Allow me to pose a different thought experiment that might elucidate things a bit.
Imagine that you visit a research lab where they put you under deep anesthesia. This anesthesia will not produce any dreams, just blank time. (Ordinarily, this would seem like one of those “blink and you’re awake again” types of experiences).
In this case, while you are unconscious, the scientists make a perfect clone of you with a perfect clone of your brain. They put that clone in an identical-looking room somewhere else in the facility.
The scientists also alter your original brain just ever-so-slightly by deleting a few memories. Your original brain is altered no more than it originally is when, let’s say, it has a slight alcohol hangover. But it is altered more than the clone, which has a perfect copy of your brain from before the operation.
Which body do you expect to wake up in the next morning? My intuition: the original with the slightly impaired memories—despite the fact that the pattern theory of identity would expect that one would wake up as the clone, would it not?
Of course, both will believe they are the original, and by all appearances it will be hard for outsiders who were not aware of the room layout of the building to figure out which one was the original. I don’t care about any of those questions for the purpose of this thought-experiment.
It seems to me that there can be five possibilities as to what I experience the next morning:
The body of the (ever-so-slightly) impaired original.
The body of the perfect clone.
Neither body (non-experience).
Neither body (reincarnation in a different body, or in an entirely different organism with an entirely different sort of consciousness, with no memory or trace of the previous experiences).
Somehow, both bodies at once.
So if you explained this setup to me before this whole operation and offered to pay either the original or the clone a million dollars after the experience was finished, my pre-operation self would very much prefer that the original get paid that million dollars because that’s the body I expect to wake up in after the operation.
Why? Well, we will wake up in our original bodies after dreaming or having a hangover that changes our brains a bit, no?
Are you telling me that, next time I go to sleep, if there happens to be a configuration of matter, a Boltzmann brain somewhere, that happens to pattern-match my pre-sleep brain better than the brain that my original body ends up with after the night, that my awareness will wake up in the Boltzmann brain, and THAT is what I will experience? Ha!
I have a very strong feeling that this has not happened ever before. So that means one of three things:
Boltzmann brains or copies of me somewhere else don’t exist. The brain in my bedroom the next morning is always the closest pattern-match to the brain in my bed the previous night, so that’s what my awareness adheres to all the time.
My feelings are fundamentally misleading (how so?)
Just think: if the pattern theory of identity is true, then here is what I logically expect to happen when I die:
My awareness will jump to the next-as-good clone of my original mental pattern. Whoever had the most similar memories to what my original brain had before it died, that’s whose body and brain and memories I will experience after the death of my original brain.
In that case: no cryonics needed! (As long as you are prepared to endure the world’s worst hangover where you lose all memories of your previous life, gain new memories, and basically think that you have been someone else all along. But hey: assuming that this new person has had a pretty good life up until now, I would say that this still beats non-existence!)
This also implies that, if you are a, let’s say, Jewish concentration camp prisoner who dies, the closest pattern-match to your mind the next moment that you will experience will be...probably another Jewish concentration camp prisoner. And on and on and on! Yikes!
You know how it feels when you decohere into multiple quantum “Many Worlds”? Very like that. (I don’t actually have much opinion about which quantum interpretation is right—it just gives a convenient model here.)
My awareness will jump to the next-as-good clone of my original mental pattern. Whoever had the most similar memories to what my original brain had before it died, that’s whose body and brain and memories I will experience after the death of my original brain.
More likely (if the universe or multiverse is infinite or at least big enough) it will “jump” to a clone of yours who survived or has just been resurrected by someone, reincarnated as a Boltzmann brain, and so forth. Personally I find this quite disturbing, but not really an argument against patternism.
I’m with Usul on this whole topic.
Allow me to pose a different thought experiment that might elucidate things a bit.
Imagine that you visit a research lab where they put you under deep anesthesia. This anesthesia will not produce any dreams, just blank time. (Ordinarily, this would seem like one of those “blink and you’re awake again” types of experiences).
In this case, while you are unconscious, the scientists make a perfect clone of you with a perfect clone of your brain. They put that clone in an identical-looking room somewhere else in the facility.
The scientists also alter your original brain just ever-so-slightly by deleting a few memories. Your original brain is altered no more than it originally is when, let’s say, it has a slight alcohol hangover. But it is altered more than the clone, which has a perfect copy of your brain from before the operation.
Which body do you expect to wake up in the next morning? My intuition: the original with the slightly impaired memories—despite the fact that the pattern theory of identity would expect that one would wake up as the clone, would it not?
Of course, both will believe they are the original, and by all appearances it will be hard for outsiders who were not aware of the room layout of the building to figure out which one was the original. I don’t care about any of those questions for the purpose of this thought-experiment.
It seems to me that there can be five possibilities as to what I experience the next morning:
The body of the (ever-so-slightly) impaired original.
The body of the perfect clone.
Neither body (non-experience).
Neither body (reincarnation in a different body, or in an entirely different organism with an entirely different sort of consciousness, with no memory or trace of the previous experiences).
Somehow, both bodies at once.
So if you explained this setup to me before this whole operation and offered to pay either the original or the clone a million dollars after the experience was finished, my pre-operation self would very much prefer that the original get paid that million dollars because that’s the body I expect to wake up in after the operation.
Why? Well, we will wake up in our original bodies after dreaming or having a hangover that changes our brains a bit, no?
Are you telling me that, next time I go to sleep, if there happens to be a configuration of matter, a Boltzmann brain somewhere, that happens to pattern-match my pre-sleep brain better than the brain that my original body ends up with after the night, that my awareness will wake up in the Boltzmann brain, and THAT is what I will experience? Ha!
I have a very strong feeling that this has not happened ever before. So that means one of three things:
Boltzmann brains or copies of me somewhere else don’t exist. The brain in my bedroom the next morning is always the closest pattern-match to the brain in my bed the previous night, so that’s what my awareness adheres to all the time.
My feelings are fundamentally misleading (how so?)
Just think: if the pattern theory of identity is true, then here is what I logically expect to happen when I die:
My awareness will jump to the next-as-good clone of my original mental pattern. Whoever had the most similar memories to what my original brain had before it died, that’s whose body and brain and memories I will experience after the death of my original brain.
In that case: no cryonics needed! (As long as you are prepared to endure the world’s worst hangover where you lose all memories of your previous life, gain new memories, and basically think that you have been someone else all along. But hey: assuming that this new person has had a pretty good life up until now, I would say that this still beats non-existence!)
This also implies that, if you are a, let’s say, Jewish concentration camp prisoner who dies, the closest pattern-match to your mind the next moment that you will experience will be...probably another Jewish concentration camp prisoner. And on and on and on! Yikes!
Both.
So, what will that feel like? I have a hard time imagining what it will be like to experience two bodies at once. Can you describe how that will work?
You know how it feels when you decohere into multiple quantum “Many Worlds”? Very like that. (I don’t actually have much opinion about which quantum interpretation is right—it just gives a convenient model here.)
More likely (if the universe or multiverse is infinite or at least big enough) it will “jump” to a clone of yours who survived or has just been resurrected by someone, reincarnated as a Boltzmann brain, and so forth. Personally I find this quite disturbing, but not really an argument against patternism.