I only added simple to indicate that nothing else is going on; it’s not a pattern plus a soul (or something else), it’s only a pattern. Everyone agrees that the pattern will be hugely complex (for humans).
And yes, I already mentioned different versions of you in the comments but didn’t want to overcomplicate things unnecessarily in this post; but one of the main reasons to be interested in this is the relation between your past and future selves.
As you say, the distance function between two encodings is currently unknown—it’s almost certainly not strictly pythagorean—some dimensions/bit-clusters are more important than others, and some will have nonlinear impact on identity. I don’t see why that makes the concept unworkable.
I’m not just saying that it’s unknown, I’m saying that it’s subjective what bits are important! You can’t define importance objectively, so we need to either rework or throw away patternism.
I’m not just saying that it’s unknown, I’m saying that it’s subjective what bits are important! You can’t define importance objectively, so we need to either rework or throw away patternism.
Oh, cool—yes, that’s an incredibly important insight. At this level, “identity” is not only not a binary choice, it’s not even consistent. Identity-for-purpose, with the result being a distance from 0 to 1, is the way we should think of it. Identity for legal purposes can use different distance functions than identity for dating, or for trust in factual claims.
I think that’s orthogonal to patternism (unless i misunderstand—is it not just another word for physicalism?)
I only added simple to indicate that nothing else is going on; it’s not a pattern plus a soul (or something else), it’s only a pattern. Everyone agrees that the pattern will be hugely complex (for humans).
And yes, I already mentioned different versions of you in the comments but didn’t want to overcomplicate things unnecessarily in this post; but one of the main reasons to be interested in this is the relation between your past and future selves.
I’m not just saying that it’s unknown, I’m saying that it’s subjective what bits are important! You can’t define importance objectively, so we need to either rework or throw away patternism.
Oh, cool—yes, that’s an incredibly important insight. At this level, “identity” is not only not a binary choice, it’s not even consistent. Identity-for-purpose, with the result being a distance from 0 to 1, is the way we should think of it. Identity for legal purposes can use different distance functions than identity for dating, or for trust in factual claims.
I think that’s orthogonal to patternism (unless i misunderstand—is it not just another word for physicalism?)