My gut reaction is… okay, sure, maybe doing it ostentatiously is obnoxious, but these reasons against feel rather contrived.
(It’s not at all a takedown to say “I disagree, your arguments feel contrived, bye!”, but I figured I’d rather write a small comment than not engage at all)
If an acquaintance approached me on the street, asked me to sign a piece of paper that says “I, TurnTrout, give [acquaintance] ownership over my metaphysical soul” in exchange for $10 (and let’s just ignore other updates I should make based on being approached with such a weird request)… that seems like a great deal to me. I’d bet 1000:1 odds against my ever wanting to “buy my soul back.” If future me changed his mind anyways? Well, screw him, he’s wrong. I don’t reflectively want to help that possible future-me, and so I won’t.
EMs? Would a religious person really think that an EM is/has a soul? Would a judge later rule that I had signed my mind-computation into slavery, before EMs even were possible?
Suppose instead that the acquaintance approached me with a piece of paper that says “I, TurnTrout, give [acquaintance] ownership over my florepti xor bobble.” I’d sign that in exchange for $10. It’s meaningless. It’s nothing. I see no reason why I should treat ‘souls’ any differently, just because ‘souls’ have a privileged place in society’s memeplex thanks to thousands of years of cult influence and bad epistemology.
Unless you’re really desperate, it just seems like a bad idea to sign any kind of non-standard contract for $10. There’s always a chance that you’re misunderstanding the terms, or that the contract gets challenged at some point, or even that your signature on the contract is used as blackmail. Maybe you’re trying to run for office or get a job at some point in the future, and the fact that you’ve sold your soul is used against you. The actual contract that Jacob references is long enough that even taking the time to read and understand it is worth significantly more than $10. Even with the simpler contract that you’re envisioning, who knows what kind of implications it has? It’s just not worth exposing yourself to these risks for the price of a burrito.
I mean “soul” is clearly much closer to having a meaning than “florepti xor bobble”. You can tell that an em is pretty similar to being a soul but hand sanitizer is not really. You know some properties that souls are supposed to have. There are various secular accounts of what a soul is that basically match the intuiton (e.g. your personality).
I agree that “soul” has more ‘real’ meaning than “florepti xor bobble.” There’s another point to consider, though, which is that many of us will privilege claims about souls with more credence than they realistically deserve, as an effect of having grown up in a certain kind of culture.
Out of all the possible metaphysical constructs which could ‘exist’, why believe that souls are particularly likely? Many people believing in souls is some small indirect evidence for them, but not an amount of evidence commensurate with the concept’s prior improbability.
So there’s a specific thing of “the immortal part of you that goes to heaven”, which is just false.
But I think plenty of people draw a mind/soul/body, where the mind/soul distinction is pointing at a cluster that’s sort of like:
System 1 (as opposed to System 2)
strongly felt emotions
the core of your being – the things that make you distinctly you, vs the parts of your algorithm that any ol’ person could easily implement (i.e. design by committee, paint by numbers). your central identity.
When one says “that artistic piece has soul” or “they poured their soul into a project”, one is saying (something like) “they invested their identity into it” or “they made it out of creative pieces that would be hard for someone else to replicate” or “they worked extremely hard on it, because they deeply cared about the outcome” (where if they had not deeply cared about the outcome they would have worked less hard).
I think people that talk about immortal souls are usually also talking about the cluster of properties that have to do with the above. And they’re just-plain-wrong about the immortal part, and they don’t have super great abstractions for the other parts, but the other parts seem like they’re trying to engage with a real thing.
FWIW I’m pretty sure people have historically used words that get translated to ‘soul’ and not believed that it was immortal or went to heaven. I don’t have time to read this at the moment but I guess this SEP article is relevant.
OK, if we’re talking about central identity, then I very much wouldn’t sign a contract giving away rights to my central identity. I interpreted the question to be about selling one’s “immortal soul” (which supposedly goes to heaven if I’m good).
I actually started this essay thinking “eh, I don’t think this matters too much”, but by the end of it I was just like “yeah, this checks out.”
I think “Don’t casually make contracts you don’t intent to keep” is just pretty cruxy for me. This is a key piece of being a trustworthy person who can coordinate in complex, novel domains. There might be a price where there is worth it to do it as a joke, but $10 is way too low.
Suppose instead that the acquaintance approached me with a piece of paper that says “I, TurnTrout, give [acquaintance] ownership over my florepti xor bobble.”
I think you should feel about this the same way you feel about some arbitrary cryptocoin or NFT. Sure, it’s an arbitrary stupid thing that only has value because people think it does. But, like, that’s what the whole finance industry is built on. You shouldn’t feel any more comfortably making a contract you don’t intend to keep about souls as you should about various currencies / beanie babies / whatever.
I’d bet 1000:1 odds against my ever wanting to “buy my soul back.”
This actually seems obviously wrong to me, if for no other reason than “I think it’s moderately likely at some point you will get approached by someone who’d buy it for more than $10.”
I think “Don’t casually make contracts you don’t intent to keep” is just pretty cruxy for me. This is a key piece of being a trustworthy person who can coordinate in complex, novel domains. There might be a price where there is worth it to do it as a joke, but $10 is way too low.
I agree that the contracts part was important, and I share this crux. I should have noted that. I did purposefully modify my hypothetical so that I wasn’t becoming less trustworthy by signing my acquaintance’s piece of paper.
This actually seems obviously wrong to me, if for no other reason than “I think it’s moderately likely at some point you will get approached by someone who’d buy it for more than $10.”
I meant something more like the desperate “oh no my soul was so important, I’m going to pay $10k, $20k, whatever it takes to get it back!”; I should have clarified that in my original comment.
It’s about 15 years since I was a religious person, but here’s something I wrote a few months before my deconversion:
My view is that “soul” can usually be replaced by “mind” without loss of meaning, and that the mind is to the body roughly as a computer program is to the hardware it runs on, or as a piece of music is to a particular performance. If the hardware is destroyed—if the performers are killed by a freak accident—the program, or the music, can be set in motion again with a different substrate.
And something else from around the same time:
The language of “souls” is a useful shorthand sometimes, but it’s wrong if taken at face value. “Soul” in the Bible sometimes seems to mean more or less the same as “being” (“and man became a living soul”) and sometimes to mean something like “deepest part of the mind” (“now is my soul troubled”).
So I’m fairly sure that late-Christian-me would have said (1) that to whatever extent people “have souls”, if you make me into an em then I “have” the same soul as before, but (2) that ownership of “souls” in this sense is not a thing that can be transferred by signing a contract and (3) that if you’re concerned that selling someone your soul gives them rights to future ems made from you, you should also be concerned that it gives them rights to your mind right now.
(This was not, and is not, a common point of view among Christians, though I have one Christian friend who I suspect would say more or less exactly the same things.)
Although this isn’t a universal Christian position (there are some Christian materialists/naturalists), most Christians believe that souls exist on a different metaphysical plane than your brain or an EM. I wouldn’t expect to find any physical atoms that could be identified as being part of a soul. I would obviously expect to find those in an EM.
Also, great article. I think the 1000:1 odds bit is a reasonable analysis. Given an atheistic starting point, although it may feel that future-theist-you is almost certainly wrong, this prediction isn’t easily extricable from the fact that it is being created by atheist-you.
Even if there is a 1:1000 chance that you have a metaphysical soul, you would certainly be making a bad deal (if it were actually possible to sell your soul online as this article posits).
If anything I said doesn’t make sense, feel free to AMA.
most Christians believe that souls exist on a different metaphysical plane than your brain or an EM
Even if that’s true, do you think that the EM has a link to the same metaphysical human who was uploaded or does the soul that was linked to the human is not linked in any way to the EM?
That’s a great question, ChristianKI. I have no idea if a soul-human link would transfer to an uploaded consciousness. The thought experiment of the Ship of Theseus definitely intrigues me, and I don’t have a strong opinion one way or the other. I wouldn’t expect to find any sort of material link to a soul, so I actually wouldn’t know how to test for it even if I had an EM in the room with me right now.
I will also add that I don’t think a belief in a soul, given that it (as far as I know) has only anecdotal evidence, and doesn’t fit into the scientific method, isn’t self-supporting, and I wouldn’t hold it if it didn’t have borrowed strength from other theistic beliefs.
My gut reaction is… okay, sure, maybe doing it ostentatiously is obnoxious, but these reasons against feel rather contrived.
(It’s not at all a takedown to say “I disagree, your arguments feel contrived, bye!”, but I figured I’d rather write a small comment than not engage at all)
If an acquaintance approached me on the street, asked me to sign a piece of paper that says “I, TurnTrout, give [acquaintance] ownership over my metaphysical soul” in exchange for $10 (and let’s just ignore other updates I should make based on being approached with such a weird request)… that seems like a great deal to me. I’d bet 1000:1 odds against my ever wanting to “buy my soul back.” If future me changed his mind anyways? Well, screw him, he’s wrong. I don’t reflectively want to help that possible future-me, and so I won’t.
EMs? Would a religious person really think that an EM is/has a soul? Would a judge later rule that I had signed my mind-computation into slavery, before EMs even were possible?
Suppose instead that the acquaintance approached me with a piece of paper that says “I, TurnTrout, give [acquaintance] ownership over my florepti xor bobble.” I’d sign that in exchange for $10. It’s meaningless. It’s nothing. I see no reason why I should treat ‘souls’ any differently, just because ‘souls’ have a privileged place in society’s memeplex thanks to thousands of years of cult influence and bad epistemology.
Unless you’re really desperate, it just seems like a bad idea to sign any kind of non-standard contract for $10. There’s always a chance that you’re misunderstanding the terms, or that the contract gets challenged at some point, or even that your signature on the contract is used as blackmail. Maybe you’re trying to run for office or get a job at some point in the future, and the fact that you’ve sold your soul is used against you. The actual contract that Jacob references is long enough that even taking the time to read and understand it is worth significantly more than $10. Even with the simpler contract that you’re envisioning, who knows what kind of implications it has? It’s just not worth exposing yourself to these risks for the price of a burrito.
Yeah, I think these are good points.
I mean “soul” is clearly much closer to having a meaning than “florepti xor bobble”. You can tell that an em is pretty similar to being a soul but hand sanitizer is not really. You know some properties that souls are supposed to have. There are various secular accounts of what a soul is that basically match the intuiton (e.g. your personality).
I agree that “soul” has more ‘real’ meaning than “florepti xor bobble.” There’s another point to consider, though, which is that many of us will privilege claims about souls with more credence than they realistically deserve, as an effect of having grown up in a certain kind of culture.
Out of all the possible metaphysical constructs which could ‘exist’, why believe that souls are particularly likely? Many people believing in souls is some small indirect evidence for them, but not an amount of evidence commensurate with the concept’s prior improbability.
Because there are good candidates for what a soul might be. E.g. the algorithm that’s running in your head.
I guess I feel like this is a significant steelman and atypical of normal usage. In my ontology, that algorithm is closer to ‘mind.’
So there’s a specific thing of “the immortal part of you that goes to heaven”, which is just false.
But I think plenty of people draw a mind/soul/body, where the mind/soul distinction is pointing at a cluster that’s sort of like:
System 1 (as opposed to System 2)
strongly felt emotions
the core of your being – the things that make you distinctly you, vs the parts of your algorithm that any ol’ person could easily implement (i.e. design by committee, paint by numbers). your central identity.
When one says “that artistic piece has soul” or “they poured their soul into a project”, one is saying (something like) “they invested their identity into it” or “they made it out of creative pieces that would be hard for someone else to replicate” or “they worked extremely hard on it, because they deeply cared about the outcome” (where if they had not deeply cared about the outcome they would have worked less hard).
I think people that talk about immortal souls are usually also talking about the cluster of properties that have to do with the above. And they’re just-plain-wrong about the immortal part, and they don’t have super great abstractions for the other parts, but the other parts seem like they’re trying to engage with a real thing.
FWIW I’m pretty sure people have historically used words that get translated to ‘soul’ and not believed that it was immortal or went to heaven. I don’t have time to read this at the moment but I guess this SEP article is relevant.
OK, if we’re talking about central identity, then I very much wouldn’t sign a contract giving away rights to my central identity. I interpreted the question to be about selling one’s “immortal soul” (which supposedly goes to heaven if I’m good).
I think part of the lesson here is ‘don’t casually sell vaguely defined things that are generally understood to be some kind of big deal’
I still don’t fully agree with OP but I do agree that I should weight this heuristic more.
I actually started this essay thinking “eh, I don’t think this matters too much”, but by the end of it I was just like “yeah, this checks out.”
I think “Don’t casually make contracts you don’t intent to keep” is just pretty cruxy for me. This is a key piece of being a trustworthy person who can coordinate in complex, novel domains. There might be a price where there is worth it to do it as a joke, but $10 is way too low.
I think you should feel about this the same way you feel about some arbitrary cryptocoin or NFT. Sure, it’s an arbitrary stupid thing that only has value because people think it does. But, like, that’s what the whole finance industry is built on. You shouldn’t feel any more comfortably making a contract you don’t intend to keep about souls as you should about various currencies / beanie babies / whatever.
This actually seems obviously wrong to me, if for no other reason than “I think it’s moderately likely at some point you will get approached by someone who’d buy it for more than $10.”
I agree that the contracts part was important, and I share this crux. I should have noted that. I did purposefully modify my hypothetical so that I wasn’t becoming less trustworthy by signing my acquaintance’s piece of paper.
I meant something more like the desperate “oh no my soul was so important, I’m going to pay $10k, $20k, whatever it takes to get it back!”; I should have clarified that in my original comment.
I declare replies to this comment to be devoted to getting data on this question.
It’s about 15 years since I was a religious person, but here’s something I wrote a few months before my deconversion:
And something else from around the same time:
So I’m fairly sure that late-Christian-me would have said (1) that to whatever extent people “have souls”, if you make me into an em then I “have” the same soul as before, but (2) that ownership of “souls” in this sense is not a thing that can be transferred by signing a contract and (3) that if you’re concerned that selling someone your soul gives them rights to future ems made from you, you should also be concerned that it gives them rights to your mind right now.
(This was not, and is not, a common point of view among Christians, though I have one Christian friend who I suspect would say more or less exactly the same things.)
One protestant friend of mine thinks that the standard Christian view is that an em would not be or have a soul.
They say that now, but perhaps they would change their mind in a hypothetical future where they actually regularly interacted with ems.
I’m a Christian user of LessWrong.
Although this isn’t a universal Christian position (there are some Christian materialists/naturalists), most Christians believe that souls exist on a different metaphysical plane than your brain or an EM. I wouldn’t expect to find any physical atoms that could be identified as being part of a soul. I would obviously expect to find those in an EM.
Also, great article. I think the 1000:1 odds bit is a reasonable analysis. Given an atheistic starting point, although it may feel that future-theist-you is almost certainly wrong, this prediction isn’t easily extricable from the fact that it is being created by atheist-you.
Even if there is a 1:1000 chance that you have a metaphysical soul, you would certainly be making a bad deal (if it were actually possible to sell your soul online as this article posits).
If anything I said doesn’t make sense, feel free to AMA.
Even if that’s true, do you think that the EM has a link to the same metaphysical human who was uploaded or does the soul that was linked to the human is not linked in any way to the EM?
That’s a great question, ChristianKI. I have no idea if a soul-human link would transfer to an uploaded consciousness. The thought experiment of the Ship of Theseus definitely intrigues me, and I don’t have a strong opinion one way or the other. I wouldn’t expect to find any sort of material link to a soul, so I actually wouldn’t know how to test for it even if I had an EM in the room with me right now.
I will also add that I don’t think a belief in a soul, given that it (as far as I know) has only anecdotal evidence, and doesn’t fit into the scientific method, isn’t self-supporting, and I wouldn’t hold it if it didn’t have borrowed strength from other theistic beliefs.
Does that add any clarity?