Thank you for the thoughtful reply. I see the problem with overly cavalier attitudes to personal identity as a reproducible pattern, but I’m not quite willing to let the continuous process view out of the hook that easily either.
It seems awfully convenient that your posited process of personal identity survives exactly those events, blinking ones eyes, epileptic fits, sleep, coma, which are not assumed to disrupt personal identity in everyday thought. Unless we have some actual neuroscience to point to, all I know is that I’m conscious right now. I don’t see why I should assume that whatever process creates my conscious feeling of self is tied exactly to the layer of physical metabolism. It could be dissolved and created anew several times a second, or it could vanish whenever I lose consciousness. I (or the new me) would be none the wiser, since the consciousness going away or coming into being doesn’t feel like anything by itself. Assuming that the continuity of a physical system is indeed vital, it could be that it’s tied to cellular metabolism in exactly the convenient way, but I’m not buying an argument that seems to basically come down to an appeal to common sense.
This is also why I’m a bit wary of your answer to the thought experiment. I’m not entirely sure how the process of discovery you describe would happen. Suppose that people today do neuroscience, and identify properties that seem to always be present in the brains of awake, alert and therefore supposedly conscious people. These properties vanish when the people lose consciousness. Most likely scientists would not conclude that the dissolution of this state intrinsically tied to consciousness means that the subject’s personal identity is gone, since common-sense reason assures us that we retain our personal identity through unconsciousness. I don’t see any way of actually knowing this though. Going to sleep and waking up would feel exactly the same for the sleep-goer and up-waker if the unconsciousness caused a destruction and reconstruction of personal identity than if it would not. I assume that people living in a society with ubiquitous revival from zero metabolism would have similar preconceptions about the revival. The situation is of course likely to be different once we have a better understanding of exactly how the brain works, but lacking that understanding, I’m having some trouble envisioning exactly how the destruction of personal identity could be determined to be intractably tied to the observed entity X.
Finally there’s the question of exactly what it means for a physical system to be intrinsically tied to being continuous in space-time. I can’t think of any phenomenon in classical mechanics where I could point to any property of the system that would be disrupted if the system got disassembled and reassembled mid-evolution. There may be something like that in quantum physics though, I don’t have much intuition regarding that.
It seems awfully convenient that your posited process of personal identity survives exactly those events, blinking ones eyes, epileptic fits, sleep, coma, which are not assumed to disrupt personal identity in everyday thought.
The philosophical habit of skeptically deconstructing basic appearances seems to prepare people badly for the task of scientifically understanding consciousness. When considering the relationship between mind and matter, it’s a little peculiar to immediately jump to complicated possibilities (“whatever process creates my conscious feeling of self … could be dissolved and created anew several times a second”) or to the possibility that appearances are radically misleading (consciousness might be constantly “going away or coming into being” without any impact on the apparent continuity of experience or of personal existence). Just because there might be an elephant around the next corner doesn’t mean we should attach much significance to the possibility.
I’m not entirely sure how the process of discovery you describe would happen… The situation is of course likely to be different once we have a better understanding of exactly how the brain works, but lacking that understanding, I’m having some trouble envisioning exactly how the destruction of personal identity could be determined to be intractably tied to the observed entity X.
It is unlikely that society would develop the capacity for mind uploading and cryonic resurrection without also coming to understand, very thoroughly, how the brain works. We may think we can imagine these procedures being performed locally in the brain, with the global result being achieved by brute force, without a systemic understanding. But to upload or reanimate you do have to know how to put the pieces back together, and the ability to perform local reassembly of parts correctly, in a physical or computational sense, also implies some ability to perform local reassembly conceptually.
In fact it would be reasonable to argue that without a systemic understanding, attempts at uploading and cryonic restoration would be a game of trial and error, producing biased copies which deviate from their originals in unpredictable ways. Suppose you use high-resolution fMRI time series to develop state-machine simulations of microscopic volumes in the brain of your subject (each such “voxel” consisting of a few hundred neighboring neurons). You will be developing a causal model of the parts of the subject’s brain by analysing the time series. It’s easy to imagine the analysis assuming that interactions only occur between neighboring voxels, or even next-nearest neighbors, and thereby overlooking long-range interactions due to long axonal fibers. The resulting upload will have lost some of the causal structure of its prototype.
The possibility of elementary errors like this, to say nothing of whatever more subtle mistakes may occur, implies that we can’t really trust procedures like this without simultaneously developing that “better understanding of exactly how the brain works”.
I can’t think of any phenomenon in classical mechanics where I could point to any property of the system that would be disrupted if the system got disassembled and reassembled mid-evolution.
How about the property of being an asymptotically bound system, in the absence of active disassembly by external forces? To me that still seems way too weak to be the ontological basis of physical identity, but that is (more or less) the philosopher Mario Bunge’s definition of systemhood. (Btw, Bunge was a physicist before he was a philosopher.)
The philosophical habit of skeptically deconstructing basic appearances seems to prepare people badly for the task of scientifically understanding consciousness. When considering the relationship between mind and matter, it’s a little peculiar to immediately jump to complicated possibilities
It wasn’t philosophers who came up with general relativity and quantum mechanics when everyday intuition about nature didn’t quite add up in some obscure corner cases. Coming up with a simple model that seems to resolve contradictions even if it doesn’t quite fit everyday intuition seems to be useful in gaining a better understanding of things.
I’m also having genuine difficulties going anywhere past the everyday intuition with the idea of the discontinuity of personal identity separate from the discontinuity of mindstate. The idea of there being only a sequence of conscious moments instead of an intrinsic continuity doesn’t present any immediately obvious contradiction and doesn’t have the confusion of exactly what the mindstate-independent component of continuous personal is really supposed to be.
Of course going with the mindstate history view, now the difference becomes the sliding scale of possible differences from the previous state. It looks like personal continuity would become a matter of degree rather than a binary thing, which pushes things further into the unintuitive.
I can’t think of any phenomenon in classical mechanics where I could point to any property of the system that would be disrupted if the system got disassembled and reassembled mid-evolution.
How about the property of being an asymptotically bound system, in the absence of active disassembly by external forces?
I’m afraid I don’t understand what that means. Can you give more concrete examples of physical things that do or don’t have this property?
The idea of there being only a sequence of conscious moments instead of an intrinsic continuity doesn’t present any immediately obvious contradiction
It contradicts the experience of time passing—the experience of change. The passage of time is an appearance, and an appearance is something stronger than an intuition. An intuition is a sort of guess about the truth, and may or may not be true, but one normally supposes that appearances definitely exist, at least as appearances. The object implied by a hallucination may not exist, but the hallucination itself does exist. It is always a very radical move to assert that an alleged appearance does not exist even on the plane of appearance. When you deny the existence of a subject which persists in time and which experiences time during that persistent existence, you are right on the edge of denying a fundamental appearance, or perhaps over the edge already.
Normally one supposes that there is an elemental experience of time flowing, and that this experience itself exists in time and somehow endures through time. When you disintegrate temporal experience into a set of distinct momentary experiences not actually joined by temporal flow, the most you can do to retain the appearance of flow is to say that each momentary experience has an illusion of flow. Nothing is ever actually happening in consciousness, but it always looks like it is. Consciousness in every moment is a static thing, but it always has an illusion of change embedded in it. (I suppose you could have a wacky theory of dynamic momentary experiences, whereby they’re all still distinct, but they do come into and then go out of existence, and the momentary appearance of flow is somehow derived from this; the illusion would then be the illusion of persistent flow.)
To sum up, it’s hard to have an actual experience of persistent flow without actually persisting. If you deny that, then either the experience of persistence or the experience of flow has to be called an illusion. And if one becomes willing to assert the persistence of the perceiver, the one having the experience, then there’s no particular reason to be minimalist about it—which I think would be the next step up for someone retreating from a position of temporal atomism. “OK, when I’m aware that time is passing, maybe it’s likely that I persistently exist throughout that experience. But what about when I’m just in the moment, and there’s a gap in time before I contrast the present with the past via memory? How do I know that there was continuity?” The simplest interpretation of this is to say that there was continuity, but you weren’t paying attention to it.
How about the property of being an asymptotically bound system, in the absence of active disassembly by external forces?
I’m afraid I don’t understand what that means. Can you give more concrete examples of physical things that do or don’t have this property?
Consider two gravitating objects. If they orbit a common center of gravity forever, we can call that asymptotically bound; if they eventually fly apart and become arbitrarily distant, they are asymptotically free. You could start with a system which, in the absence of perturbing influences, is asymptotically bound; then perturb it until it became asymptotically free, and then perturb it again in order to restore asymptotic boundedness.
Thank you for the thoughtful reply. I see the problem with overly cavalier attitudes to personal identity as a reproducible pattern, but I’m not quite willing to let the continuous process view out of the hook that easily either.
It seems awfully convenient that your posited process of personal identity survives exactly those events, blinking ones eyes, epileptic fits, sleep, coma, which are not assumed to disrupt personal identity in everyday thought. Unless we have some actual neuroscience to point to, all I know is that I’m conscious right now. I don’t see why I should assume that whatever process creates my conscious feeling of self is tied exactly to the layer of physical metabolism. It could be dissolved and created anew several times a second, or it could vanish whenever I lose consciousness. I (or the new me) would be none the wiser, since the consciousness going away or coming into being doesn’t feel like anything by itself. Assuming that the continuity of a physical system is indeed vital, it could be that it’s tied to cellular metabolism in exactly the convenient way, but I’m not buying an argument that seems to basically come down to an appeal to common sense.
This is also why I’m a bit wary of your answer to the thought experiment. I’m not entirely sure how the process of discovery you describe would happen. Suppose that people today do neuroscience, and identify properties that seem to always be present in the brains of awake, alert and therefore supposedly conscious people. These properties vanish when the people lose consciousness. Most likely scientists would not conclude that the dissolution of this state intrinsically tied to consciousness means that the subject’s personal identity is gone, since common-sense reason assures us that we retain our personal identity through unconsciousness. I don’t see any way of actually knowing this though. Going to sleep and waking up would feel exactly the same for the sleep-goer and up-waker if the unconsciousness caused a destruction and reconstruction of personal identity than if it would not. I assume that people living in a society with ubiquitous revival from zero metabolism would have similar preconceptions about the revival. The situation is of course likely to be different once we have a better understanding of exactly how the brain works, but lacking that understanding, I’m having some trouble envisioning exactly how the destruction of personal identity could be determined to be intractably tied to the observed entity X.
Finally there’s the question of exactly what it means for a physical system to be intrinsically tied to being continuous in space-time. I can’t think of any phenomenon in classical mechanics where I could point to any property of the system that would be disrupted if the system got disassembled and reassembled mid-evolution. There may be something like that in quantum physics though, I don’t have much intuition regarding that.
The philosophical habit of skeptically deconstructing basic appearances seems to prepare people badly for the task of scientifically understanding consciousness. When considering the relationship between mind and matter, it’s a little peculiar to immediately jump to complicated possibilities (“whatever process creates my conscious feeling of self … could be dissolved and created anew several times a second”) or to the possibility that appearances are radically misleading (consciousness might be constantly “going away or coming into being” without any impact on the apparent continuity of experience or of personal existence). Just because there might be an elephant around the next corner doesn’t mean we should attach much significance to the possibility.
It is unlikely that society would develop the capacity for mind uploading and cryonic resurrection without also coming to understand, very thoroughly, how the brain works. We may think we can imagine these procedures being performed locally in the brain, with the global result being achieved by brute force, without a systemic understanding. But to upload or reanimate you do have to know how to put the pieces back together, and the ability to perform local reassembly of parts correctly, in a physical or computational sense, also implies some ability to perform local reassembly conceptually.
In fact it would be reasonable to argue that without a systemic understanding, attempts at uploading and cryonic restoration would be a game of trial and error, producing biased copies which deviate from their originals in unpredictable ways. Suppose you use high-resolution fMRI time series to develop state-machine simulations of microscopic volumes in the brain of your subject (each such “voxel” consisting of a few hundred neighboring neurons). You will be developing a causal model of the parts of the subject’s brain by analysing the time series. It’s easy to imagine the analysis assuming that interactions only occur between neighboring voxels, or even next-nearest neighbors, and thereby overlooking long-range interactions due to long axonal fibers. The resulting upload will have lost some of the causal structure of its prototype.
The possibility of elementary errors like this, to say nothing of whatever more subtle mistakes may occur, implies that we can’t really trust procedures like this without simultaneously developing that “better understanding of exactly how the brain works”.
How about the property of being an asymptotically bound system, in the absence of active disassembly by external forces? To me that still seems way too weak to be the ontological basis of physical identity, but that is (more or less) the philosopher Mario Bunge’s definition of systemhood. (Btw, Bunge was a physicist before he was a philosopher.)
It wasn’t philosophers who came up with general relativity and quantum mechanics when everyday intuition about nature didn’t quite add up in some obscure corner cases. Coming up with a simple model that seems to resolve contradictions even if it doesn’t quite fit everyday intuition seems to be useful in gaining a better understanding of things.
I’m also having genuine difficulties going anywhere past the everyday intuition with the idea of the discontinuity of personal identity separate from the discontinuity of mindstate. The idea of there being only a sequence of conscious moments instead of an intrinsic continuity doesn’t present any immediately obvious contradiction and doesn’t have the confusion of exactly what the mindstate-independent component of continuous personal is really supposed to be.
Of course going with the mindstate history view, now the difference becomes the sliding scale of possible differences from the previous state. It looks like personal continuity would become a matter of degree rather than a binary thing, which pushes things further into the unintuitive.
I’m afraid I don’t understand what that means. Can you give more concrete examples of physical things that do or don’t have this property?
It contradicts the experience of time passing—the experience of change. The passage of time is an appearance, and an appearance is something stronger than an intuition. An intuition is a sort of guess about the truth, and may or may not be true, but one normally supposes that appearances definitely exist, at least as appearances. The object implied by a hallucination may not exist, but the hallucination itself does exist. It is always a very radical move to assert that an alleged appearance does not exist even on the plane of appearance. When you deny the existence of a subject which persists in time and which experiences time during that persistent existence, you are right on the edge of denying a fundamental appearance, or perhaps over the edge already.
Normally one supposes that there is an elemental experience of time flowing, and that this experience itself exists in time and somehow endures through time. When you disintegrate temporal experience into a set of distinct momentary experiences not actually joined by temporal flow, the most you can do to retain the appearance of flow is to say that each momentary experience has an illusion of flow. Nothing is ever actually happening in consciousness, but it always looks like it is. Consciousness in every moment is a static thing, but it always has an illusion of change embedded in it. (I suppose you could have a wacky theory of dynamic momentary experiences, whereby they’re all still distinct, but they do come into and then go out of existence, and the momentary appearance of flow is somehow derived from this; the illusion would then be the illusion of persistent flow.)
To sum up, it’s hard to have an actual experience of persistent flow without actually persisting. If you deny that, then either the experience of persistence or the experience of flow has to be called an illusion. And if one becomes willing to assert the persistence of the perceiver, the one having the experience, then there’s no particular reason to be minimalist about it—which I think would be the next step up for someone retreating from a position of temporal atomism. “OK, when I’m aware that time is passing, maybe it’s likely that I persistently exist throughout that experience. But what about when I’m just in the moment, and there’s a gap in time before I contrast the present with the past via memory? How do I know that there was continuity?” The simplest interpretation of this is to say that there was continuity, but you weren’t paying attention to it.
Consider two gravitating objects. If they orbit a common center of gravity forever, we can call that asymptotically bound; if they eventually fly apart and become arbitrarily distant, they are asymptotically free. You could start with a system which, in the absence of perturbing influences, is asymptotically bound; then perturb it until it became asymptotically free, and then perturb it again in order to restore asymptotic boundedness.