I experience a certain sense of my own presence. This is what I am talking about, when I say that I am conscious. The idea that there is such an experience, and that this is what we are talking about when we talk about consciousness, appears absent from the article.
Everyone reading this, please take a moment to see whether you have any sensation that you might describe by those words. Some people can’t see colours. Some people can’t imagine visual scenes. Some people can’t taste phenylthiocarbamide. Some people can’t wiggle their ears. Maybe some people have no sensation of their own selves. If they don’t, maybe this is something that can be learned, like ear-wiggling, and maybe it isn’t, like phenylthiocarbamide.
You are not alone. This is exactly what I experience. I have, however, engaged with some people on this site about this subject who have been stubbornly dense on the subject of the subjective experience of consciousness. For example, insisting that destructive uploaders are perfectly okay with no downside to the person stepping inside one. I finally decided to update and rate more likely the possibility that others do not experience consciousness in the same way I do. This may be an instance of the mind-projection fallacy at work.
For example, insisting that destructive uploaders are perfectly okay with no downside to the person stepping inside one. I finally decided to update and rate more likely the possibility that others do not experience consciousness in the same way I do.
I’m inclined to disagree, but you might be one level beyond me. I believe many people empathize with a visceral sense of horror about (say) destructive teleportation, but intellectually come to the conclusion that those anxieties are baseless. These people may argue in a way that appears dense, but they are actually using second-level counterarguments. But perhaps you actually have counter-counter arguments, and I would appear to be dense when discussing those.
Argument in a nutshell:
Sleep might be a Lovecraftian horror. As light in front of you dims, your thoughts become more and more disorganized, and your sense of self fades until the continuation of consciousness that is you ceases to exist. A few hour later someone else wakes up who thinks that they were you. But they are not you. Every night billions of day-old consciousnesses die, replaced the next morning with billion more, deluded by borrowed memories into believing that they will live for more than a few hours. After a you next go to sleep, you will never see colors again.
People who have never slept would be terrified of sleeping. People who have never teleported are terrified of teleporting. The two fears are roughly equal in merit.
Going even further, some philosophers suggest that consciousness isn’t even continuous, e.g. as you refocus your attention, as you blink, there are gaps that we don’t notice. Just like how there are gaps in your vision when you move your eyes from one place to another, but to you it appears as a continuous experience.
Consciousness is complex. It is a structured thing, not an indivisible atom. It is changeable, not fixed. It has parts and degrees and shifting, uncertain edges.
Well of course it worries people! Precisely the function of consciousness (at least in my current view) is to “paint a picture” of wholeness and continuity that enables self-reflective cognition. Problem is, any given system doesn’t have the memory to store its whole self within its internal representational data-structures, so it has to abstract over itself rather imperfectly.
The problem is that we currently don’t know the structure, so the discord between the continuous, whole, coherent internal feeling of the abstraction and the disjointed, sharp-edged, many-pieced truth we can empirically detect is really disturbing.
It will stop being disturbing about five minutes after we figure out what’s actually going on, when everything will once again add up to normality.
It seems to only worry people when they notice unfamiliar (to them) aspects of the complexity of consciousness. Familiar changes in consciousness, such as sleep, dreams, alcohol, and moods, they never see a problem with.
That doesn’t fit predictions of the theory. As you sleep you are not forming long term memories, to various degrees (that’s why many people don’t typically remember their dreams). But your brain is still causally interconnected and continues to compute during sleep just as much as it does during waking time. Your consciousness persists, it just doesn’t remember.
Teleportation / destructive uploading is totally different. You are destroying the interconnected causal process that gives rise to the experience of consciousness. That is death. It doesn’t matter if very shortly thereafter either another physical copy of you is made or a simulation started.
Imagine I passively scanned your body to molecular detail, then somebody shoots you in the head. I carve the exact coordinates of each atom in your body on stone tablets, which are kept in storage for 20 million years. Then an advanced civilization re-creates your body from that specification, to atomic detail. What do you expect to experience after being shot in the head? Do you expect to wake up in the future?
[during sleep] Your consciousness persists, it just doesn’t remember.
Huh. Does something in your subjective experience make you think that your consciousness continues while you sleep? Aside from a few dreams, sleep to me is a big black hole in which I might as well be dead. I mean, I have nothing in my subjective experience to contradicts the hypothesis that my brain does nothing at night, and what I interpret as memories of dreams are really errors in my long-term memories that manifest in the seconds I wake-up. (I don’t actually think dreams are formed this way, but there is nothing in the way I experience consciousness that tells me so).
What do you expect to experience after being shot in the head? Do you expect to wake up in the future?
Since when growing up I didn’t take the transporter to school every morning, I would be scared of not waking up. After a few hundred round trips to and from stone tablets, not so much. Of course, it’s possible that I should be afraid of becoming a stone tablet, just as it is possible that I should be afraid of going to sleep now.
Arguments around the question “is teleportation different from sleep?” seem to me to like they center around questions of science and logic, not differences in subjective experiences of consciousness. That is, unless your experience of conciseness while sleeping differs significantly from mine.
Have you ever woken up in the process of falling asleep, or suddenly jolted awake in an adrenaline releasing situation? What was your memory of that experience?
It varies. Certainly if I’m just falling asleep, or groggy and waking up, I sometimes get the sense that I was there but not thinking the same way I do when I’m awake.
But that doesn’t mean that I’m somewhat conscious all the time. I have sat in class paying close attention to the professor, then felt my friend’s hand on my shoulder in an otherwise empty classroom. I didn’t notice myself falling asleep or waking up—time just seemed to stop.
There’s a causal chain from the thoughts I have today, to the thoughts I have tomorrow, and there’s a causal chain from the thoughts I’d have before your scanning and stone tablet procedure, and after.
(There’s however no causal chain from anything done by the original me after the scan, to anything in the copy.)
Causal chains are one possible explanation, but a weak one. There is also a causal chain from a pregnant mother to her child, indeed a much stronger connection than with stone tablets. Why doesn’t the mother “live on” in her child?
And if there is no causal chain from you-after-scanning to the copy, you seem to be accepting some sort of forking to have occurred. What basis have you for expecting to perceive waking up as the copy in the future?
There are other possible explanations than causal chain, e.g. persistence of computation, which IMHO better explain these edge cases. However the expectation of these models is different you would not expect a continuity of experience.
Well, there’s no causal chain from what the pregnant woman thinks to what the child remembers, or at least, no chain of the kind that we associate with future selves. Who knows, maybe in the future there will be a memory enhancing modification, without which our natural memories would seem fairly distant from continuation.
What basis have you for expecting to perceive waking up as the copy in the future?
I’d expect the same as if I were to e.g. somehow reset my memories to what they were 10 hours ago. I would definitely not expect subjective continuity with my current self in the case of memory reset—I wouldn’t think it’d be such a big deal though.
There are other possible explanations than causal chain, e.g. persistence of computation,
It seems to me that something like that could break down once when we try to define what we mean by persistence of computation, or indeed, by computation.
If you accept reductionism, which you really should, then a copy of your brain is a copy of your mind. I submit you don’t actually care about the interconnected causal process when you’re conscious or asleep. You probably couldn’t if you tried really hard, what does it even matter? You couldn’t even tell if that causal connection “was broken” or not.
People get drunk and wake up in some place without recollection how they got there and their life doesn’t seem particularly unworthy afterwards, though they should go easier on the liquor. The supposed problem you feel so strongly about is merely a conceptual problem, a quirk of how your mind models people and identities, not one rooted in reality. It’s all just a consequence of how you model reality in your mind and then your mind comes up with clever ideas how “being causally interconnected during sleep” somehow matters. You model yourself and the copy of yourself as two separate and distinct entities in your mind and apply all the same rules and intuitions you usually apply to any other mind that isn’t you. But those intuitions are misplaced in in this novel and very different situation where that other mind is literally you in every way you care about. Which is fine because you are and you will be separated in space and perhaps also in time, so it really makes sense modeling two instances of yourself, or at least to try. If you imagine to kill yourself and your copy goes on it really somehow fells like “I die and some impostor who isn’t me -or at least doesn’t continue my own subjective experience- lives on and my unique own inner subjective experience will be extinguished and I’ll miss out on the rest of it because someone else has internal experiences but that’s not me”. That’s just a quirk of how we tend model other minds and other people, nothing more, All the dozens of clever reasons people tend to come up with to somehow show how they won’t be able to continue their internal experience as their own copy hold no merit, it’s all just an outgrowth of that really deeply rooted intuition based on how we model ourselves and other people.
People wake up from year long comas and if you were to wake up from one you wouldn’t go: “oh no I’m suddenly not me anymore, I lost track of my causal interconnectedness because I stopped paying attention”. The fact that your brain is the result of causal things doesn’t mean “causal interconnectedness” carries any kind of actually valuable information your copy would somehow miss, or to be precise that you would miss. In fact this kind of information is lost all the time, there is nothing that keeps track of it, information about our causal past gets lost all the time as entropy increases. Eventually the universe will face its slow heat death and there will be no information about the causal chains of the past remaining at all. In the end there is maximum entropy and minimum information. It’s happening right now all around us, we’re moving towards it and information about the causal past is being lost everywhere as we speak.
Hmm, you’re right I did a lousy or non-existant job of refuting that idea. Okay let’s try a thought experiment then. Your brain got instantly-frozen close to absolute zero and could be thawed in such a way that you’d be alive after say 100 years of being completely frozen and perfectly preserved. I think it’s fair to say here your brain “stopped working” altogether during that time, while the world outside changed. Would you really expect your subjective experience to end at the moment of freezing, while some kind of new or different subjective experience suddenly starts its existence at the time of being thawed?
If you wouldn’t expect your subjective experience to end at that point, then how is it possibly any different from a perfect copy of yourself assuming you truly accept reductionism? In other words yes, for that reason and others I would expect to open MY eyes and resume MY subjective experience after being perfectly preserved in the form of stone tablets for 20 million years. It sounds strange even to me I confess, but if reductionist assumptions are true then I must accept this, my intuitions that this is not the case are just a consequence of how I model and think of my own identity. This is something I’ve grappled with for a few years now and at the beginning I came up with tons of clever reasons why it “wouldn’t really be me” but no, reason trumps intuition on this one. Also yes, destructive teleportation is a kind of “death” you don’t notice, but its also one you don’t care about because next thing you open your eyes an everything is okay you are just somewhere else, nothing else is different. That’s the idea behind the drunk analogy, it would be the same experience minus the hangover.
You are not alone. This is exactly what I experience. I have, however, engaged with some people on this site about this subject who have been stubbornly dense on the subject of the subjective experience of consciousness. For example, insisting that destructive uploaders are perfectly okay with no downside to the person stepping inside one. I finally decided to update and rate more likely the possibility that others do not experience consciousness in the same way I do. This may be an instance of the mind-projection fallacy at work.
Nice to know that I’m not alone though :)
I’m inclined to disagree, but you might be one level beyond me. I believe many people empathize with a visceral sense of horror about (say) destructive teleportation, but intellectually come to the conclusion that those anxieties are baseless. These people may argue in a way that appears dense, but they are actually using second-level counterarguments. But perhaps you actually have counter-counter arguments, and I would appear to be dense when discussing those.
Argument in a nutshell:
Sleep might be a Lovecraftian horror. As light in front of you dims, your thoughts become more and more disorganized, and your sense of self fades until the continuation of consciousness that is you ceases to exist. A few hour later someone else wakes up who thinks that they were you. But they are not you. Every night billions of day-old consciousnesses die, replaced the next morning with billion more, deluded by borrowed memories into believing that they will live for more than a few hours. After a you next go to sleep, you will never see colors again.
People who have never slept would be terrified of sleeping. People who have never teleported are terrified of teleporting. The two fears are roughly equal in merit.
Going even further, some philosophers suggest that consciousness isn’t even continuous, e.g. as you refocus your attention, as you blink, there are gaps that we don’t notice. Just like how there are gaps in your vision when you move your eyes from one place to another, but to you it appears as a continuous experience.
Consciousness is complex. It is a structured thing, not an indivisible atom. It is changeable, not fixed. It has parts and degrees and shifting, uncertain edges.
This worries some people.
Well of course it worries people! Precisely the function of consciousness (at least in my current view) is to “paint a picture” of wholeness and continuity that enables self-reflective cognition. Problem is, any given system doesn’t have the memory to store its whole self within its internal representational data-structures, so it has to abstract over itself rather imperfectly.
The problem is that we currently don’t know the structure, so the discord between the continuous, whole, coherent internal feeling of the abstraction and the disjointed, sharp-edged, many-pieced truth we can empirically detect is really disturbing.
It will stop being disturbing about five minutes after we figure out what’s actually going on, when everything will once again add up to normality.
It seems to only worry people when they notice unfamiliar (to them) aspects of the complexity of consciousness. Familiar changes in consciousness, such as sleep, dreams, alcohol, and moods, they never see a problem with.
We only ever have approxmate models of external things, too.
That doesn’t fit predictions of the theory. As you sleep you are not forming long term memories, to various degrees (that’s why many people don’t typically remember their dreams). But your brain is still causally interconnected and continues to compute during sleep just as much as it does during waking time. Your consciousness persists, it just doesn’t remember.
Teleportation / destructive uploading is totally different. You are destroying the interconnected causal process that gives rise to the experience of consciousness. That is death. It doesn’t matter if very shortly thereafter either another physical copy of you is made or a simulation started.
Imagine I passively scanned your body to molecular detail, then somebody shoots you in the head. I carve the exact coordinates of each atom in your body on stone tablets, which are kept in storage for 20 million years. Then an advanced civilization re-creates your body from that specification, to atomic detail. What do you expect to experience after being shot in the head? Do you expect to wake up in the future?
Huh. Does something in your subjective experience make you think that your consciousness continues while you sleep? Aside from a few dreams, sleep to me is a big black hole in which I might as well be dead. I mean, I have nothing in my subjective experience to contradicts the hypothesis that my brain does nothing at night, and what I interpret as memories of dreams are really errors in my long-term memories that manifest in the seconds I wake-up. (I don’t actually think dreams are formed this way, but there is nothing in the way I experience consciousness that tells me so).
Since when growing up I didn’t take the transporter to school every morning, I would be scared of not waking up. After a few hundred round trips to and from stone tablets, not so much. Of course, it’s possible that I should be afraid of becoming a stone tablet, just as it is possible that I should be afraid of going to sleep now.
Arguments around the question “is teleportation different from sleep?” seem to me to like they center around questions of science and logic, not differences in subjective experiences of consciousness. That is, unless your experience of conciseness while sleeping differs significantly from mine.
Have you ever woken up in the process of falling asleep, or suddenly jolted awake in an adrenaline releasing situation? What was your memory of that experience?
It varies. Certainly if I’m just falling asleep, or groggy and waking up, I sometimes get the sense that I was there but not thinking the same way I do when I’m awake.
But that doesn’t mean that I’m somewhat conscious all the time. I have sat in class paying close attention to the professor, then felt my friend’s hand on my shoulder in an otherwise empty classroom. I didn’t notice myself falling asleep or waking up—time just seemed to stop.
There’s a causal chain from the thoughts I have today, to the thoughts I have tomorrow, and there’s a causal chain from the thoughts I’d have before your scanning and stone tablet procedure, and after.
(There’s however no causal chain from anything done by the original me after the scan, to anything in the copy.)
Causal chains are one possible explanation, but a weak one. There is also a causal chain from a pregnant mother to her child, indeed a much stronger connection than with stone tablets. Why doesn’t the mother “live on” in her child?
And if there is no causal chain from you-after-scanning to the copy, you seem to be accepting some sort of forking to have occurred. What basis have you for expecting to perceive waking up as the copy in the future?
There are other possible explanations than causal chain, e.g. persistence of computation, which IMHO better explain these edge cases. However the expectation of these models is different you would not expect a continuity of experience.
Well, there’s no causal chain from what the pregnant woman thinks to what the child remembers, or at least, no chain of the kind that we associate with future selves. Who knows, maybe in the future there will be a memory enhancing modification, without which our natural memories would seem fairly distant from continuation.
I’d expect the same as if I were to e.g. somehow reset my memories to what they were 10 hours ago. I would definitely not expect subjective continuity with my current self in the case of memory reset—I wouldn’t think it’d be such a big deal though.
It seems to me that something like that could break down once when we try to define what we mean by persistence of computation, or indeed, by computation.
If you accept reductionism, which you really should, then a copy of your brain is a copy of your mind. I submit you don’t actually care about the interconnected causal process when you’re conscious or asleep. You probably couldn’t if you tried really hard, what does it even matter? You couldn’t even tell if that causal connection “was broken” or not.
People get drunk and wake up in some place without recollection how they got there and their life doesn’t seem particularly unworthy afterwards, though they should go easier on the liquor. The supposed problem you feel so strongly about is merely a conceptual problem, a quirk of how your mind models people and identities, not one rooted in reality. It’s all just a consequence of how you model reality in your mind and then your mind comes up with clever ideas how “being causally interconnected during sleep” somehow matters. You model yourself and the copy of yourself as two separate and distinct entities in your mind and apply all the same rules and intuitions you usually apply to any other mind that isn’t you. But those intuitions are misplaced in in this novel and very different situation where that other mind is literally you in every way you care about. Which is fine because you are and you will be separated in space and perhaps also in time, so it really makes sense modeling two instances of yourself, or at least to try. If you imagine to kill yourself and your copy goes on it really somehow fells like “I die and some impostor who isn’t me -or at least doesn’t continue my own subjective experience- lives on and my unique own inner subjective experience will be extinguished and I’ll miss out on the rest of it because someone else has internal experiences but that’s not me”. That’s just a quirk of how we tend model other minds and other people, nothing more, All the dozens of clever reasons people tend to come up with to somehow show how they won’t be able to continue their internal experience as their own copy hold no merit, it’s all just an outgrowth of that really deeply rooted intuition based on how we model ourselves and other people.
People wake up from year long comas and if you were to wake up from one you wouldn’t go: “oh no I’m suddenly not me anymore, I lost track of my causal interconnectedness because I stopped paying attention”. The fact that your brain is the result of causal things doesn’t mean “causal interconnectedness” carries any kind of actually valuable information your copy would somehow miss, or to be precise that you would miss. In fact this kind of information is lost all the time, there is nothing that keeps track of it, information about our causal past gets lost all the time as entropy increases. Eventually the universe will face its slow heat death and there will be no information about the causal chains of the past remaining at all. In the end there is maximum entropy and minimum information. It’s happening right now all around us, we’re moving towards it and information about the causal past is being lost everywhere as we speak.
Did you even read my post? Getting drunk and not remembering things or being in a coma are not states where the brain stops working altogether.
Hmm, you’re right I did a lousy or non-existant job of refuting that idea. Okay let’s try a thought experiment then. Your brain got instantly-frozen close to absolute zero and could be thawed in such a way that you’d be alive after say 100 years of being completely frozen and perfectly preserved. I think it’s fair to say here your brain “stopped working” altogether during that time, while the world outside changed. Would you really expect your subjective experience to end at the moment of freezing, while some kind of new or different subjective experience suddenly starts its existence at the time of being thawed?
If you wouldn’t expect your subjective experience to end at that point, then how is it possibly any different from a perfect copy of yourself assuming you truly accept reductionism? In other words yes, for that reason and others I would expect to open MY eyes and resume MY subjective experience after being perfectly preserved in the form of stone tablets for 20 million years. It sounds strange even to me I confess, but if reductionist assumptions are true then I must accept this, my intuitions that this is not the case are just a consequence of how I model and think of my own identity. This is something I’ve grappled with for a few years now and at the beginning I came up with tons of clever reasons why it “wouldn’t really be me” but no, reason trumps intuition on this one. Also yes, destructive teleportation is a kind of “death” you don’t notice, but its also one you don’t care about because next thing you open your eyes an everything is okay you are just somewhere else, nothing else is different. That’s the idea behind the drunk analogy, it would be the same experience minus the hangover.