All that confusion arises from the attempt to find identity between physical objects. I don’t think there’s any identity outside of minds. Identity is a “=”-relation between two representations, not two actual physical things.
That has its own problems. If a Tibetan thinks the Dalai Lama is in some essential way identical to some previous holder of that office, that’s the same kind of judgement as myself believing I’m identical to the memory of myself from yesterday. I lose any objective character of identity.
But at least I don’t need to have identity “emerge” (or something) from patterns. And many of the questions of the type in the SMBC comic are easily answered this way: Whether persons are “identical” before and after teleportation (or any other change, including flossing) becomes an entirely subjective judgement, with no objective truth that might be violated.
Nice thing about the Dalai Lama example is that he probably gets strong social pressure to believe he is a continuation of his previous incarnation. I don’t know about the details of his office, but if I really believed in reincarnation, I would prepare a lot of notes for my future incarnation… something like what every reasonable person would prepare for themselves if they expected to have a sudden memory loss at some moment in the near future, assuming they would want to follow their original plans. (Perhaps how much of this Dalai Lama really does could be used as a measure of how much he literally believes in his reincarnation.)
There are also social pressures in the opposite direction, just smaller ones. People are supposed to “change” during various rituals, not necessarily religious ones: finishing a university and having a title added to your name is a secular example. In a work or in military, when you change your position in the hierarchy, it’s not only about what you do, but also how you behave towards others, and how the others behave towards you: so it’s like a minor surgery to your personality.
I am curious whether (as a part of a mad science experiment) it would be possible to create an opposite of the Dalai Lama effect; to create a Monday Man who would believe he is a different person that the Sunday Man, despite having the same body. More precisely, how far you could get, using only beliefs and social pressure on a neurotypical person.
To some degree this experiment was already done, by various cults. The cultists are supposed to believe they are someone more or less different than they were before; they even use “born again” to describe the change. But it seems like the old personality continues to exist—at least some descriptions of “deprogramming” claim that if a cultist is kidnapped, prevented contact with other cultists, and prevented from doing their mental rituals (e.g. if you remove all the external and internal pressure towards the cult) that is usually enough for the old personality to reappear. If this is true, I would consider this an unsuccessful change. A successful change would be where the new person is completely free to do whatever they want, and they still naturally remain the new person. Even better, if the Sunday Man could regularly become a Monday Man every week, and then regularly change back again, both personalities having their own lives.
One obvious problem is memory. It stays with the body. The Dalai Lama can partially copy it from the old body to the new body, using notes. But you cannot keep two separate instances for the Sunday Man and Monday Man. Could people believe (if this is what their culture would tell them) that they can have a memory of another person in their head, but it doesn’t make them identical with the person? Would the Monday Man accept that he has Sunday Man’s memories, but he is a different person? The environment could be different, e.g. the Monday Man would live in a different house, wear a different uniform, meet different people, and the people would behave differently...
In other words, if you are not insane, you are probably not experimenting enough.
Something like the Monday Man already exists. In African and Afro-American religions such as Voodoo and Candomblé, people who get possessed say that whatever was moving their body in that time was not them, but some other entity. They frequently claim amnesia about the event, saying their normal non-possessed selves were “not there” to even notice what was happening. I don’t know if anyone has done experiments to see whether they actually lack access to memories of that period, or whether they’re merely denying them.
Of course, these religions, and particularly possession states, often involve great amounts of strong alcohol, so maybe the amnesia thing isn’t so far-fetched.
A lot of the time the only language that really exists to talk about these things is the language of shamanism and occultists and ritual magic because psychology doesn’t really go there much in professional medicine, and I’m not sure that the concept of ‘genuine amnesia’ is terribly useful in this context. These things happen, it doesn’t matter that there’s ‘just’ a material human brain and nervous system doing it, people can and do come under the control and influence of what is experienced as agency that is not ‘their own’ under many circumstances. I know someone who is as reductionist/materialist as they get, but through various methods has been known to channel Carl Sagan (and have interesting conversations with him about how odd it is to speak with him that way) and has been repeatedly briefly possessed by Hindu gods. She knows it’s entirely coming from the operation of her own nervous system, but she thinks that if she has a complete enough identity to ‘invite in’ it is actually meaningful to say that something that comes from her mouth when she is in such an altered state comes ‘from’ that identity and not from her. To loosely quote her, “I’m pretty darn sure they’re a function of my nervous system weirdness, but it just doesn’t matter what the gods are when they come calling.”
Whether persons are “identical” before and after teleportation (or any other change, including flossing) becomes an entirely subjective judgement, with no objective truth that might be violated.
Sure. I’m fine with learning the subjective answer—would I continue to experience things in this situation. Teleported me sure will but does that mean that what I am pre-teleportation actually will subjectively experience anything? (if you believe in Pattern Identity Theory then substitute the teleportation with immense self-enhancement)
Sort of, but it’s the other way around: It will not first “be you” and then have subjective experiences. Instead, it will have subjective experiences and then consider itself identical to you.
Suppose the teleportation (or enhancement or flossing or whatever) leaves a functioning brain. A functioning brain will have experiences. If it also has memories of previous experiences, it will correlate the new ones with the previous ones and come up with the complex network of circular representations we like to simplify into a quasi-monolothic object we call the mind—like it does when you awaken from deep sleep. If in those memories is contained a habit of referring to itself as you, the post-teleportation (or post-whatever) mind will continue to refer to itself as you. It’ll think it is you, which is nothing less than what you do.
Yeah, no doubt there. However, I don’t really care if something identical to me thinks its me though—I care if the me right now (which is to be teleported/copied in some years) will itself continue to experience things after the teleportation occurs (and the answer is yes if you believe that in Pattern Identity Theory and no if you believe Folk Identity Theory).
The you-right-now (which I label U1 for clarity) won’t even continue to experience things after you finish reading this comment. Some other entity, very similar to but not quite identical to U1, will be experiencing things instead… call it U2.
Fortunately, neither U1 nor U2 consider the difference between U1 and U2 particularly important, so both entities will agree that identity was preserved.
And I agree with chaosmage here: that’s all there is to say about that. There is no special objectively correct essence of youness that can be preserved or fail to be preserved; there are simply two systems at different times that share some properties and fail to share others.
Which of those properties we consider definitive of usness is not the sort of thing we can be wrong about, any more than we can be wrong about our own aesthetic judgments.
Fortunately, neither U1 nor U2 consider the difference between U1 and U2 particularly important, so both entities will agree that identity was preserved.
We both do actually and we are both not very impressed that such a large amount of entities similar to us (including us) are dying. And if I really accept that this is the case (as it seems to be) then most of the reason for wanting to stay alive at all seems to logically vanish.
And if I really accept that this is the case (as it seems to be) then most of the reason for wanting to stay alive at all seems to logically vanish.
Not exactly. What’s called for is a reinterpretation of your values, given that you have previously couched them in incoherent terms (insofar as those terms presuppose a metaphysical fact of “identity” that got shaved away by Occam’s Razor).
A good place to start in that reinterpretation is with TheOtherDave’s questions about the vast set of possible U2 states.
I wouldn’t exactly describe what U1 and U2 are doing as “dying”, any more than if U1 could somehow continue to exist in perpetuity—if you were frozen in stasis forever, for example, such that you never got to the end of this comment—I would exactly describe that as “living”. Our normal understanding of life and death is defined by the continual transition between one state and another; those terms don’t apply too readily to conditions like indefinite stasis.
But, terminology notwithstanding, if the passage of time constitutes the destruction of the same value that using a hypothetical transporter does, I’m not sure how your original thought experiment holds up. Why not use the transporter, in that case? Refusing to doesn’t actually preserve anything.
As for reasons to stay alive… well, that depends on what we value.
There’s a vast set of possible histories. In some of them U1 ceases to exist and U2 comes into existence (what we normally call “you stay alive”), in others U1 ceases to exist and U2 doesn’t come into existence (what we normally call “you die”). Do you have a preference between those?
A different way of putting it: there’s a vast set of possible U2s. Some of them are living beings and some of them are corpses. Do you have a preference between those?
EDIT: Whoops! I just realized that I got your OP confused with someone else’s comment. Ignore the stuff about the transporter…
How do you distinguish between “me” and “something identical to me”? You’re implying it can be done, but I really don’t see how. As soon as you find a difference, that something isn’t identical to you anymore.
How do you distinguish between “me” and “something identical to me”?
We are just going in circles now. Yes, I believe that too… which is why this post is about arguing whether changing yourself sufficently is ‘killing yourself’.. since there are some observable differences between ‘me’ and ‘enhanced me’.
Or to put it in another way (a bit of a false dichotomy) - you either kill yourself when you ‘teleport’ as the ‘original’ is no longer there or alternatively you are data and you kill yourself when you change that data significantly.
I don’t think we’re going in circles. It is just that problems related to the Anthropic Trilemma aren’t easy.
Pattern Identity Theory does not have a distinction between “me” and “something identical to me”. You believe in the existence of such a distinction, so you want Pattern Identitfy Theory to not be true. So you are, quite rightly, pointing out the absurdities of Pattern Identity Theory: Sufficient changes being like “killing yourself” and other such nonsense.
I agree Pattern Identity Theory is false, if for entirely different reasons. I do not agree that the falsehood of Pattern Identity Theory means that the distinction exists.
All that confusion arises from the attempt to find identity between physical objects. I don’t think there’s any identity outside of minds. Identity is a “=”-relation between two representations, not two actual physical things.
That has its own problems. If a Tibetan thinks the Dalai Lama is in some essential way identical to some previous holder of that office, that’s the same kind of judgement as myself believing I’m identical to the memory of myself from yesterday. I lose any objective character of identity.
But at least I don’t need to have identity “emerge” (or something) from patterns. And many of the questions of the type in the SMBC comic are easily answered this way: Whether persons are “identical” before and after teleportation (or any other change, including flossing) becomes an entirely subjective judgement, with no objective truth that might be violated.
Nice thing about the Dalai Lama example is that he probably gets strong social pressure to believe he is a continuation of his previous incarnation. I don’t know about the details of his office, but if I really believed in reincarnation, I would prepare a lot of notes for my future incarnation… something like what every reasonable person would prepare for themselves if they expected to have a sudden memory loss at some moment in the near future, assuming they would want to follow their original plans. (Perhaps how much of this Dalai Lama really does could be used as a measure of how much he literally believes in his reincarnation.)
There are also social pressures in the opposite direction, just smaller ones. People are supposed to “change” during various rituals, not necessarily religious ones: finishing a university and having a title added to your name is a secular example. In a work or in military, when you change your position in the hierarchy, it’s not only about what you do, but also how you behave towards others, and how the others behave towards you: so it’s like a minor surgery to your personality.
I am curious whether (as a part of a mad science experiment) it would be possible to create an opposite of the Dalai Lama effect; to create a Monday Man who would believe he is a different person that the Sunday Man, despite having the same body. More precisely, how far you could get, using only beliefs and social pressure on a neurotypical person.
To some degree this experiment was already done, by various cults. The cultists are supposed to believe they are someone more or less different than they were before; they even use “born again” to describe the change. But it seems like the old personality continues to exist—at least some descriptions of “deprogramming” claim that if a cultist is kidnapped, prevented contact with other cultists, and prevented from doing their mental rituals (e.g. if you remove all the external and internal pressure towards the cult) that is usually enough for the old personality to reappear. If this is true, I would consider this an unsuccessful change. A successful change would be where the new person is completely free to do whatever they want, and they still naturally remain the new person. Even better, if the Sunday Man could regularly become a Monday Man every week, and then regularly change back again, both personalities having their own lives.
One obvious problem is memory. It stays with the body. The Dalai Lama can partially copy it from the old body to the new body, using notes. But you cannot keep two separate instances for the Sunday Man and Monday Man. Could people believe (if this is what their culture would tell them) that they can have a memory of another person in their head, but it doesn’t make them identical with the person? Would the Monday Man accept that he has Sunday Man’s memories, but he is a different person? The environment could be different, e.g. the Monday Man would live in a different house, wear a different uniform, meet different people, and the people would behave differently...
In other words, if you are not insane, you are probably not experimenting enough.
Something like the Monday Man already exists. In African and Afro-American religions such as Voodoo and Candomblé, people who get possessed say that whatever was moving their body in that time was not them, but some other entity. They frequently claim amnesia about the event, saying their normal non-possessed selves were “not there” to even notice what was happening. I don’t know if anyone has done experiments to see whether they actually lack access to memories of that period, or whether they’re merely denying them.
Of course, these religions, and particularly possession states, often involve great amounts of strong alcohol, so maybe the amnesia thing isn’t so far-fetched.
A lot of the time the only language that really exists to talk about these things is the language of shamanism and occultists and ritual magic because psychology doesn’t really go there much in professional medicine, and I’m not sure that the concept of ‘genuine amnesia’ is terribly useful in this context. These things happen, it doesn’t matter that there’s ‘just’ a material human brain and nervous system doing it, people can and do come under the control and influence of what is experienced as agency that is not ‘their own’ under many circumstances. I know someone who is as reductionist/materialist as they get, but through various methods has been known to channel Carl Sagan (and have interesting conversations with him about how odd it is to speak with him that way) and has been repeatedly briefly possessed by Hindu gods. She knows it’s entirely coming from the operation of her own nervous system, but she thinks that if she has a complete enough identity to ‘invite in’ it is actually meaningful to say that something that comes from her mouth when she is in such an altered state comes ‘from’ that identity and not from her. To loosely quote her, “I’m pretty darn sure they’re a function of my nervous system weirdness, but it just doesn’t matter what the gods are when they come calling.”
Sure. I’m fine with learning the subjective answer—would I continue to experience things in this situation. Teleported me sure will but does that mean that what I am pre-teleportation actually will subjectively experience anything? (if you believe in Pattern Identity Theory then substitute the teleportation with immense self-enhancement)
Sort of, but it’s the other way around: It will not first “be you” and then have subjective experiences. Instead, it will have subjective experiences and then consider itself identical to you.
Suppose the teleportation (or enhancement or flossing or whatever) leaves a functioning brain. A functioning brain will have experiences. If it also has memories of previous experiences, it will correlate the new ones with the previous ones and come up with the complex network of circular representations we like to simplify into a quasi-monolothic object we call the mind—like it does when you awaken from deep sleep. If in those memories is contained a habit of referring to itself as you, the post-teleportation (or post-whatever) mind will continue to refer to itself as you. It’ll think it is you, which is nothing less than what you do.
Yeah, no doubt there. However, I don’t really care if something identical to me thinks its me though—I care if the me right now (which is to be teleported/copied in some years) will itself continue to experience things after the teleportation occurs (and the answer is yes if you believe that in Pattern Identity Theory and no if you believe Folk Identity Theory).
The you-right-now (which I label U1 for clarity) won’t even continue to experience things after you finish reading this comment. Some other entity, very similar to but not quite identical to U1, will be experiencing things instead… call it U2.
Fortunately, neither U1 nor U2 consider the difference between U1 and U2 particularly important, so both entities will agree that identity was preserved.
And I agree with chaosmage here: that’s all there is to say about that. There is no special objectively correct essence of youness that can be preserved or fail to be preserved; there are simply two systems at different times that share some properties and fail to share others.
Which of those properties we consider definitive of usness is not the sort of thing we can be wrong about, any more than we can be wrong about our own aesthetic judgments.
We both do actually and we are both not very impressed that such a large amount of entities similar to us (including us) are dying. And if I really accept that this is the case (as it seems to be) then most of the reason for wanting to stay alive at all seems to logically vanish.
Not exactly. What’s called for is a reinterpretation of your values, given that you have previously couched them in incoherent terms (insofar as those terms presuppose a metaphysical fact of “identity” that got shaved away by Occam’s Razor).
A good place to start in that reinterpretation is with TheOtherDave’s questions about the vast set of possible U2 states.
I wouldn’t exactly describe what U1 and U2 are doing as “dying”, any more than if U1 could somehow continue to exist in perpetuity—if you were frozen in stasis forever, for example, such that you never got to the end of this comment—I would exactly describe that as “living”. Our normal understanding of life and death is defined by the continual transition between one state and another; those terms don’t apply too readily to conditions like indefinite stasis.
But, terminology notwithstanding, if the passage of time constitutes the destruction of the same value that using a hypothetical transporter does, I’m not sure how your original thought experiment holds up. Why not use the transporter, in that case? Refusing to doesn’t actually preserve anything.
As for reasons to stay alive… well, that depends on what we value.
There’s a vast set of possible histories. In some of them U1 ceases to exist and U2 comes into existence (what we normally call “you stay alive”), in others U1 ceases to exist and U2 doesn’t come into existence (what we normally call “you die”). Do you have a preference between those?
A different way of putting it: there’s a vast set of possible U2s. Some of them are living beings and some of them are corpses. Do you have a preference between those?
EDIT: Whoops! I just realized that I got your OP confused with someone else’s comment. Ignore the stuff about the transporter…
How do you distinguish between “me” and “something identical to me”? You’re implying it can be done, but I really don’t see how. As soon as you find a difference, that something isn’t identical to you anymore.
We are just going in circles now. Yes, I believe that too… which is why this post is about arguing whether changing yourself sufficently is ‘killing yourself’.. since there are some observable differences between ‘me’ and ‘enhanced me’.
Or to put it in another way (a bit of a false dichotomy) - you either kill yourself when you ‘teleport’ as the ‘original’ is no longer there or alternatively you are data and you kill yourself when you change that data significantly.
I don’t think we’re going in circles. It is just that problems related to the Anthropic Trilemma aren’t easy.
Pattern Identity Theory does not have a distinction between “me” and “something identical to me”. You believe in the existence of such a distinction, so you want Pattern Identitfy Theory to not be true. So you are, quite rightly, pointing out the absurdities of Pattern Identity Theory: Sufficient changes being like “killing yourself” and other such nonsense.
I agree Pattern Identity Theory is false, if for entirely different reasons. I do not agree that the falsehood of Pattern Identity Theory means that the distinction exists.
I do? Since when?