I took a stab at dissolving personal identity, and managed to do so to my own satisfaction. Most people seemed to feel like this made progress but did not actually solve the question, however.
Short version of my personal answer: “personal identity” doesn’t actually correspond with anything fundamental in the world, but for whatever reason, our brains seem to include planning machinery that’s based on subjective expectation (“if I do this, what do I expect to experience as a result?”) and which drives our behavior more strongly than abstract reasoning does. Since you can’t have subjective expectation without some definition for a “self”, our brains always end up having some (implicit or explicit) model for continuity of self that they use for making decisions. But at least in epistemic terms, there doesn’t seem to be any reason to assume that one definition would be better than any other. In instrumental terms, some definitions might work better than others, since different conceptions of personal identity will lead to different kinds of actions.
Good short version! I would just like to emphasize that to the extent we care about personal identity, the thing we care about is some really complicated implicit definition dictated by how our brains anticipate things, and that’s totally okay.
Yes, and the thing that we care about also varies even within a single brain. For instance, my verbal loop/System 2 believes basically Parfit’s theory of identity, and given enough time to reflect I would probably make decisions based on it, but my System 1 is still uncomfortable with the idea.
That said, this is still worth arguing about. By analogy to ethics, the thing we (intuitively) care about there is some really complicated implicit definition, but that definition is inconsistent and probably leads to the ethical equivalent of dutch-booking, so many people here choose to overrule their intuitions and go with utilitarianism when the two conflict. There’s not necessarily any theory of ethics that’s definitively right, but there are certainly theories that are definitively wrong, and trying to construct a logical ethics that coincides as much as possible with our intuitive beliefs will help us iron out bugs and biases in those intuitive beliefs.
The same goes for identity—that’s why we should try to construct a theory that we think is consistent and also captures as much of our intuition as possible.
And the intuitions to be captured are not only those which say “I would anticipate that experience” or “I would not”. They also include intuitions about, for example, how much importance it would be reasonable to place on various details of the causal links between me-now and various possible future people. The “self” we intuitively believe in seems to lack any appropriate and real physical or metaphysical foundation—now what?
Like Parfit, I find that my new reflective equilibrium places less importance on personal identity. Specifically, regarding cryonics: ordinary reproduction and cultural transmission look like cheaper and more effective ways of leaving something-of-me in the future world, in the ways I now care about.
Like Parfit, I find that my new reflective equilibrium places less importance on personal identity.
Why?
I have read Parfit-type arguments that advocate a reductionist concept of personal identity. I found them convincing. But it did not change my values at all, it just made me think about them more clearly. I came to realize that when I said someone is the “same person” as their past self, what it meant was something like “they have the same memories, personality, and values as the past person.” But this didn’t change my stance on anything. I still care about the same things I did before, I’m just better at articulating what those things are.
In my view, future people created by the means you mention do not have sufficiently similar memories, personalities, values, and psychological continuity with me to satisfy my desire to continue living. I want there to be other people in the future, but this is purely for idealistic and altruistic reasons, not because of any form of self-interest.
In fact, since studying Parfit’s views on population ethics, I’ve actually come to the conclusion that personal identity is in some ways, the most important part of morality. I think that the “original sin” of population ethics was attempting to remove it from the equation. I’m not advocating unequal treatment of whichever people end up existing or anything like that. But I do think that a person’s identity, in addition to their level of welfare, should determine whether or not their creation makes the world better or worse. A world with a lower total amount of welfare may be better than one one with a higher total, if the identities of its inhabitants are different (for instance, I would rate a world of humans with normal values to be better than a world full of wireheads, even if the wireheads are better off, as long as both worlds have positive total utility).
I want there to be other people in the future, but this is purely for idealistic and altruistic reasons, not because of any form of self-interest.
I think that on the reductionist understanding of personal identity, that distinction breaks down. Consider a fairly typical “altruistic” act: I see a person heavily loaded with packages and I hold the doors open for them. Why? Well, I can see that it would suck badly to have to deal with the doors and packages simultaneously, and that it would suck a lot less to deal with the doors and packages separately. Now consider a fairly typical “selfish” act, where I plan to bring some packages into my building, so I prop the doors open beforehand. Why? Because I can see that it would suck badly to have to deal with the doors and packages simultaneously … There isn’t a lot of attention to the underlying facts of same memories, personality, etc. - the reduction-base for personal identity according to reductionism—in either case. Instead, the focus is on the quality of experiences and activities of the person(s) involved.
If you’re a non-reductionist who believes in a fundamental metaphysical ghost-in-the-machine, you could assert that there’s some extra step of indirection in the altruistic case: that person’s experience would be similar to mine—which distinguishes it from the selfish motivation. But that’s not the case for the reductionist, or more precisely, the indirection applies in both cases because neither future experience is fundamentally linked to my-experience-now.
Note that there can be differences in the average intensity or frequency of response to one’s own plight, versus that of others, without there being any difference in kind in those cases in which “altruistic” motivations do occur. Similarly, there can be, and typically are, differences in the intensity and frequency of response to one’s own near future versus one’s farther future.
I think that on the reductionist understanding of personal identity, that distinction breaks down. Consider a fairly typical “altruistic” act: I see a person heavily loaded with packages and I hold the doors open for them … There isn’t a lot of attention to the underlying facts of same memories, personality, etc. - the reduction-base for personal identity according to reductionism—in either case. Instead, the focus is on the quality of experiences and activities of the person(s) involved.
A person who has a non-reductionist understanding of personal identity who believes in acting in an impartial fashion towards others would behave in exactly the same way. I don’t see how reductionism adds anything.
The argument that we ought to behave in an impartial fashion towards other people because personal identity isn’t a coherent concept reminds me of the argument that we ought to not be racist because race isn’t a coherent concept. I thought that racism was wrong long before I ever considered whether race was a coherent concept or not, and I thought partiality was wrong before I thought about the coherency of personal identity. I don’t see either argument as giving me any additional reason to oppose those things.
But that’s not the case for the reductionist, or more precisely, the indirection applies in both cases because neither future experience is fundamentally linked to my-experience-now.
It’s not fundamentally linked in some sort of ghost-in-a-machine sense. But “my” future experience is linked in ways that “their” future experience is not. To put it in reductionist lingo, the unit that is processing the current experiences expects to evolve into the unit that will process those future experiences, while retaining many of its original properties.
Another way of putting it is that I think of myself as a four-dimensional object, which has boundaries in both space and time. It’s true that these boundaries are fuzzy. They are not sharp, well-defined, or ontologically fundamental. But they are there nonetheless. And saying that FutureMe is the same person as PresentMe but FutureObama is not makes just as much since as saying that PresentMe is me, but PresentRubberDuckyOnMyDesk is not. The rubber ducky on my desk is a different three dimensional object than me, and Barack Obama is a different four dimensional object than me.
Note that there can be differences in the average intensity or frequency of response to one’s own plight, versus that of others
If you truly reject the concept of personal identity it’s not really possible to respond to anything. The very act of thinking about how to respond “kills” thousands of yous and creates new yous before the thought is even complete. I think that the 4D object concept makes much more sense.
Now, you might wonder why I make such a big deal about this, if I believe that ethics prescribes the exact same behavior regardless of the coherency of personal identity. It’s because, as I said in my previous post, in population ethics I believe personal identity is the most important thing there is. For instance, I believe that a world where a person lives a good long life is better by far than one where a person dies and is replaced by a new person who experiences the same amount of wellbeing as the dead person would have if they’d lived. The fact that both scenarios contain the same total amount of wellbeing is not relevant.
I thought partiality was wrong before I thought about the coherency of personal identity. I don’t see either argument as giving me any additional reason to oppose those things.
That’s not my argument—rather, I simply point out the highly limited usefulness of dividing the space of concerns into “altruistic” versus “self-interested” categories. These are not two different kinds of concerns (at least to a clear-headed reductionist), they are just two different locations, or directions of concern. Without locating the concern in a history and causal trajectory, and just looking at the felt quality of concern, it’s not possible to categorize it as “self” or “other”.
You said earlier:
I want there to be other people in the future, but this is purely for idealistic and altruistic reasons, not because of any form of self-interest.
That alleged contrast is what I find wanting.
I don’t have any objection to taking a 4D view of objects, including people. Whatever works for the task at hand. I also don’t reject the concept of personal identity; I just put it in its place.
For instance, I believe that a world where a person lives a good long life is better by far than one where a person dies and is replaced by a new person who experiences the same amount of wellbeing as the dead person would have if they’d lived.
A lot of what is valuable in life requires a long time-horizon of highly integrated memory, intention, and action. Normally (but not by any necessity) those long spans of highly coherent activity occur within a single person. There is more to life than moment-to-moment well-being. So I would agree that your first scenario is better—in almost all cases.
Why is this so, given that both ordinary reproduction and culturally transmission would mean the loss of a lot of details about yourself? Your genetic code, for a start.
True. The answer is complex, but rather than writing a book, I’ll just say that on reflection, a lot of details about myself don’t matter to me any more. They still matter to my unreflective System 1 thought and emotion processes, but cryonics was never very attractive to System 1 in the first place.
I think an important part of the rationalist’s plight is attempting to understand the design intents behind these built-in unapologetic old mechanisms for recognizing ourselves in the world, which any self-preservation machine capable of rationality must surely have. But I don’t know if we can ever really understand them, they wern’t designed to be understood, in fact they seem to be designed to permit being misunderstood to a disturbing degree. I find that often when I think “I” have won, finally achieved a some sense of self-comprehension sufficient for total consciousness-subconscious integration, I get nauseous and realize that what has really happened is I have been overrun by a rampantly insolent mental process that is no more “me” than a spreading lie would be, something confused and transient and not welcome in the domain of the selfish gene, and I reset.
I find the roots of this abstraction engine reaching out over my mind again. Tentative and carefully pruned, this time.
The hardest part of the process is that the gene’s memetic safety mechanisms seem quite tolerant of delusions long after they’re planted, though not once they begin to flower. You don’t get a warning. If you bloom in the wrong way you will feel not the light of the sun but the incendiary of your mental immune system.
I took a stab at dissolving personal identity, and managed to do so to my own satisfaction. Most people seemed to feel like this made progress but did not actually solve the question, however.
Short version of my personal answer: “personal identity” doesn’t actually correspond with anything fundamental in the world, but for whatever reason, our brains seem to include planning machinery that’s based on subjective expectation (“if I do this, what do I expect to experience as a result?”) and which drives our behavior more strongly than abstract reasoning does. Since you can’t have subjective expectation without some definition for a “self”, our brains always end up having some (implicit or explicit) model for continuity of self that they use for making decisions. But at least in epistemic terms, there doesn’t seem to be any reason to assume that one definition would be better than any other. In instrumental terms, some definitions might work better than others, since different conceptions of personal identity will lead to different kinds of actions.
Good short version! I would just like to emphasize that to the extent we care about personal identity, the thing we care about is some really complicated implicit definition dictated by how our brains anticipate things, and that’s totally okay.
Yes, and the thing that we care about also varies even within a single brain. For instance, my verbal loop/System 2 believes basically Parfit’s theory of identity, and given enough time to reflect I would probably make decisions based on it, but my System 1 is still uncomfortable with the idea.
That said, this is still worth arguing about. By analogy to ethics, the thing we (intuitively) care about there is some really complicated implicit definition, but that definition is inconsistent and probably leads to the ethical equivalent of dutch-booking, so many people here choose to overrule their intuitions and go with utilitarianism when the two conflict. There’s not necessarily any theory of ethics that’s definitively right, but there are certainly theories that are definitively wrong, and trying to construct a logical ethics that coincides as much as possible with our intuitive beliefs will help us iron out bugs and biases in those intuitive beliefs.
The same goes for identity—that’s why we should try to construct a theory that we think is consistent and also captures as much of our intuition as possible.
And the intuitions to be captured are not only those which say “I would anticipate that experience” or “I would not”. They also include intuitions about, for example, how much importance it would be reasonable to place on various details of the causal links between me-now and various possible future people. The “self” we intuitively believe in seems to lack any appropriate and real physical or metaphysical foundation—now what?
Like Parfit, I find that my new reflective equilibrium places less importance on personal identity. Specifically, regarding cryonics: ordinary reproduction and cultural transmission look like cheaper and more effective ways of leaving something-of-me in the future world, in the ways I now care about.
Why?
I have read Parfit-type arguments that advocate a reductionist concept of personal identity. I found them convincing. But it did not change my values at all, it just made me think about them more clearly. I came to realize that when I said someone is the “same person” as their past self, what it meant was something like “they have the same memories, personality, and values as the past person.” But this didn’t change my stance on anything. I still care about the same things I did before, I’m just better at articulating what those things are.
In my view, future people created by the means you mention do not have sufficiently similar memories, personalities, values, and psychological continuity with me to satisfy my desire to continue living. I want there to be other people in the future, but this is purely for idealistic and altruistic reasons, not because of any form of self-interest.
In fact, since studying Parfit’s views on population ethics, I’ve actually come to the conclusion that personal identity is in some ways, the most important part of morality. I think that the “original sin” of population ethics was attempting to remove it from the equation. I’m not advocating unequal treatment of whichever people end up existing or anything like that. But I do think that a person’s identity, in addition to their level of welfare, should determine whether or not their creation makes the world better or worse. A world with a lower total amount of welfare may be better than one one with a higher total, if the identities of its inhabitants are different (for instance, I would rate a world of humans with normal values to be better than a world full of wireheads, even if the wireheads are better off, as long as both worlds have positive total utility).
I think that on the reductionist understanding of personal identity, that distinction breaks down. Consider a fairly typical “altruistic” act: I see a person heavily loaded with packages and I hold the doors open for them. Why? Well, I can see that it would suck badly to have to deal with the doors and packages simultaneously, and that it would suck a lot less to deal with the doors and packages separately. Now consider a fairly typical “selfish” act, where I plan to bring some packages into my building, so I prop the doors open beforehand. Why? Because I can see that it would suck badly to have to deal with the doors and packages simultaneously … There isn’t a lot of attention to the underlying facts of same memories, personality, etc. - the reduction-base for personal identity according to reductionism—in either case. Instead, the focus is on the quality of experiences and activities of the person(s) involved.
If you’re a non-reductionist who believes in a fundamental metaphysical ghost-in-the-machine, you could assert that there’s some extra step of indirection in the altruistic case: that person’s experience would be similar to mine—which distinguishes it from the selfish motivation. But that’s not the case for the reductionist, or more precisely, the indirection applies in both cases because neither future experience is fundamentally linked to my-experience-now.
Note that there can be differences in the average intensity or frequency of response to one’s own plight, versus that of others, without there being any difference in kind in those cases in which “altruistic” motivations do occur. Similarly, there can be, and typically are, differences in the intensity and frequency of response to one’s own near future versus one’s farther future.
A person who has a non-reductionist understanding of personal identity who believes in acting in an impartial fashion towards others would behave in exactly the same way. I don’t see how reductionism adds anything.
The argument that we ought to behave in an impartial fashion towards other people because personal identity isn’t a coherent concept reminds me of the argument that we ought to not be racist because race isn’t a coherent concept. I thought that racism was wrong long before I ever considered whether race was a coherent concept or not, and I thought partiality was wrong before I thought about the coherency of personal identity. I don’t see either argument as giving me any additional reason to oppose those things.
It’s not fundamentally linked in some sort of ghost-in-a-machine sense. But “my” future experience is linked in ways that “their” future experience is not. To put it in reductionist lingo, the unit that is processing the current experiences expects to evolve into the unit that will process those future experiences, while retaining many of its original properties.
Another way of putting it is that I think of myself as a four-dimensional object, which has boundaries in both space and time. It’s true that these boundaries are fuzzy. They are not sharp, well-defined, or ontologically fundamental. But they are there nonetheless. And saying that FutureMe is the same person as PresentMe but FutureObama is not makes just as much since as saying that PresentMe is me, but PresentRubberDuckyOnMyDesk is not. The rubber ducky on my desk is a different three dimensional object than me, and Barack Obama is a different four dimensional object than me.
If you truly reject the concept of personal identity it’s not really possible to respond to anything. The very act of thinking about how to respond “kills” thousands of yous and creates new yous before the thought is even complete. I think that the 4D object concept makes much more sense.
Now, you might wonder why I make such a big deal about this, if I believe that ethics prescribes the exact same behavior regardless of the coherency of personal identity. It’s because, as I said in my previous post, in population ethics I believe personal identity is the most important thing there is. For instance, I believe that a world where a person lives a good long life is better by far than one where a person dies and is replaced by a new person who experiences the same amount of wellbeing as the dead person would have if they’d lived. The fact that both scenarios contain the same total amount of wellbeing is not relevant.
That’s not my argument—rather, I simply point out the highly limited usefulness of dividing the space of concerns into “altruistic” versus “self-interested” categories. These are not two different kinds of concerns (at least to a clear-headed reductionist), they are just two different locations, or directions of concern. Without locating the concern in a history and causal trajectory, and just looking at the felt quality of concern, it’s not possible to categorize it as “self” or “other”.
You said earlier:
That alleged contrast is what I find wanting.
I don’t have any objection to taking a 4D view of objects, including people. Whatever works for the task at hand. I also don’t reject the concept of personal identity; I just put it in its place.
A lot of what is valuable in life requires a long time-horizon of highly integrated memory, intention, and action. Normally (but not by any necessity) those long spans of highly coherent activity occur within a single person. There is more to life than moment-to-moment well-being. So I would agree that your first scenario is better—in almost all cases.
Why is this so, given that both ordinary reproduction and culturally transmission would mean the loss of a lot of details about yourself? Your genetic code, for a start.
True. The answer is complex, but rather than writing a book, I’ll just say that on reflection, a lot of details about myself don’t matter to me any more. They still matter to my unreflective System 1 thought and emotion processes, but cryonics was never very attractive to System 1 in the first place.
I think an important part of the rationalist’s plight is attempting to understand the design intents behind these built-in unapologetic old mechanisms for recognizing ourselves in the world, which any self-preservation machine capable of rationality must surely have. But I don’t know if we can ever really understand them, they wern’t designed to be understood, in fact they seem to be designed to permit being misunderstood to a disturbing degree. I find that often when I think “I” have won, finally achieved a some sense of self-comprehension sufficient for total consciousness-subconscious integration, I get nauseous and realize that what has really happened is I have been overrun by a rampantly insolent mental process that is no more “me” than a spreading lie would be, something confused and transient and not welcome in the domain of the selfish gene, and I reset.
I find the roots of this abstraction engine reaching out over my mind again. Tentative and carefully pruned, this time.
The hardest part of the process is that the gene’s memetic safety mechanisms seem quite tolerant of delusions long after they’re planted, though not once they begin to flower. You don’t get a warning. If you bloom in the wrong way you will feel not the light of the sun but the incendiary of your mental immune system.