Scenario meant to discover whether the experience of life is valued
Relatedly, given a button that I know creates two perfect copies and then picks one of the resulting three Daves at random to destroy an hour later, I press it. At the time of pressing the button, I’m indifferent as to which of the three copies gets selected for destruction… they are all me.
Okay, so I guess what you’re saying here is that what you value about being alive is NOT the experience of life.
How do you feel about this scenario:
You and your husband are planning to go to a really awesome event soon. Maybe it’s the Singularity summit, maybe your favorite rock star is having a concert, maybe it’s the birth of a new baby you guys have been wanting for a long time. Imagine whatever sort of event you’d enjoy most.
You’re really looking forward to it!
Then work calls and says “Dave, two days from now, we need you to do this really important job 3,000 miles away from your ordinary work site. We couldn’t get you a plane ticket on such short notice, but fortunately we have a transporter.”
You agree, as it is your job.
Now you hang up the phone and your husband comes over, saying “I can’t believe we’re actually going to have this event soon! Isn’t it exciting!”
“Yeah, of course!” You say. But something feels wrong.
You realize that you are going to be disassembled by the transporter BEFORE the event happens.
YOU won’t experience the event whatsoever. A copy of you will be there instead.
Is this acceptable?
I certainly don’t want to live a lifestyle where we use transporters to go everywhere and each instance of me only experiences until the next transport. My life would never be long enough to experience any satisfaction. That’s reminiscent of Alice in Wonderland’s absurd circumstance: “Jam tomorrow, jam yesterday, but never ever jam today.”
A new instance of me can experience a future event I’ve been planning for tomorrow, and a past me may have experienced a continuous life before transporters, but most instances of me would just be slaving away during the few hours or days in which they experience, doing things like working or buying groceries, so that other temporary instances of myself can reap the rewards. The instances that do get a reward still wouldn’t get to experience the fulfillment of planning out a goal and following through—this is really important to me for satisfaction.
Scenarios meant to explore instance differentiation and the relation to continuous experience
While we lie in frozen sleep, the spaceship has a technical failure in mid-flight which reduces the ship and everything in it to constituent atoms. The ship’s captain has the option of using the ship’s transporter to beam us from the doomed ship to the surface of Alpha Centauri.
Okay, so (just ignoring for a moment the fact that the transporter itself has just been vaporized, I guess I’ll assume it’s intact) I assume you’re saying the option is to reassemble those people out of their original particles. (Because if not, it isn’t any different from the transporter with technical failure argument, and I’d say that their experiencing ceased when they were disassembled, which is unacceptable, so they’re dead.).
First, I’d like to say that re-assembling the people, no matter what with, may be better than letting them die because that still saves them from four out of the five elements of death above.
So what we’re arguing about is not whether this rescues their genes, their influence in the world, their selves, or their bodies (that’s inconsequential in this case), but whether it saved their ability to experience.
I’m seeing several ways for this to go. The transporter could re-assemble them by putting the exact same particles into the exact same relative locations, or by putting the mass of particles from the accident into whatever locations (mostly not the same locations).
Putting the same particles into the same relative locations:
This, I think, would be the same as turning a computer on and off. I don’t have any reason to think I have a “soul” that would “escape” in this case, and I see no reason to differentiate a me made of the exact same particles as me from a me made from the exact same particles as me. In other words, a copy was never made. The re-assembled me is not a new instance—it is the original. I theorize that me1′s experience would continue.
Putting the mass of particles into different locations:
This is sticky. If I have some of the same particles, but not all of them, is it me1? What if I have all of the same particles but they’re in different locations? That’s really, really sticky. This calls into question: What is experience? To answer this question, I have to ask “What is consciousness?”
I have an idea. If we had enough technology to send a person’s entire pattern to a new location, surely it would require less bandwidth to send only their thoughts or commands to the remote location. Also there would be no risk of being damaged due to copying errors. A brainless body could be constructed there (either in the exact likeness of the person, or in a form designed to make optimal use of resources), and the original person could control it using a mind reading interface such that they experience what the remote avatar is experiencing.
This would be more efficient and less risky, don’t you think?
It still doesn’t answer the sticky question of “Would my experience be continuous if my particles were disassembled and re-arranged?” but I think it addresses the practical transportation problem behind this (also, you’d likely get to inhabit a variety of avatars, which would be cool) but back to the original question:
If all of my particles were disassembled and re-arranged, would I have a continuous experience or not? I had been basing this on whether there would be a new instance or not. But this confuses me as to whether there’s a new instance, and makes me ask whether being disassembled and re-assembled exactly the same way might mean I lose continuous experience even if I am the same instance.
So I have to answer the question of “What is continuous experience?” and “How does it work?”
Unfortunately, I see no way of testing for whether a consciousness is having a continuous experience, since it follows that new instances will pick up where previous instances left off, causing them to have the illusion of continuous experience, and disassembled instances will be dead and therefore incapable of responding about whether they’re having an experience. Not that I could test it anyway without a transporter, but this means I can’t imagine a scenario and reason out whether a disassembled instance of me would experience or not after being put back together exactly the same way.
Do you see a way to reason that out, or do you have a clarifying question we could ask?
Okay, so I guess what you’re saying here is that what you value about being alive is NOT the experience of life.
Nope, that’s not what I’m saying at all. All of the Daves have the experience of life, and I absolutely do value it, which is why I press the button that I expect to create more of it.
YOU won’t experience the event whatsoever. A copy of you will be there instead. Is this acceptable?
No, that simply isn’t true. I will in fact experience the event (assuming I can get back from my work assignment in time, or assuming that my employer uses a nondestructive teleporter such that I can both experience the event and do my job).
Okay, so (just ignoring for a moment the fact that the transporter itself has just been vaporized, I guess I’ll assume it’s intact)
No, sorry, I was unclear. The engine is going to overload in ten minutes, say, and the captain has the choice of transporting us off the ship before it explodes. Which, on your account, is not worth bothering with, since we’re going to be just as dead whether she does or not.
This [teleoperating remote bodies] would be more efficient and less risky, don’t you think?
Sure. Given the choice of telecommuting this way, rather than teleporting my body back and forth, I would probably choose tele-operating a remote body, assuming the experience was comparable.
Do you see a way to reason that out, or do you have a clarifying question we could ask?
No, not really, especially since you’re in the habit of not answering the questions I do ask. Either way, though, no: I think you’ve created a confusion here that is unresolvable as long as you hold on to your belief that there is some essence of selfness (continuous experience, identity, real-me-ness, whatever) that is undetectable and unduplicatable but somehow still important.
Your model creates the possibility that I am not the person I was a moment ago and there’s simply no fact about the world that would resolve the question of whether that possibility is actual or not. This seems absurd to me: if nothing depends on it, I simply don’t care whether it’s true or not; if we insist that that is what it means to be “really me”, then I must accept that maybe I’m not “really me” and I’m OK with that.
I haven’t touched on personal identity—for clarity I’m not equating that with continuous experience nor am I even equating continuous instance distinctions with continuous experience at this point. (I guess I’m interpreting personal identity either like “self” or identity the way it’s used in “identity theft”—like a group of accounts and things like SSNs that places use to distinguish one person from another. I’m not using that term here and I’m not sure what you mean by it.).
I’m not trying to figure out whether my “self” maps to certain particles. I feel sure that “self” is copy-able (though I haven’t formally defined self yet). However, I am separating self from continuous experience (like you can see in my Elements of Death comment).
What I am trying to do is to figure out whether the continuous experience of my current instance is linked to specific particles. The reason I am asking that question is made apparent in my transporter failure scenario.
Scenario meant to discover whether the experience of life is valued
Okay, so I guess what you’re saying here is that what you value about being alive is NOT the experience of life.
How do you feel about this scenario:
You and your husband are planning to go to a really awesome event soon. Maybe it’s the Singularity summit, maybe your favorite rock star is having a concert, maybe it’s the birth of a new baby you guys have been wanting for a long time. Imagine whatever sort of event you’d enjoy most.
You’re really looking forward to it!
Then work calls and says “Dave, two days from now, we need you to do this really important job 3,000 miles away from your ordinary work site. We couldn’t get you a plane ticket on such short notice, but fortunately we have a transporter.”
You agree, as it is your job.
Now you hang up the phone and your husband comes over, saying “I can’t believe we’re actually going to have this event soon! Isn’t it exciting!”
“Yeah, of course!” You say. But something feels wrong.
You realize that you are going to be disassembled by the transporter BEFORE the event happens.
YOU won’t experience the event whatsoever. A copy of you will be there instead.
Is this acceptable?
I certainly don’t want to live a lifestyle where we use transporters to go everywhere and each instance of me only experiences until the next transport. My life would never be long enough to experience any satisfaction. That’s reminiscent of Alice in Wonderland’s absurd circumstance: “Jam tomorrow, jam yesterday, but never ever jam today.”
A new instance of me can experience a future event I’ve been planning for tomorrow, and a past me may have experienced a continuous life before transporters, but most instances of me would just be slaving away during the few hours or days in which they experience, doing things like working or buying groceries, so that other temporary instances of myself can reap the rewards. The instances that do get a reward still wouldn’t get to experience the fulfillment of planning out a goal and following through—this is really important to me for satisfaction.
Scenarios meant to explore instance differentiation and the relation to continuous experience
Okay, so (just ignoring for a moment the fact that the transporter itself has just been vaporized, I guess I’ll assume it’s intact) I assume you’re saying the option is to reassemble those people out of their original particles. (Because if not, it isn’t any different from the transporter with technical failure argument, and I’d say that their experiencing ceased when they were disassembled, which is unacceptable, so they’re dead.).
First, I’d like to say that re-assembling the people, no matter what with, may be better than letting them die because that still saves them from four out of the five elements of death above.
So what we’re arguing about is not whether this rescues their genes, their influence in the world, their selves, or their bodies (that’s inconsequential in this case), but whether it saved their ability to experience.
I’m seeing several ways for this to go. The transporter could re-assemble them by putting the exact same particles into the exact same relative locations, or by putting the mass of particles from the accident into whatever locations (mostly not the same locations).
Putting the same particles into the same relative locations:
This, I think, would be the same as turning a computer on and off. I don’t have any reason to think I have a “soul” that would “escape” in this case, and I see no reason to differentiate a me made of the exact same particles as me from a me made from the exact same particles as me. In other words, a copy was never made. The re-assembled me is not a new instance—it is the original. I theorize that me1′s experience would continue.
Putting the mass of particles into different locations:
This is sticky. If I have some of the same particles, but not all of them, is it me1? What if I have all of the same particles but they’re in different locations? That’s really, really sticky. This calls into question: What is experience? To answer this question, I have to ask “What is consciousness?”
I have an idea. If we had enough technology to send a person’s entire pattern to a new location, surely it would require less bandwidth to send only their thoughts or commands to the remote location. Also there would be no risk of being damaged due to copying errors. A brainless body could be constructed there (either in the exact likeness of the person, or in a form designed to make optimal use of resources), and the original person could control it using a mind reading interface such that they experience what the remote avatar is experiencing.
This would be more efficient and less risky, don’t you think?
It still doesn’t answer the sticky question of “Would my experience be continuous if my particles were disassembled and re-arranged?” but I think it addresses the practical transportation problem behind this (also, you’d likely get to inhabit a variety of avatars, which would be cool) but back to the original question:
If all of my particles were disassembled and re-arranged, would I have a continuous experience or not? I had been basing this on whether there would be a new instance or not. But this confuses me as to whether there’s a new instance, and makes me ask whether being disassembled and re-assembled exactly the same way might mean I lose continuous experience even if I am the same instance.
Maybe continuous instance != continuous experience.
So I have to answer the question of “What is continuous experience?” and “How does it work?”
Unfortunately, I see no way of testing for whether a consciousness is having a continuous experience, since it follows that new instances will pick up where previous instances left off, causing them to have the illusion of continuous experience, and disassembled instances will be dead and therefore incapable of responding about whether they’re having an experience. Not that I could test it anyway without a transporter, but this means I can’t imagine a scenario and reason out whether a disassembled instance of me would experience or not after being put back together exactly the same way.
Do you see a way to reason that out, or do you have a clarifying question we could ask?
Nope, that’s not what I’m saying at all. All of the Daves have the experience of life, and I absolutely do value it, which is why I press the button that I expect to create more of it.
No, that simply isn’t true. I will in fact experience the event (assuming I can get back from my work assignment in time, or assuming that my employer uses a nondestructive teleporter such that I can both experience the event and do my job).
No, sorry, I was unclear. The engine is going to overload in ten minutes, say, and the captain has the choice of transporting us off the ship before it explodes. Which, on your account, is not worth bothering with, since we’re going to be just as dead whether she does or not.
Sure. Given the choice of telecommuting this way, rather than teleporting my body back and forth, I would probably choose tele-operating a remote body, assuming the experience was comparable.
No, not really, especially since you’re in the habit of not answering the questions I do ask. Either way, though, no: I think you’ve created a confusion here that is unresolvable as long as you hold on to your belief that there is some essence of selfness (continuous experience, identity, real-me-ness, whatever) that is undetectable and unduplicatable but somehow still important.
Your model creates the possibility that I am not the person I was a moment ago and there’s simply no fact about the world that would resolve the question of whether that possibility is actual or not. This seems absurd to me: if nothing depends on it, I simply don’t care whether it’s true or not; if we insist that that is what it means to be “really me”, then I must accept that maybe I’m not “really me” and I’m OK with that.
What motivates you to link personal identity to your specific particles? Any two atoms of the same type are perfectly indistinguishable.
I haven’t touched on personal identity—for clarity I’m not equating that with continuous experience nor am I even equating continuous instance distinctions with continuous experience at this point. (I guess I’m interpreting personal identity either like “self” or identity the way it’s used in “identity theft”—like a group of accounts and things like SSNs that places use to distinguish one person from another. I’m not using that term here and I’m not sure what you mean by it.).
I’m not trying to figure out whether my “self” maps to certain particles. I feel sure that “self” is copy-able (though I haven’t formally defined self yet). However, I am separating self from continuous experience (like you can see in my Elements of Death comment).
What I am trying to do is to figure out whether the continuous experience of my current instance is linked to specific particles. The reason I am asking that question is made apparent in my transporter failure scenario.