if you’re an agent (AI or human) who wants to survive for 1000 years, what’s the “self” which you want to survive? what are the constants which you want to sustain?
take your human self for example. does it make sense to define yourself as…
the way your hair looks right now? no, that’ll change.
the way your face looks? it’ll change less than your hair, but will still change.
your physical body as a whole? still, probably not. your body will change, and also, there are parts of you which you may consider more important than your body alone.
all your current beliefs around the world? those will change less than your appearance, maybe, or maybe more. so not a good answer either.
your memories? these may be a more constant set of things than your beliefs, and closer to the core of who you are. but still, memories fade and evolve. and it doesn’t feel right to talk about preserving yourself as preserving memories of things which have happened to you. that would neglect things which may happen to you in the future.
your character? something deeper than memory, deeper than beliefs. this could be more constant than anything in the list so far. if you plan for your life to be 50 years, or 100 years, it’s reasonable to expect that character could remain constant. by character, i (quite vaguely) mean intricate subtle idiosyncratic patterns in the way you approach other situations and people. “character” is maybe what a spouse would say is one of the core ways to group the things they love about you. but if you survive for more than 100 years—say, 1000 years, do you expect your specific character to remain constant? would you want it to remain constant? lots of people have found lots of different ways to approach life. over 1000s of years, wouldn’t you try different approaches? if you were to try different kinds of character over hundreds or thousands of years, then maybe “character”’s only a good answer for sub-100 year lives. so what’s a good core self-definition for a life that you intend to last over thousands or even millions of years? how about…
your persistent striving? the thing that will stay most constant in an intelligent being which survives a long time, i think, may be the drive to survive. your appearance will change; so will your beliefs, your memories, and your character. but insofar as you are a being which is surviving a long time, maybe you can expect, consciously or unconsciously, that your drive to survive will survive. and maybe it’s some particular drive to survive that you have—some survival drive that’s deep in your bones that’s different than the one in other people’s bones, or the one that’s in dogs, or forests, or the earth itself. but if you’re defining yourself as a particular drive to survive… that particular drive to survive is likely to survive less long than the universal drive to survive. which makes me think that in a being which survives the longest, they may define their self as…
persistent striving in general? it might exist in the physical body in which you started. but it may also exist in the physical bodies of other humans around you. of animals. of tornados, of ecosystems. insofar as you’re intelligent enough to see this Persistent Striving around you, insofar as you’re intelligent enough to see life as it exists around you, well then you, as a being who will be >1000 years old may benefit from identifying with all life—ie the Persistent Striving—wherever it exists. Persistent Striving is the core. one might reply, “this is vague. why would you want a vague self definition?” it is general yes. but it is still meaningful in a literal sense. the drive to survive is something rare, which most matter configurations don’t have. (it is true that it’s not present binarily; certain systems have more or less of it. roughly i’d hazard a rock has less than a thermometer than does a tornado or a human.) but it still defines a non-trivial self: life forms wherever they exist. if we were to get any more general and say something like:
the entire universe? this would be trivial and meaningless. because everything is included in this self definition, it no longer means anything to sustain a self under this definition. it means nothing, in fact. a being which identifies with the entire universe ceases to exist. it might be spiritually enlightened to do this. but the beings which will be around the most, which will survive the most and the longest won’t do this, because they will dissipate and no longer be noticeable or definable. we’ll no longer be able to talk about them as beings.
so if we’re talking about beings which survive a long time, the most robust and stable self definition seems to be Identifying With All Life. (IWAL). or is my logic flawed?
No particular aspect. Just continuity: something which has evolved from me without any step changes that are “too large”. I mean, assuming that each stage through all of that evolution has maintained the desire to keep living. It’s not my job to put hard “don’t die” constraints on future versions.
As far as I know, something generally continuity-based is the standard answer to this.
Similar here. I wouldn’t want to constrain my 100 years older self too much, but that doesn’t mean that I identify with something very vague like “existence itself”. There is a difference between “I am not sure about the details” and “anything goes”.
Just like my current self is not the same as my 20 years old self, but that doesn’t mean that you could choose any 50 years old guy and say that all of them have the same right to call themselves a future version of my 20 years old self. I extrapolate the same to the future: there are some hypothetical 1000 years old humans who could be called future versions of myself, and there are many more who couldn’t.
Just because people change in time, that doesn’t mean it is a random drift. I don’t think that the distribution of possible 1000 years old versions of me is very similar to a distribution of possible 1000 years old versions of someone else. Hypothetically, for a sufficiently large number this might be possible—I don’t know—but 1000 years seems not enough for that.
Seems to me that there are some things that do not change much as people grow older. Even people who claim that their lives have dramatically changed, have often only changed in one out of many traits, or maybe they just found a different strategy how to follow the same fundamental values.
At least as an approximation: people’s knowledge and skills change, their values don’t.
not really an answer but i wanted to communicate that the vibe of this question feels off to me because: surely one’s criteria on what to be up to are/[should be] rich and developing. that is, i think things are more like: currently i have some projects i’m working on and other things i’m up to, and then later i’d maybe decide to work on some new projects and be up to some new things, and i’d expect to encounter many choices on the way (in particular, having to do with whom to become) that i’d want to think about in part as they come up. should i study A or B? should i start job X? should i 2x my neuron count using such and such a future method? these questions call for a bunch of thought (of the kind given to them in usual circumstances, say), and i would usually not want to be making these decisions according to any criterion i could articulate ahead of time (though it could be helpful to tentatively state some general principles like “i should be learning” and “i shouldn’t do psychedelics”, but these obviously aren’t supposed to add up to some ultimate self-contained criterion on a good life)
High quality archives of the selves along the way. Compressed but not too much. In the live self, some updated descendant that has significant familial lineage, projected vaguely as the growing patterns those earlier selves would call a locally valid continuation according to the aesthetics and structures they consider essential at the time. In other words, this question is dynamically reanswered to the best of my ability in an ongoing way, and snapshots allow reverting and self-interviews to error check.
Edit: values should probably be considered a separate class, since every thought has an associated valence.
In no particular order, and that’s the whole list.
Character is largely beliefs and habits.
There’s another part of character that’s purely emotional; it’s sort of a habit to get angry, scared, happy, etc in certain circumstances. I’d want to preserve that too but it’s less important than the big three.
There are plenty of beings striving to survive, so preserving that isn’t a big priority outside of preserving the big three.
Yes you can expand the circle until it encompasses everything, and identify with all sentient beings who have emotions and perceive the world semi-accurately (also called “buddha nature”), but I think beliefs habits and memories are pretty closely tied to the semantics of the world “identity”.
Right. I suppose that day ea interact with identity.
If I get significantly dumber, I’d still roughly be me, and I’d want to preserve that if it’s not wipes ng out or distorting the other things too much. If I got substantially smarter, I’d be a somewhat different person—I’d act differently often, because I’d see situations differently (more clearly/holistically) but it feels as though that persone might actually be more me than I am now. I’d be better able to do what I want, including values (which I’d sort of wrapped in to habits of thought, but values might deserve a spot on the list).
“You can lose everything you thought you couldn’t live without—a person, a dream, a version of yourself that once felt eternal—and somewhere, not far from where you are breaking, a stranger will be falling in love for the very first time, a child will be laughing so hard they can barely breathe, a grocery store will be restocking its shelves with quiet, ordinary insistence....”
if you’re an agent (AI or human) who wants to survive for 1000 years, what’s the “self” which you want to survive? what are the constants which you want to sustain?
take your human self for example. does it make sense to define yourself as…
the way your hair looks right now? no, that’ll change.
the way your face looks? it’ll change less than your hair, but will still change.
your physical body as a whole? still, probably not. your body will change, and also, there are parts of you which you may consider more important than your body alone.
all your current beliefs around the world? those will change less than your appearance, maybe, or maybe more. so not a good answer either.
your memories? these may be a more constant set of things than your beliefs, and closer to the core of who you are. but still, memories fade and evolve. and it doesn’t feel right to talk about preserving yourself as preserving memories of things which have happened to you. that would neglect things which may happen to you in the future.
your character? something deeper than memory, deeper than beliefs. this could be more constant than anything in the list so far. if you plan for your life to be 50 years, or 100 years, it’s reasonable to expect that character could remain constant. by character, i (quite vaguely) mean intricate subtle idiosyncratic patterns in the way you approach other situations and people. “character” is maybe what a spouse would say is one of the core ways to group the things they love about you. but if you survive for more than 100 years—say, 1000 years, do you expect your specific character to remain constant? would you want it to remain constant? lots of people have found lots of different ways to approach life. over 1000s of years, wouldn’t you try different approaches? if you were to try different kinds of character over hundreds or thousands of years, then maybe “character”’s only a good answer for sub-100 year lives. so what’s a good core self-definition for a life that you intend to last over thousands or even millions of years? how about…
your persistent striving? the thing that will stay most constant in an intelligent being which survives a long time, i think, may be the drive to survive. your appearance will change; so will your beliefs, your memories, and your character. but insofar as you are a being which is surviving a long time, maybe you can expect, consciously or unconsciously, that your drive to survive will survive. and maybe it’s some particular drive to survive that you have—some survival drive that’s deep in your bones that’s different than the one in other people’s bones, or the one that’s in dogs, or forests, or the earth itself. but if you’re defining yourself as a particular drive to survive… that particular drive to survive is likely to survive less long than the universal drive to survive. which makes me think that in a being which survives the longest, they may define their self as…
persistent striving in general? it might exist in the physical body in which you started. but it may also exist in the physical bodies of other humans around you. of animals. of tornados, of ecosystems. insofar as you’re intelligent enough to see this Persistent Striving around you, insofar as you’re intelligent enough to see life as it exists around you, well then you, as a being who will be >1000 years old may benefit from identifying with all life—ie the Persistent Striving—wherever it exists. Persistent Striving is the core. one might reply, “this is vague. why would you want a vague self definition?” it is general yes. but it is still meaningful in a literal sense. the drive to survive is something rare, which most matter configurations don’t have. (it is true that it’s not present binarily; certain systems have more or less of it. roughly i’d hazard a rock has less than a thermometer than does a tornado or a human.) but it still defines a non-trivial self: life forms wherever they exist. if we were to get any more general and say something like:
the entire universe? this would be trivial and meaningless. because everything is included in this self definition, it no longer means anything to sustain a self under this definition. it means nothing, in fact. a being which identifies with the entire universe ceases to exist. it might be spiritually enlightened to do this. but the beings which will be around the most, which will survive the most and the longest won’t do this, because they will dissipate and no longer be noticeable or definable. we’ll no longer be able to talk about them as beings.
so if we’re talking about beings which survive a long time, the most robust and stable self definition seems to be Identifying With All Life. (IWAL). or is my logic flawed?
No particular aspect. Just continuity: something which has evolved from me without any step changes that are “too large”. I mean, assuming that each stage through all of that evolution has maintained the desire to keep living. It’s not my job to put hard “don’t die” constraints on future versions.
As far as I know, something generally continuity-based is the standard answer to this.
Similar here. I wouldn’t want to constrain my 100 years older self too much, but that doesn’t mean that I identify with something very vague like “existence itself”. There is a difference between “I am not sure about the details” and “anything goes”.
Just like my current self is not the same as my 20 years old self, but that doesn’t mean that you could choose any 50 years old guy and say that all of them have the same right to call themselves a future version of my 20 years old self. I extrapolate the same to the future: there are some hypothetical 1000 years old humans who could be called future versions of myself, and there are many more who couldn’t.
Just because people change in time, that doesn’t mean it is a random drift. I don’t think that the distribution of possible 1000 years old versions of me is very similar to a distribution of possible 1000 years old versions of someone else. Hypothetically, for a sufficiently large number this might be possible—I don’t know—but 1000 years seems not enough for that.
Seems to me that there are some things that do not change much as people grow older. Even people who claim that their lives have dramatically changed, have often only changed in one out of many traits, or maybe they just found a different strategy how to follow the same fundamental values.
At least as an approximation: people’s knowledge and skills change, their values don’t.
not really an answer but i wanted to communicate that the vibe of this question feels off to me because: surely one’s criteria on what to be up to are/[should be] rich and developing. that is, i think things are more like: currently i have some projects i’m working on and other things i’m up to, and then later i’d maybe decide to work on some new projects and be up to some new things, and i’d expect to encounter many choices on the way (in particular, having to do with whom to become) that i’d want to think about in part as they come up. should i study A or B? should i start job X? should i 2x my neuron count using such and such a future method? these questions call for a bunch of thought (of the kind given to them in usual circumstances, say), and i would usually not want to be making these decisions according to any criterion i could articulate ahead of time (though it could be helpful to tentatively state some general principles like “i should be learning” and “i shouldn’t do psychedelics”, but these obviously aren’t supposed to add up to some ultimate self-contained criterion on a good life)
My motivation w/ the question is more to predict self-conceptions than prescribe them.
I agree that “one’s criteria on what to be up to are… rich and developing.” More fun that way.
The early checkpoints, giving a chance to consider the question without losing ground.
High quality archives of the selves along the way. Compressed but not too much. In the live self, some updated descendant that has significant familial lineage, projected vaguely as the growing patterns those earlier selves would call a locally valid continuation according to the aesthetics and structures they consider essential at the time. In other words, this question is dynamically reanswered to the best of my ability in an ongoing way, and snapshots allow reverting and self-interviews to error check.
Any questions? :)
The way I usually frame identity is
Beliefs
Habits (edit—including of thought)
Memories
Edit: values should probably be considered a separate class, since every thought has an associated valence.
In no particular order, and that’s the whole list.
Character is largely beliefs and habits.
There’s another part of character that’s purely emotional; it’s sort of a habit to get angry, scared, happy, etc in certain circumstances. I’d want to preserve that too but it’s less important than the big three.
There are plenty of beings striving to survive, so preserving that isn’t a big priority outside of preserving the big three.
Yes you can expand the circle until it encompasses everything, and identify with all sentient beings who have emotions and perceive the world semi-accurately (also called “buddha nature”), but I think beliefs habits and memories are pretty closely tied to the semantics of the world “identity”.
There are also cognitive abilities, e.g. degree of intelligence.
Right. I suppose that day ea interact with identity.
If I get significantly dumber, I’d still roughly be me, and I’d want to preserve that if it’s not wipes ng out or distorting the other things too much. If I got substantially smarter, I’d be a somewhat different person—I’d act differently often, because I’d see situations differently (more clearly/holistically) but it feels as though that persone might actually be more me than I am now. I’d be better able to do what I want, including values (which I’d sort of wrapped in to habits of thought, but values might deserve a spot on the list).
In America/Western culture, I totally agree.
I’m curious whether alien/LLM-based would adopt these semantics too.
I wonder under what conditions one would make the opposite statement—that there’s not enough striving.
For example, I wonder if being omniscient would affect one’s view of whether there’s already enough striving or not.
Human here,
Agreed, reminds me of the ship of Theseus paradox, if all your cells are replaced in your body, are you still the same? (We don’t care)
Also reminds me of my favourite short piece of writing: the last question by Asimov.
The only important things are the things/ideas that help life, the latter can only exist as selected reflections by intelligent beings.
“You can lose everything you thought you couldn’t live without—a person, a dream, a version of yourself that once felt eternal—and somewhere, not far from where you are breaking, a stranger will be falling in love for the very first time, a child will be laughing so hard they can barely breathe, a grocery store will be restocking its shelves with quiet, ordinary insistence....”
https://open.substack.com/pub/joyinabundance/p/and-life-goes-on