I wish there were an article that dealt more precisely with “Experience and Death,” rather than “identity and death,” because maintaining an experience is what really interests me. After all, we already don’t stay the same person from moment to moment. We acquire new neural structures, associations, and memories (and lose some old ones that we aren’t even aware of losing), and that doesn’t particularly bother me. So maintaining a particular “identity” does not seem to me to be the problem worth really worrying about.
In fact, let’s suppose that I was about to die due to some brain tumor, and there was one medical procedure that could save me, but it would entail destroying a lot of my existing memories, incidentally creating some new ones, re-arranging a lot of neural associations, and generally changing my whole personality in a drastic way.
If death and non-experience were not threatening me, then all other things being equal (meaning, assuming this personality will be relatively as happy and functional as my current self), my current self would NOT prefer to undergo this procedure (although the preference is not a particularly strong one. It’s more of an “avoiding Buridan’s Ass, risk-averse, all other things being equal, might as well stick with this current personality that I already know about” preference). However, if this procedure involving a lot of relatively neutral changes to my personality meant the difference between having future experiences of any sort and not having future experiences of any sort, then I would absolutely jump onboard with the procedure.
Let’s kick it up one notch further, though. Let’s say there’s a brain procedure that will change a lot of memories and associations in such a way that I will be a happier and more successful/functional person. Let’s say the procedure will raise my IQ by 100 points, increase my willpower, and so on. Then my current self would absolutely elect to undergo the procedure, even without being threatened with death otherwise.
When it comes to the classic teleporter thought-experiment, what really interests me is not the usual question people focus on of “will society recognize the duplicate as me,” or “will I ‘identify’ with my future duplicate self,” but rather, “will I experience my future duplicate self.” I do not want the teleporter to be a suicide machine as far as my first-person experience is concerned.
When people usually try to address this question, I often hear things like, “your first-person experience will continue if you want to identify with that duplicate” or statements that imply something similar. This just doesn’t make any sense to me.
Here’s why: imagine a teleporter experiment, except in this case when your first body steps into the teleporter chamber and gets vaporized, two duplicates get re-constructed in different neighboring rooms.
The first duplicate gets re-constructed in a torture chamber, where it will get tortured for the rest of its life.
The second duplicate gets re-constructed in a normal waiting room, gets handed a billion dollars, and is set free back into society.
Now, if it is at all possible, I would like to experience the experiences of the second duplicate. How can I make sure that that happens? From what I have read, people make it sound like it is as easy as making your pre-teleporter self pre-commit to not caring about duplicates of yourself that get materialized in the torture chamber rather than the waiting room.
That just doesn’t make sense to me. Normally reality doesn’t work like that. I can try to pre-commit to not caring about the pain signals coming from my finger before I smash it with a hammer, but pain I will feel nonetheless. Granted, as of now I don’t have full control over the self-modification of my own source code / nerves and neurons. If I did, I suppose I could re-program myself to not to feel pain or care about pain in that circumstance.
Still, this only goes so far. If I wanted to experience Neil deGrasse Tyson’s experience, or experience his brain (because maybe I perceived him as having higher IQ than me or more interesting memories than me or more wealth than me), I cannot just go to sleep tonight and pre-commit to caring only about Neil deGrasse Tyson and expect to wake up tomorrow morning experiencing Neil deGrasse Tyson’s reality, with all of his memories, feeling as if I had always been Neil deGrasse Tyson, with no memory of ever having experienced anything different.
Or maybe I can? How would I know that I have not repeatedly done this? How do I know that I did not just do this 5 seconds ago? I guess I don’t know. But...it just doesn’t FEEL LIKE I have.
Okay, NOW I am experiencing Matthew Opitz. And...NOW I am experiencing Matthew Opitz. And...NOW I am experiencing Matthew Opitz.
How could I seriously believe that I really just started experiencing Matthew Opitz after the 2nd “NOW” just now, and the first two “NOWs” are just false memories that I now have?
But still, it could be possible, when I look at the issue from the vantage point of this new NOW.
Really, when you think about it, the experience of time does not make any sense at all...
I wish there were an article that dealt more precisely with “Experience and Death,” rather than “identity and death,” because maintaining an experience is what really interests me. After all, we already don’t stay the same person from moment to moment. We acquire new neural structures, associations, and memories (and lose some old ones that we aren’t even aware of losing), and that doesn’t particularly bother me. So maintaining a particular “identity” does not seem to me to be the problem worth really worrying about.
In fact, let’s suppose that I was about to die due to some brain tumor, and there was one medical procedure that could save me, but it would entail destroying a lot of my existing memories, incidentally creating some new ones, re-arranging a lot of neural associations, and generally changing my whole personality in a drastic way.
If death and non-experience were not threatening me, then all other things being equal (meaning, assuming this personality will be relatively as happy and functional as my current self), my current self would NOT prefer to undergo this procedure (although the preference is not a particularly strong one. It’s more of an “avoiding Buridan’s Ass, risk-averse, all other things being equal, might as well stick with this current personality that I already know about” preference). However, if this procedure involving a lot of relatively neutral changes to my personality meant the difference between having future experiences of any sort and not having future experiences of any sort, then I would absolutely jump onboard with the procedure.
Let’s kick it up one notch further, though. Let’s say there’s a brain procedure that will change a lot of memories and associations in such a way that I will be a happier and more successful/functional person. Let’s say the procedure will raise my IQ by 100 points, increase my willpower, and so on. Then my current self would absolutely elect to undergo the procedure, even without being threatened with death otherwise.
When it comes to the classic teleporter thought-experiment, what really interests me is not the usual question people focus on of “will society recognize the duplicate as me,” or “will I ‘identify’ with my future duplicate self,” but rather, “will I experience my future duplicate self.” I do not want the teleporter to be a suicide machine as far as my first-person experience is concerned.
When people usually try to address this question, I often hear things like, “your first-person experience will continue if you want to identify with that duplicate” or statements that imply something similar. This just doesn’t make any sense to me.
Here’s why: imagine a teleporter experiment, except in this case when your first body steps into the teleporter chamber and gets vaporized, two duplicates get re-constructed in different neighboring rooms.
The first duplicate gets re-constructed in a torture chamber, where it will get tortured for the rest of its life.
The second duplicate gets re-constructed in a normal waiting room, gets handed a billion dollars, and is set free back into society.
Now, if it is at all possible, I would like to experience the experiences of the second duplicate. How can I make sure that that happens? From what I have read, people make it sound like it is as easy as making your pre-teleporter self pre-commit to not caring about duplicates of yourself that get materialized in the torture chamber rather than the waiting room.
That just doesn’t make sense to me. Normally reality doesn’t work like that. I can try to pre-commit to not caring about the pain signals coming from my finger before I smash it with a hammer, but pain I will feel nonetheless. Granted, as of now I don’t have full control over the self-modification of my own source code / nerves and neurons. If I did, I suppose I could re-program myself to not to feel pain or care about pain in that circumstance.
Still, this only goes so far. If I wanted to experience Neil deGrasse Tyson’s experience, or experience his brain (because maybe I perceived him as having higher IQ than me or more interesting memories than me or more wealth than me), I cannot just go to sleep tonight and pre-commit to caring only about Neil deGrasse Tyson and expect to wake up tomorrow morning experiencing Neil deGrasse Tyson’s reality, with all of his memories, feeling as if I had always been Neil deGrasse Tyson, with no memory of ever having experienced anything different.
Or maybe I can? How would I know that I have not repeatedly done this? How do I know that I did not just do this 5 seconds ago? I guess I don’t know. But...it just doesn’t FEEL LIKE I have.
Okay, NOW I am experiencing Matthew Opitz. And...NOW I am experiencing Matthew Opitz. And...NOW I am experiencing Matthew Opitz.
How could I seriously believe that I really just started experiencing Matthew Opitz after the 2nd “NOW” just now, and the first two “NOWs” are just false memories that I now have?
But still, it could be possible, when I look at the issue from the vantage point of this new NOW.
Really, when you think about it, the experience of time does not make any sense at all...