.
So under my framework, saying “I am the same person as me1995” is saying “I am a person that me1995 would like to change into in the future, and me1995 is someone that I am glad changed into me.”
I suspect many people are similar. For instance, many people talk about “finding themselves” or try to see “who they really are.” Under my framework, what they are basically saying is “I want to determine the CEV of my personal-identity related preferences.”
However, it occurs to me that there might exist some people who either lack these strong preferences about personal identity, or who are unusually bad at introspection related to them and extrapolating them. These people might assume everyone else is like them, and think that all those people talking about personal identity are irrational or something.
Since I consider that sense of connectedness to be a manifestation of my personal-identity-preferences, I consider it very morally significant, because really, it seems like the satisfaction of other people’s preferences is one of the most important parts of morality. I consider the idea that our preferences can be reduced down to the desire to have experiences, irrespective of personal identity, to be the same kind of morally wrongheaded thinking as the idea that our preferences can be reduced to the desire to feel pleasure.
OK, thanks for clarifying.
For my own part, I agree that our preferences can’t be reduced to the desire to have experiences, but I wouldn’t say that they can be reduced to (the desire to have experiences + the desire to be a certain way in the future) either. Mostly my desire-to-be-a-certain-way is instrumental.
Sure, if your preferences are bound up with that sense of connectedness in a way that importantly defines your notion of morality, then that sense of connectedness will be morally significant to you. Agreed.
I agree entirely, I wasn’t arguing that “desire to have experiences” and “desire to be a certain way” are all of what our preferences reduce to. I was just arguing that “desire to be a certain way” is a preference that is sometimes ignored when discussing moral philosophy. Obviously we can have even more kinds of preferences than that.
Ah, OK. I misunderstood you as equating personal identity with preferences for change.