I see the pattern identity theory, where uploads make sense, as one that takes it as a starting point that you have an unambiguous past but no unambiguous future. You have moments of consciousness where you remember your past, which gives you identity, and lets you associate your past moments of consciousness to your current one. But there’s no way, objective or subjective, to associate your present moment of consciousness to a specific future moment of consciousness, if there are multiple such moments, such as a high-fidelity upload and the original person, who remember the same past identity equally well. A continuity identity theorist thinks that a person who gets uploaded and then dies is dead. A pattern identity theorist thinks that people die in that sense several times a second and have just gotten used to it. There are physical processes that correspond to moments of consciousness, but there’s no physical process for linking two consecutive moments of consciousness as the same consciousness, other than regular old long and short term memories.
There’s no question that the upload and the original will diverge. If I have a non-destructive upload done on me, I expect to get up from the upload couch, not wake up in the matrix, old habits and all that. And there is going to be a future me who will experience exactly that. But if the upload was successful, there’s also going to be a future me who will be very surprised to wake up staring at some fluorescent polygons, having expected to wake up on the upload coach. This is where the “no unambiguous future selves” stops being sophistry and starts paying rent for the pattern identity theorist. “Which one is the real me” is a meaningless question. All we have to go with are memories, and both of me will have my memories.
If you want to argue a pattern identity theorist out of it, you’ll want to argue why there has to necessarily be more than just memory going on with producing the sense of moment-to-moment personal continuity, and why the physically unconnected moments of consciousness model can’t be sufficient.
Thanks for the reply. I am not convinced by the pattern identity theorist because, I suppose, I do not see the importance of memory in the matter, nor the thoughts one might have about those thoughts. If I lose every memory slowly and die senile in a hospital bed I believe that it will be the same consciousness experiencing those events as is experiencing me writing these words. I identify that being which holds no resemblance to my current intellect and personality will be my Self in a way that an uploaded copy with my current memory and personality can never be. I might should have tabooed “consciousness” from the get go, as there is no one universal definition. For me it is passive awareness. This meat awareness in my head will never get out and it will die and no amount of cryonics or uploading to create a perfect copy that feels as if it is the same meat awareness will change that. Glass half-empty I suppose.
You’re still mostly just arguing for your personal intuition for the continuity theory though. People have been doing that pretty much as long as we’ve had fiction about uploads or destructive teleportation, with not much progress to the arguments. How would you convince someone sympathetic to the pattern theory that the pattern theory isn’t viable?
FWIW, after some earlier discussions about this, I’ve been meaning to look into Husserl’s phenomenology to see if there are some more interesting arguments to be found there. That stuff gets pretty weird and tricky fast though, and might be a dead end anyway.
Honestly, I’m not sure what other than intuition and subjective experience we have to go with in discussing consciousness. Even the heavy hitters in the philosophy of consciousness don’t 100% agree that it exists. I will be the first to admit I don’t have the background in pattern theory or the inclination to get into a head to head with someone who does. If pressed, right now I’m leaning towards the matter-based argument, that if consciousness is not magical then it is tied to specific sets of matter. And that a set of matter can not exist in multiple locations. Therefore a single consciousness can not exist in multiple locations. The consciousness A that I am now is in matter A. If a copy consciousness B is made in matter B and matter A continues to exist than it is reasonable to state that consciousness A remains in matter A. If matter A is destroyed there is no reason to assume consciousness A has entered matter B simply because of this. You are in A now. You will never get to B.
So, if it exists, and it is you, you’re stuck in the meat. And undeniably, someone gets stuck in the meat.
I imagine differing definitions of You, self, consciousness, etc would queer the deal before we even got started.
If pressed, right now I’m leaning towards the matter-based argument, that if consciousness is not magical then it is tied to specific sets of matter. And that a set of matter can not exist in multiple locations. Therefore a single consciousness can not exist in multiple locations. The consciousness A that I am now is in matter A.
So, there are two things we need to track here, and you’re not really making a distinction between them. There are individual moments of consciousness, which, yes, probably need to be on a physical substrate that exists in the single location. This is me saying that I’m this moment of conscious experience right now, which manifests in my physical brain. Everybody can be in agreement about this one.
Then there is the continuity of consciousness from moment to moment, which is where the problems show up. This is me saying that I’m the moment of conscious experience in my brain right now, and I’m also going to be the next moment of conscious experience in my brain.
The problems start when you want to say that the moment of consciousness in your brain now and the moment of consciousness in your brain a second in the future are both “your consciousness” and the moment of consciousness in your brain now and the moment of consciousness in your perfect upload a second in the future are not. There is no actual “consciousness” that refers to things other than the single moments for the patternist. There is momentary consciousness now, with your memories, then there is momentary consciousness later, with your slightly evolved memories. And on and on. Once you’ve gone past the single eyeblink of consciousness, you’re already gone, and a new you might show up once, never, or many times in the future. There’s nothing but the memories that stay in your brain during the gap laying the claim for the you-ness of the next moment of consciousness about to show up in a hundred or so milliseconds.
I’m going to go ahead and continue to disagree with the the pattern theorists on this one. Has the inverse of the popular “Omega is a dick with a lame sense of irony” simulation mass-murder scenario been discussed? Omega (truthful) gives you a gun. “Blow your brains out and I’ll give the other trillion copies a dollar.” It seems the pattern theorist takes the bullet or Dr Bowie-Tesla’s drowning pool with very little incentive.
The pattern theorists as you describe them would seem to take us also to the endgame of Buddhist ethics (not a Buddhist, not proselytizing for them): You are not thought, you are not feeling, you are not memory, because these things are impermanent and changing. You are the naked awareness at the center of these things in the mind of which you are aware. (I’m with them so far. Here’s where I get off): All sentient beings are points of naked awareness, by definition they are identical (naked, passive), therefore they are the same, Therefore even this self does not matter, therefore thou shall not value the self more than others. At all. On any level. All of which can lead you to bricking yourself up in a cave being the correct course of action.
To your understanding, does the pattern theorist (just curious, do you hold to the views you are describing as pattern theory?) define self at all on any level? Memory seems an absurd place to do so from, likewise personality, thought- have you heard the nonsense that thought comes up with? How can a pattern theorist justify valuing self above other? Without a continuous You, we get to the old Koan “Who sits before me now? (who/what are You?)”
“Leave me alone and go read up on pattern theory yourself, I’m not your God-damn philosophy teacher.” Is a perfectly acceptable response, by the way. No offense will be taken and it would not be an unwarranted reply. I appreciate the time you have taken to discuss this with me already.
There is some Buddhist connection, yes. The moments of experience thing is a thing in some meditation styles, and advanced meditators are actually describing something like subjective experience starting to feel like an on/off sequence instead of a continuous flux. Haven’t gone really deep into what either the Buddhist metaphysics or the meditation phenomenology says. Neuroscience also has some discrete consciousness steps stuff, but I likewise haven’t gone very deep into that. Anyway,
I’m with them so far. Here’s where I get off): All sentient beings are points of naked awareness, by definition they are identical (naked, passive), therefore they are the same, Therefore even this self does not matter, therefore thou shall not value the self more than others. At all. On any level. All of which can lead you to bricking yourself up in a cave being the correct course of action.
This is still up for grabs. Given the whole thing about memories being what makes you you, consciousness itself is nice but it’s not all that. It can still be your tribe against the world, your family against your tribe, your siblings against your family and you and your army of upload copies against your siblings and their armies of upload copies. So I’m basically thinking about this from a kin altruism and a general having people more like you closer in your circle of concern than people less like you thing. Upload copies are basically way, way closer kin than any actual kin.
So am I a pattern theorist? Not quite sure. It seems to resolve lots of paradoxes with the upload thought experiments, and I have no idea about a way to prove it wrong. (Would like to find one though, it seems sorta simplistic and we definitely still don’t understand consciousness to my satisfaction.) But like I said, if I sit down on an upload couch, I fully expect to get up from an upload couch, not suddenly be staring at a HUD saying “IN SIMULATION”, even though pattern theory seems to say that I should expect each outcome with 50 % probability. There will be someone who does wake up in the simulation with my memories in the thought experiment, no matter which interpretation, so I imagine those versions will start expecting to shift viewpoints while they do further upload scans, while the version of me who always wakes up on the upload coach (by the coin-toss tournament logic, there will be a me who never experiences waking up in a simulation, and one who always does) will continue to not expect much. I think uploads are a good idea more because of the kin selection like reasons above rather than because I’m convinced it’s a ticket to personal immortality.
I wouldn’t give a damn about aliens taking my body and brain apart every time I sleep as long as they put it back together perfectly again though, so if that makes me a pattern theorist then yes.
I very much like bringing these concepts of unambiguous past and ambiguous future to this problem.
As a pattern theorist, I agree that only memory (and the other parts of my brain’s patterns which establish my values, personality, etc) matter when it comes to who I am. If I were to wake up tomorrow with Britney Spear’s memories, values, and personality, ‘I’ will have ceased to exist in any important sense, even if that brain still had the same ‘consciousness’ that Usul describes at the bottom of his post.
Once one links personal identity to one’s memories, values and personality, the same kind of thinking about uploading/copying can be applied to future Everett branches of one’s current self, and the unambigous past/ambiguous future concepts are even more obviously important.
In a similar way to Usul not caring about his copy, one might ‘not care’ about a version of oneself in a different Everett branch, but it would still make sense to care about both future instances of yourself BEFORE the split happens, due to the fact that you are uncertain which future you will be ‘you’ (and of course, in the Everett branch case, you will experience being both, so I guess both will be ‘you’). And to bring home the main point regarding uploading/copying, I would much prefer that an entity with my memories/values/personality continue to exist in at least one Everett branch, even if such entities will cease existing in other branches.
Even though I don’t have a strong belief in quantum multiverse theory, thinking about Everett branches helped me resolve the is-the-copy-really-me? dilemma for myself, at least. Of course, the main difference (for me) is that with Everett branches, the different versions of me will never interact. With copies of me existing in the same world, I would consider my copy as a maximally close kin and my most trusted ally (as you explain elsewhere in this thread).
I see the pattern identity theory, where uploads make sense, as one that takes it as a starting point that you have an unambiguous past but no unambiguous future. You have moments of consciousness where you remember your past, which gives you identity, and lets you associate your past moments of consciousness to your current one. But there’s no way, objective or subjective, to associate your present moment of consciousness to a specific future moment of consciousness, if there are multiple such moments, such as a high-fidelity upload and the original person, who remember the same past identity equally well. A continuity identity theorist thinks that a person who gets uploaded and then dies is dead. A pattern identity theorist thinks that people die in that sense several times a second and have just gotten used to it. There are physical processes that correspond to moments of consciousness, but there’s no physical process for linking two consecutive moments of consciousness as the same consciousness, other than regular old long and short term memories.
There’s no question that the upload and the original will diverge. If I have a non-destructive upload done on me, I expect to get up from the upload couch, not wake up in the matrix, old habits and all that. And there is going to be a future me who will experience exactly that. But if the upload was successful, there’s also going to be a future me who will be very surprised to wake up staring at some fluorescent polygons, having expected to wake up on the upload coach. This is where the “no unambiguous future selves” stops being sophistry and starts paying rent for the pattern identity theorist. “Which one is the real me” is a meaningless question. All we have to go with are memories, and both of me will have my memories.
If you want to argue a pattern identity theorist out of it, you’ll want to argue why there has to necessarily be more than just memory going on with producing the sense of moment-to-moment personal continuity, and why the physically unconnected moments of consciousness model can’t be sufficient.
Thanks for the reply. I am not convinced by the pattern identity theorist because, I suppose, I do not see the importance of memory in the matter, nor the thoughts one might have about those thoughts. If I lose every memory slowly and die senile in a hospital bed I believe that it will be the same consciousness experiencing those events as is experiencing me writing these words. I identify that being which holds no resemblance to my current intellect and personality will be my Self in a way that an uploaded copy with my current memory and personality can never be. I might should have tabooed “consciousness” from the get go, as there is no one universal definition. For me it is passive awareness. This meat awareness in my head will never get out and it will die and no amount of cryonics or uploading to create a perfect copy that feels as if it is the same meat awareness will change that. Glass half-empty I suppose.
You’re still mostly just arguing for your personal intuition for the continuity theory though. People have been doing that pretty much as long as we’ve had fiction about uploads or destructive teleportation, with not much progress to the arguments. How would you convince someone sympathetic to the pattern theory that the pattern theory isn’t viable?
FWIW, after some earlier discussions about this, I’ve been meaning to look into Husserl’s phenomenology to see if there are some more interesting arguments to be found there. That stuff gets pretty weird and tricky fast though, and might be a dead end anyway.
Honestly, I’m not sure what other than intuition and subjective experience we have to go with in discussing consciousness. Even the heavy hitters in the philosophy of consciousness don’t 100% agree that it exists. I will be the first to admit I don’t have the background in pattern theory or the inclination to get into a head to head with someone who does. If pressed, right now I’m leaning towards the matter-based argument, that if consciousness is not magical then it is tied to specific sets of matter. And that a set of matter can not exist in multiple locations. Therefore a single consciousness can not exist in multiple locations. The consciousness A that I am now is in matter A. If a copy consciousness B is made in matter B and matter A continues to exist than it is reasonable to state that consciousness A remains in matter A. If matter A is destroyed there is no reason to assume consciousness A has entered matter B simply because of this. You are in A now. You will never get to B.
So, if it exists, and it is you, you’re stuck in the meat. And undeniably, someone gets stuck in the meat.
I imagine differing definitions of You, self, consciousness, etc would queer the deal before we even got started.
So, there are two things we need to track here, and you’re not really making a distinction between them. There are individual moments of consciousness, which, yes, probably need to be on a physical substrate that exists in the single location. This is me saying that I’m this moment of conscious experience right now, which manifests in my physical brain. Everybody can be in agreement about this one.
Then there is the continuity of consciousness from moment to moment, which is where the problems show up. This is me saying that I’m the moment of conscious experience in my brain right now, and I’m also going to be the next moment of conscious experience in my brain.
The problems start when you want to say that the moment of consciousness in your brain now and the moment of consciousness in your brain a second in the future are both “your consciousness” and the moment of consciousness in your brain now and the moment of consciousness in your perfect upload a second in the future are not. There is no actual “consciousness” that refers to things other than the single moments for the patternist. There is momentary consciousness now, with your memories, then there is momentary consciousness later, with your slightly evolved memories. And on and on. Once you’ve gone past the single eyeblink of consciousness, you’re already gone, and a new you might show up once, never, or many times in the future. There’s nothing but the memories that stay in your brain during the gap laying the claim for the you-ness of the next moment of consciousness about to show up in a hundred or so milliseconds.
I’m going to go ahead and continue to disagree with the the pattern theorists on this one. Has the inverse of the popular “Omega is a dick with a lame sense of irony” simulation mass-murder scenario been discussed? Omega (truthful) gives you a gun. “Blow your brains out and I’ll give the other trillion copies a dollar.” It seems the pattern theorist takes the bullet or Dr Bowie-Tesla’s drowning pool with very little incentive.
The pattern theorists as you describe them would seem to take us also to the endgame of Buddhist ethics (not a Buddhist, not proselytizing for them): You are not thought, you are not feeling, you are not memory, because these things are impermanent and changing. You are the naked awareness at the center of these things in the mind of which you are aware. (I’m with them so far. Here’s where I get off): All sentient beings are points of naked awareness, by definition they are identical (naked, passive), therefore they are the same, Therefore even this self does not matter, therefore thou shall not value the self more than others. At all. On any level. All of which can lead you to bricking yourself up in a cave being the correct course of action.
To your understanding, does the pattern theorist (just curious, do you hold to the views you are describing as pattern theory?) define self at all on any level? Memory seems an absurd place to do so from, likewise personality, thought- have you heard the nonsense that thought comes up with? How can a pattern theorist justify valuing self above other? Without a continuous You, we get to the old Koan “Who sits before me now? (who/what are You?)”
“Leave me alone and go read up on pattern theory yourself, I’m not your God-damn philosophy teacher.” Is a perfectly acceptable response, by the way. No offense will be taken and it would not be an unwarranted reply. I appreciate the time you have taken to discuss this with me already.
There is some Buddhist connection, yes. The moments of experience thing is a thing in some meditation styles, and advanced meditators are actually describing something like subjective experience starting to feel like an on/off sequence instead of a continuous flux. Haven’t gone really deep into what either the Buddhist metaphysics or the meditation phenomenology says. Neuroscience also has some discrete consciousness steps stuff, but I likewise haven’t gone very deep into that. Anyway,
This is still up for grabs. Given the whole thing about memories being what makes you you, consciousness itself is nice but it’s not all that. It can still be your tribe against the world, your family against your tribe, your siblings against your family and you and your army of upload copies against your siblings and their armies of upload copies. So I’m basically thinking about this from a kin altruism and a general having people more like you closer in your circle of concern than people less like you thing. Upload copies are basically way, way closer kin than any actual kin.
So am I a pattern theorist? Not quite sure. It seems to resolve lots of paradoxes with the upload thought experiments, and I have no idea about a way to prove it wrong. (Would like to find one though, it seems sorta simplistic and we definitely still don’t understand consciousness to my satisfaction.) But like I said, if I sit down on an upload couch, I fully expect to get up from an upload couch, not suddenly be staring at a HUD saying “IN SIMULATION”, even though pattern theory seems to say that I should expect each outcome with 50 % probability. There will be someone who does wake up in the simulation with my memories in the thought experiment, no matter which interpretation, so I imagine those versions will start expecting to shift viewpoints while they do further upload scans, while the version of me who always wakes up on the upload coach (by the coin-toss tournament logic, there will be a me who never experiences waking up in a simulation, and one who always does) will continue to not expect much. I think uploads are a good idea more because of the kin selection like reasons above rather than because I’m convinced it’s a ticket to personal immortality.
I wouldn’t give a damn about aliens taking my body and brain apart every time I sleep as long as they put it back together perfectly again though, so if that makes me a pattern theorist then yes.
No, you’re not even that.
Yep. And “Self”. These are tricky terms that guarantee confusion.
I very much like bringing these concepts of unambiguous past and ambiguous future to this problem.
As a pattern theorist, I agree that only memory (and the other parts of my brain’s patterns which establish my values, personality, etc) matter when it comes to who I am. If I were to wake up tomorrow with Britney Spear’s memories, values, and personality, ‘I’ will have ceased to exist in any important sense, even if that brain still had the same ‘consciousness’ that Usul describes at the bottom of his post.
Once one links personal identity to one’s memories, values and personality, the same kind of thinking about uploading/copying can be applied to future Everett branches of one’s current self, and the unambigous past/ambiguous future concepts are even more obviously important.
In a similar way to Usul not caring about his copy, one might ‘not care’ about a version of oneself in a different Everett branch, but it would still make sense to care about both future instances of yourself BEFORE the split happens, due to the fact that you are uncertain which future you will be ‘you’ (and of course, in the Everett branch case, you will experience being both, so I guess both will be ‘you’). And to bring home the main point regarding uploading/copying, I would much prefer that an entity with my memories/values/personality continue to exist in at least one Everett branch, even if such entities will cease existing in other branches.
Even though I don’t have a strong belief in quantum multiverse theory, thinking about Everett branches helped me resolve the is-the-copy-really-me? dilemma for myself, at least. Of course, the main difference (for me) is that with Everett branches, the different versions of me will never interact. With copies of me existing in the same world, I would consider my copy as a maximally close kin and my most trusted ally (as you explain elsewhere in this thread).