Patternism is the belief that the thing that makes ‘you’ ‘you’ can be described as a simple pattern.
What information is “simple” conveying in this description? Is it still patternism if I believe it’s a very complicated and not-currently-measurable pattern that defines different … things (which I think are _also_ just a bigger category of patterns of quantum states in areas of spacetime) which call themselves and each other “me”?
When there is a second being with the same mental pattern as you, that being is also you.
Sure, and you’ve already accepted a HUGE amount of complexity in the definition of “being”.
Note that identity is _not_ binary. It’s a question of continuity and overlap of patterns. There will (I hope) be an agent that exists tomorrow, which is more similar and connected to today’s “me” than the agent which (again, I hope) exists 25 years from now and remembers (or not) writing this post.
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 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?)
What information is “simple” conveying in this description? Is it still patternism if I believe it’s a very complicated and not-currently-measurable pattern that defines different … things (which I think are _also_ just a bigger category of patterns of quantum states in areas of spacetime) which call themselves and each other “me”?
Sure, and you’ve already accepted a HUGE amount of complexity in the definition of “being”.
Note that identity is _not_ binary. It’s a question of continuity and overlap of patterns. There will (I hope) be an agent that exists tomorrow, which is more similar and connected to today’s “me” than the agent which (again, I hope) exists 25 years from now and remembers (or not) writing this post.
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 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?)