I think this is maybe useful.. it seems like there’s two meanings of “I” which are generally tricky to differentiate between, with other options for how identity could work (physical and causal continuity) dismissed by things linked in the post.
When you ask “was I at work yesterday”, what I think you’re asking is “do I believe that a configuration of matter which was I would identify as me was at work yesterday”, essentially asking about a category of objects which is a fuzzy category over thingspace.
You’re right, concepts don’t have places and are not themselves created or destroyed. But they can gain and lose embodiments. An example: Removing every physical example of a the the concept “Object containing a clear representation of the concept platonic solids” from the universe does not destroy the platonic solids, but it does destroy all representations of them which will reduce the impact of the properties of the platonic solids from the universe until someone makes new representations, because examples of the concept cannot causally interact with the universe. Evolution needs objects to interact with the environment a lot to make more of themselves, so we care not about the higher concept being destroyed, but about physical embodiments of the concept.
As for self-reference.. I don’t think you contain yourself fully, but I do think you contain a compressed and fuzzy representation of your current self which blurs into nearby thingspace along axes you care less about (e.g. length of your hair, exact molecular weight of your spleen) but is fairly focused along axes you care about greatly (e.g. memories, social groups).
As for self-reference.. I don’t think you contain yourself fully, but I do think you contain a compressed and fuzzy representation of your current self
Well, this is tricky. If I can’t completely contain a representation of myself, then we have to distinguish on the one hand the containing I, and the contained, fuzzy I. If the containing I is not identical to the fuzzy I, then it seems to me you’ve been talking about the fuzzy I in the above post. But what we’re really interested in is the containing I.
Sorry, I need to be more careful with words. Let me rephrase:
I don’t think current-you contains all of the details every example of you-the-concept or a representation of all of the details about current-you, but I do think current-you contains a very compressed and fuzzy representation of your current self which is treated by the brain as a concept to sort points in thingspace into “me” and “not me” with some middle ground of “kinda me”.
I don’t think the single snapshot current-me is the only interesting part, the fuzzy concept of “me”ness which it contains seems useful in many more situations where you need to work out how to act (which will come up more clearly when I get to decision theory).
I don’t think the single snapshot current-me is the only interesting part,
No, I agree, the containing I isn’t the only interesting part. But it is an interesting part and it remains undefined. One of the most interesting elements of it is that nothing in the fuzzy me-ness really sticks: I can say I’m a student, or an atheist, or a man, but none of those things is really and essentially me. Those are continent facts. I can cease to be all of those things (to one degree or another) without ceasing to exist, and I can cease to be them at will.
But the question is really this: what do you think the containing I is, given that it’s not a concept?
hm, the way I see it “I” am a sum of my parts. If you remove or change any one non-core aspect current!me still consider the result to be me, but remove and change a large number of aspects or any particularly core ones and the result is only slightly me from current!me’s point of view.
I think that the idea of a containing “I” outside of the current!me’s physical representation of the fuzzy me concept is essentially a confusion, caused by evolution hardwring a sense of self in an environmentally effective but epistemologically incoherent way.
In a sense, though a not particularly useful one, “I” am my parts right now (single frame view).
In another sense, which I consider more useful, “I” am the high-level pattern in the arrangement of those parts.
How exactly that higher level pattern generates subjective experience is beyond what I’m trying to cover in this post, but so far the general idea that my conscious experience of being “me” is purely generated by the physical embodiment of a moderately enduring pattern is the only one which has held up to my inspection.
hm, the way I see it “I” am a sum of my parts. If you remove or change any one non-core aspect current!me still consider the result to be me, but remove and change a large number of aspects or any particularly core ones and the result is only slightly me from current!me’s point of view.
It seems to me that there are two problems with this: first, we use indexicals like ‘I’ to say things like ‘I was never the same after that’, or ‘I was born 30 years ago’ or ‘One day I’ll be dead’ all of which seem to assume a radical independence of the I from particular facts about it (even being alive!). I don’t mean to say that all of these sentences necessarily express truths, but just that they all seem to be grammatical, that is, they’re not nonsense.
The second problem is that so many of the facts about me are actually constituted by what I take the facts about me to be. I mean that I am an atheist because I take myself to be an atheist, a student because (with some paperwork) I take myself to be a student, etc. These things are true of me because my believing them to be true makes it so. And I often think of these kinds of facts about me as the most essential and important ones. The point is that I can give up on such things, and just cease to be a student, or an atheist, etc. And the one giving up on these things will be me, and in virtue of my power to do so. My giving up on these things won’t (indeed can’t) just be something that happens to me.
I think that the idea of a containing “I” outside of the current!me’s physical representation of the fuzzy me concept is essentially a confusion, caused by evolution hardwring a sense of self in an environmentally effective but epistemologically incoherent way.
Maybe, but then it’s a confusion fundamental to the proposal you’re offering: the ‘containing I’ is that ‘current!me’ that’s representing itself (imperfectly) to itself. So if the containing I is a confusion, isn’t your proposal in the same situation?
I think the first part can be answered by considering that those common language uses refer to the causal continuum “I”, which has issues when you look closely. It’s fine and handy as a shortcut for most situations because we don’t have cloning and reloading available, but talking about “I” in that way when you have more complex situations it can become incoherent.
The second.. if I’m understanding you correctly, you’re saying that you have the ability to change parts of yourself you consider to be important, and it would be you making those changes? If so, I agree with that, and would add that those changes would likely be bit by bit with each step moving further away from current!you. I’m not sure how this is a problem?
And the last part, I don’t think so, because current!me is a distinct snapshot. A physical instance of a central example of current!me’s concept of “I” which also happens to contain a representation of a concept it fits within, which anchors it to reality in a concrete way. Thinking of a “me” other than the physical and the concept seems like a confusion, but you can reason about “I” with just a physical instance and a concept.
A physical instance of a central example of current!me’s concept of “I” which also happens to contain a representation of a concept it fits within, which anchors it to reality in a concrete way.
...er, can I make a suggestion? I’m not sure if this has been taken up elsewhere, but maybe it’s just a mistake to find some physical or metaphysical explanation of personal identity. Maybe we should try thinking about it as an ethical category. I mean, maybe what counts as hen, and what doesn’t, is an ethical question sensitive to ethical contexts. Like, my arm counts as me when we’re talking about someone assaulting me, but it doesn’t when we’re talking about my accidentally whacking someone on the bus.
I’m not trying to say that personal identity is somehow non-physical, but just that asking for a physical explanation is a bit like trying to find a physical explanation of what it is to be a good bargain at the grocery store. Observing that there’s no good physical explanation of something doesn’t commit us to denying its reality, or to any kind of super-naturalism.
Yes, I think “is this me” is an ethical question, and I also think ethics is purely physical (or more specifically a concept which only affects reality via physical representations of itself). This post is mostly about trying to establish a foundation that “I” is necessarily a caused by a physical thing in our brain running a concept to approximately sort things into “me” and “not-me”, with some blurriness. More details of how “I” works and its importance are planned :).
Yes, I think “is this me” is an ethical question, and I also think ethics is purely physical (or more specifically a concept which only affects reality via physical representations of itself).
Well, let’s take for granted that there’s nothing that’s super-natural or anything like that. But I guess I’d still caution against looking for certain kinds of physical explanations when they might not be appropriate to the subject matter. Let me explain by way of a couple of clear cases, so we can try to figure out where ‘I’ stand relative to each.
So if we want an explanation of hydrogen, I think we’d do well to look into a physical explanation. For every case of hydrogen, we can observe the relevant physical system and its properties, and these physical observations will directly inform and explanation (even, a complete explanation) of hydrogen in general. Hydrogen is an ideal case of physical explanation.
But what about the ‘rook’ in the game of Chess? Every rook and every chess game is a physical system. Indeed, we could go about and look for cases of a rook, and we will always find some physical object.
But we won’t learn much about chess rooks that way. For one thing, we won’t see that much in common in how rooks are physically instantiated. Some rooks will be little plastic castles, others will be made of wood or stone. Some will be computer code, others will be just neurological. And even if we did come up with a complete list of the physical instances of chess rooks, that wouldn’t do much to explain them: in principle, I can use anything as a rook: a penny, a wad of paper, a patch of colored light, a vintage Porsche 959, anything so long as I can move it around a chess board. The rook has to have some physical properties, but observations about these properties just aren’t very interesting. We can do a physics of chess rooks, but we won’t get very much out of it.
I think ethics, politics, economics, etc. are all more like chess rooks than they are like hydrogen. There’s nothing supernatural about the ethical, but that doesn’t mean physics, or even biology, is a good place to go looking for an explanation.
Okay, I think I see where you’re coming from. Let me sum it up to see if I’m getting this right:
The important aspects of some categories of objects (aka concepts) which humans recognize is not easily reducible to constituent parts (e.g. disassemble a plastic Rook, a wooden Rook, and a memory of a Rook and there’s nothing “Rooklike” to link them).
Even not-easily reducible concepts are technically reducible (they are still physical), but looking at the smallest structure is a hilariously inefficient and ineffective way to approach understanding them.
Identity is not an easily reducible by disassemble-to-parts-method category, and like ethics, politics, etc it is vastly more sensible to understand them by higher level patterns which the human brain is good at recognizing thanks to a few billion years of evolution.
If that’s what your point is, I agree with you entirely, and I think it’s compatible with fuzzy pattern theory. I don’t think it would be sane to try and work out what to identify as current!ete by disassembling my brain and trying to construct the pattern of the “is this me” algorithm, but it is important to realize that that algorithm exists. I know I’m saying it’s useful/important a lot without showing how and why, but that is coming. I just think it requires a full post to explain and justify at all properly.
the human brain is good at recognizing thanks to a few billion years of evolution.
It’s got something to do with evolution, but I’d say much more to do with a few thousand years of cultural maturation, science, and philosophy. I don’t expect the brains of Babylonians to be much different from ours, but I also don’t think we’d get very far trying to explain ethics as we understand it to the slaves of a god-king (and certainly not to the god-king).
I know I’m saying it’s useful/important a lot without showing how and why, but that is coming. I just think it requires a full post to explain and justify at all properly.
Fair enough. I’ll look forward to your future posts.
I think this is maybe useful.. it seems like there’s two meanings of “I” which are generally tricky to differentiate between, with other options for how identity could work (physical and causal continuity) dismissed by things linked in the post.
When you ask “was I at work yesterday”, what I think you’re asking is “do I believe that a configuration of matter which was I would identify as me was at work yesterday”, essentially asking about a category of objects which is a fuzzy category over thingspace.
You’re right, concepts don’t have places and are not themselves created or destroyed. But they can gain and lose embodiments. An example: Removing every physical example of a the the concept “Object containing a clear representation of the concept platonic solids” from the universe does not destroy the platonic solids, but it does destroy all representations of them which will reduce the impact of the properties of the platonic solids from the universe until someone makes new representations, because examples of the concept cannot causally interact with the universe. Evolution needs objects to interact with the environment a lot to make more of themselves, so we care not about the higher concept being destroyed, but about physical embodiments of the concept.
As for self-reference.. I don’t think you contain yourself fully, but I do think you contain a compressed and fuzzy representation of your current self which blurs into nearby thingspace along axes you care less about (e.g. length of your hair, exact molecular weight of your spleen) but is fairly focused along axes you care about greatly (e.g. memories, social groups).
Well, this is tricky. If I can’t completely contain a representation of myself, then we have to distinguish on the one hand the containing I, and the contained, fuzzy I. If the containing I is not identical to the fuzzy I, then it seems to me you’ve been talking about the fuzzy I in the above post. But what we’re really interested in is the containing I.
Sorry, I need to be more careful with words. Let me rephrase:
I don’t think current-you contains all of the details every example of you-the-concept or a representation of all of the details about current-you, but I do think current-you contains a very compressed and fuzzy representation of your current self which is treated by the brain as a concept to sort points in thingspace into “me” and “not me” with some middle ground of “kinda me”.
I don’t think the single snapshot current-me is the only interesting part, the fuzzy concept of “me”ness which it contains seems useful in many more situations where you need to work out how to act (which will come up more clearly when I get to decision theory).
No, I agree, the containing I isn’t the only interesting part. But it is an interesting part and it remains undefined. One of the most interesting elements of it is that nothing in the fuzzy me-ness really sticks: I can say I’m a student, or an atheist, or a man, but none of those things is really and essentially me. Those are continent facts. I can cease to be all of those things (to one degree or another) without ceasing to exist, and I can cease to be them at will.
But the question is really this: what do you think the containing I is, given that it’s not a concept?
hm, the way I see it “I” am a sum of my parts. If you remove or change any one non-core aspect current!me still consider the result to be me, but remove and change a large number of aspects or any particularly core ones and the result is only slightly me from current!me’s point of view.
I think that the idea of a containing “I” outside of the current!me’s physical representation of the fuzzy me concept is essentially a confusion, caused by evolution hardwring a sense of self in an environmentally effective but epistemologically incoherent way.
In a sense, though a not particularly useful one, “I” am my parts right now (single frame view).
In another sense, which I consider more useful, “I” am the high-level pattern in the arrangement of those parts.
How exactly that higher level pattern generates subjective experience is beyond what I’m trying to cover in this post, but so far the general idea that my conscious experience of being “me” is purely generated by the physical embodiment of a moderately enduring pattern is the only one which has held up to my inspection.
It seems to me that there are two problems with this: first, we use indexicals like ‘I’ to say things like ‘I was never the same after that’, or ‘I was born 30 years ago’ or ‘One day I’ll be dead’ all of which seem to assume a radical independence of the I from particular facts about it (even being alive!). I don’t mean to say that all of these sentences necessarily express truths, but just that they all seem to be grammatical, that is, they’re not nonsense.
The second problem is that so many of the facts about me are actually constituted by what I take the facts about me to be. I mean that I am an atheist because I take myself to be an atheist, a student because (with some paperwork) I take myself to be a student, etc. These things are true of me because my believing them to be true makes it so. And I often think of these kinds of facts about me as the most essential and important ones. The point is that I can give up on such things, and just cease to be a student, or an atheist, etc. And the one giving up on these things will be me, and in virtue of my power to do so. My giving up on these things won’t (indeed can’t) just be something that happens to me.
Maybe, but then it’s a confusion fundamental to the proposal you’re offering: the ‘containing I’ is that ‘current!me’ that’s representing itself (imperfectly) to itself. So if the containing I is a confusion, isn’t your proposal in the same situation?
I think the first part can be answered by considering that those common language uses refer to the causal continuum “I”, which has issues when you look closely. It’s fine and handy as a shortcut for most situations because we don’t have cloning and reloading available, but talking about “I” in that way when you have more complex situations it can become incoherent.
The second.. if I’m understanding you correctly, you’re saying that you have the ability to change parts of yourself you consider to be important, and it would be you making those changes? If so, I agree with that, and would add that those changes would likely be bit by bit with each step moving further away from current!you. I’m not sure how this is a problem?
And the last part, I don’t think so, because current!me is a distinct snapshot. A physical instance of a central example of current!me’s concept of “I” which also happens to contain a representation of a concept it fits within, which anchors it to reality in a concrete way. Thinking of a “me” other than the physical and the concept seems like a confusion, but you can reason about “I” with just a physical instance and a concept.
...er, can I make a suggestion? I’m not sure if this has been taken up elsewhere, but maybe it’s just a mistake to find some physical or metaphysical explanation of personal identity. Maybe we should try thinking about it as an ethical category. I mean, maybe what counts as hen, and what doesn’t, is an ethical question sensitive to ethical contexts. Like, my arm counts as me when we’re talking about someone assaulting me, but it doesn’t when we’re talking about my accidentally whacking someone on the bus.
I’m not trying to say that personal identity is somehow non-physical, but just that asking for a physical explanation is a bit like trying to find a physical explanation of what it is to be a good bargain at the grocery store. Observing that there’s no good physical explanation of something doesn’t commit us to denying its reality, or to any kind of super-naturalism.
Excellent. That’s actually something I hope to explore more later.
I agree that “I” as a concept is very importantly viewed as an ethical or moral category, but was hoping to do a detour through some evolution before trying to tackle it in full.
Yes, I think “is this me” is an ethical question, and I also think ethics is purely physical (or more specifically a concept which only affects reality via physical representations of itself). This post is mostly about trying to establish a foundation that “I” is necessarily a caused by a physical thing in our brain running a concept to approximately sort things into “me” and “not-me”, with some blurriness. More details of how “I” works and its importance are planned :).
Well, let’s take for granted that there’s nothing that’s super-natural or anything like that. But I guess I’d still caution against looking for certain kinds of physical explanations when they might not be appropriate to the subject matter. Let me explain by way of a couple of clear cases, so we can try to figure out where ‘I’ stand relative to each.
So if we want an explanation of hydrogen, I think we’d do well to look into a physical explanation. For every case of hydrogen, we can observe the relevant physical system and its properties, and these physical observations will directly inform and explanation (even, a complete explanation) of hydrogen in general. Hydrogen is an ideal case of physical explanation.
But what about the ‘rook’ in the game of Chess? Every rook and every chess game is a physical system. Indeed, we could go about and look for cases of a rook, and we will always find some physical object.
But we won’t learn much about chess rooks that way. For one thing, we won’t see that much in common in how rooks are physically instantiated. Some rooks will be little plastic castles, others will be made of wood or stone. Some will be computer code, others will be just neurological. And even if we did come up with a complete list of the physical instances of chess rooks, that wouldn’t do much to explain them: in principle, I can use anything as a rook: a penny, a wad of paper, a patch of colored light, a vintage Porsche 959, anything so long as I can move it around a chess board. The rook has to have some physical properties, but observations about these properties just aren’t very interesting. We can do a physics of chess rooks, but we won’t get very much out of it.
I think ethics, politics, economics, etc. are all more like chess rooks than they are like hydrogen. There’s nothing supernatural about the ethical, but that doesn’t mean physics, or even biology, is a good place to go looking for an explanation.
Okay, I think I see where you’re coming from. Let me sum it up to see if I’m getting this right:
If that’s what your point is, I agree with you entirely, and I think it’s compatible with fuzzy pattern theory. I don’t think it would be sane to try and work out what to identify as current!ete by disassembling my brain and trying to construct the pattern of the “is this me” algorithm, but it is important to realize that that algorithm exists. I know I’m saying it’s useful/important a lot without showing how and why, but that is coming. I just think it requires a full post to explain and justify at all properly.
You have my point exactly. But...
It’s got something to do with evolution, but I’d say much more to do with a few thousand years of cultural maturation, science, and philosophy. I don’t expect the brains of Babylonians to be much different from ours, but I also don’t think we’d get very far trying to explain ethics as we understand it to the slaves of a god-king (and certainly not to the god-king).
Fair enough. I’ll look forward to your future posts.