During some periods of sleep. So far as I am aware, in deep sleep there’s no reason to think you are having any experiences at all.
Anyway, for those who don’t object to thought experiments: imagine that there’s some machine that completely suspends all your brain activity for five minutes, after which it continues from exactly its previous state. Are you the same person after as before? If you answer yes to this—which I bet almost everyone does—then the implications are the same as those you’d get from sleep involving a complete cessation of consciousness.
During some periods of sleep. So far as I am aware, in deep sleep there’s no reason to think you are having any experiences at all.
Your brain keeps doing stuff however. Your lungs keep breathing, and your heart keeps beating. There is no normal phase of sleep where someone shaking you and yelling in your ear won’t wake you up, but normal noises and the hum of machinery or cool breeze does not. So something is processing and filtering inputs for relevance.
imagine that there’s some machine that completely suspends all your brain activity for five minutes, after which it continues from exactly its previous state. Are you the same person after as before?
The only honest answer I can give to this is “I don’t know.”
imagine that there’s some machine that completely suspends all your brain activity for five minutes, after which it continues from exactly its previous state. Are you the same person after as before?
If a tree falls in a forest and no one is around to hear it, does it make a sound?
imagine that there’s some machine that completely suspends all your brain activity for five minutes, after which it continues from exactly its previous state. Are you the same person after as before?
“So far as I am aware, in deep sleep there’s no reason to think you are having any experiences at all.”—No reason to think you are having experiences != Reason to believe that you are having no experiences. How would we know?
I think that is a very interesting thought experiment and I have no objections to it. The reason I am objecting to the sleep argument is that it is based upon uncertain science and an equivocation between two words.
Somehow people are able to throw covers off or burrow into them without waking up. I would say this is evidence of both having experiences and reacting to them.
For 5 minutes suspension versus dreamless deep sleep—almost exactly the same person. For 3 hours dreamless deep sleep I’m not so sure. I think my brain does something to change state while I’m deep asleep, even if I don’t consciously experience or remember anything. Have you ever woken up feeling different about something, or with a solution to a problem you were thinking about as you dropped off ? If that’s not all due to dreaming, then you must be evolving at least slightly while completely unconscious.
I expect I will do the same things for the same reasons as before. Or, to put it another way, I do not expect a brief interruption in my input/output patterns to significantly affect my input/output patterns in the future. Even less so than if they had not been interrupted and I had been allowed to have an experience of the same duration, now that I think about it.
I choose not to comment on the concept of “sameness” as it applies to “person”, however, without some rigorous definitions. Ship of Theseus and all that.
What do you understand as brain? Neocortex? Because if the evolutionary old parts of your brain stop doing anything for five minutes, you will likely die. If you mean ‘whole body is put into stasis’, that’s a different matter.
Fair point. I think whole-body stasis for 5 minutes works about as well for the thought experiment, or else “everything in the brain except what’s needed to keep you alive”.
I bet if you phrase the question as “your brain is destroyed and recreated 5 minutes later”, most people outside LW answer no. I guess this might be another instance of brain functions inactive vs lack of ability to have experiences.
Yes, I agree (except that I’m not sure whether most people outside LW would really answer no; for sure a lot would, but I don’t have a strong intuition about whether it would be a majority). My point is just that even if sleep never turns off experiences altogether, the intuition people appeal to when saying “experience stops every night when you sleep” isn’t actually dependent on that.
I interpret them as meaning something like “disassemble” and “reassemble in the same configuration as before, with the same component parts”
That’s not how I interpret the descriptions of the destructive teleportation, uploading, and forking scenarios.
The only arguments I can presently think of that really make me doubt my response to the “do you survive destructive uploading/teleportation/copying?” questions are more on the lines of the Ship of Theseus. My computer remains my computer if I turn it off and on again. “My files” can refer to specific instances, versions, copies, whatever, whether they’re on “my computer” or copied to an external device. If my computer falls apart and is put back together again, it’s still my computer. If my computer is taken apart, and an identical computer with my files on its hard drive is built (with different parts), it’s a different computer. If my computer slowly has all its parts replaced, one at a time, I don’t really know what I’d think; I want to say it’s no longer the same computer at some point, but I don’t know which point. Maybe when the hard drive is replaced, but that’s a bad example because replacing individual chunks of atoms in the hard drive is a weird concept. Actually, I’d probably think of the new chunks as “the new chunks”, and more or less treat it as portions of two separate disks acting as one. (And if files are modified, deleted, copied, etc, then they are modified, deleted, copied, etc, and this does not make it stop being “my computer”.)
So what does that mean for the brain? The brain changes a lot; does its component parts get replaced all that often? A huge portion of the cells in the body get replaced at varying rates; do they play into this at all? How would my conclusions change if the brain replaces its cells frequently and I was just that bad at understanding neurology? I’m not really sure about the answers to these. It’s possible that the answers could change my mind. It’s possible that I would just stay in the same boat and remain existentially horrified forever or something.
But flipping the switch from on to off to on is more or less irrelevant. I feel like we are using the same words to describe completely different phenomena, then debating as though everyone is using the words in the same way. (Compare “Congress” to “the 75th congress” to “the 76th congress”. The first is defined by an enduring pattern with interchangeable components, such that it describes the both of the other two; the second refers to a specific configuration of components and behaviors; the third is as specific as the second, but it’s entirely possible that only a few members from the 75th congress were replaced for the 76th. If someone was particularly attached to the 75th congress, and by the 80th congress, the last member from the 75th was replaced, what would we take from such a person’s reaction? Keeping in mind that people tend to write dramatic articles whenever an enduring group loses or replaces all of its original members, or all of the members present for particularly charished events, etc. What if a band breaks up, then most of its members form a new band?)
During some periods of sleep. So far as I am aware, in deep sleep there’s no reason to think you are having any experiences at all.
Anyway, for those who don’t object to thought experiments: imagine that there’s some machine that completely suspends all your brain activity for five minutes, after which it continues from exactly its previous state. Are you the same person after as before? If you answer yes to this—which I bet almost everyone does—then the implications are the same as those you’d get from sleep involving a complete cessation of consciousness.
Your brain keeps doing stuff however. Your lungs keep breathing, and your heart keeps beating. There is no normal phase of sleep where someone shaking you and yelling in your ear won’t wake you up, but normal noises and the hum of machinery or cool breeze does not. So something is processing and filtering inputs for relevance.
The only honest answer I can give to this is “I don’t know.”
If a tree falls in a forest and no one is around to hear it, does it make a sound?
Addressed before. TL;DR: it’s not really a question about the existence of sound, but about the definition of sound.
This is what I was referring to.
And the obligatory poll:
[pollid:1089]
The Rev. Bayes would be.
I’d like to tick both ‘I am’ and ‘the question makes no sense’.
“So far as I am aware, in deep sleep there’s no reason to think you are having any experiences at all.”—No reason to think you are having experiences != Reason to believe that you are having no experiences. How would we know?
I think that is a very interesting thought experiment and I have no objections to it. The reason I am objecting to the sleep argument is that it is based upon uncertain science and an equivocation between two words.
Somehow people are able to throw covers off or burrow into them without waking up. I would say this is evidence of both having experiences and reacting to them.
For 5 minutes suspension versus dreamless deep sleep—almost exactly the same person. For 3 hours dreamless deep sleep I’m not so sure. I think my brain does something to change state while I’m deep asleep, even if I don’t consciously experience or remember anything. Have you ever woken up feeling different about something, or with a solution to a problem you were thinking about as you dropped off ? If that’s not all due to dreaming, then you must be evolving at least slightly while completely unconscious.
I expect I will do the same things for the same reasons as before. Or, to put it another way, I do not expect a brief interruption in my input/output patterns to significantly affect my input/output patterns in the future. Even less so than if they had not been interrupted and I had been allowed to have an experience of the same duration, now that I think about it.
I choose not to comment on the concept of “sameness” as it applies to “person”, however, without some rigorous definitions. Ship of Theseus and all that.
What do you understand as brain? Neocortex? Because if the evolutionary old parts of your brain stop doing anything for five minutes, you will likely die. If you mean ‘whole body is put into stasis’, that’s a different matter.
Fair point. I think whole-body stasis for 5 minutes works about as well for the thought experiment, or else “everything in the brain except what’s needed to keep you alive”.
I bet if you phrase the question as “your brain is destroyed and recreated 5 minutes later”, most people outside LW answer no. I guess this might be another instance of brain functions inactive vs lack of ability to have experiences.
Yes, I agree (except that I’m not sure whether most people outside LW would really answer no; for sure a lot would, but I don’t have a strong intuition about whether it would be a majority). My point is just that even if sleep never turns off experiences altogether, the intuition people appeal to when saying “experience stops every night when you sleep” isn’t actually dependent on that.
What do “destroy” and “recreate” mean?
I interpret them as meaning something like “disassemble” and “reassemble in the same configuration as before, with the same component parts”
That’s not how I interpret the descriptions of the destructive teleportation, uploading, and forking scenarios.
The only arguments I can presently think of that really make me doubt my response to the “do you survive destructive uploading/teleportation/copying?” questions are more on the lines of the Ship of Theseus. My computer remains my computer if I turn it off and on again. “My files” can refer to specific instances, versions, copies, whatever, whether they’re on “my computer” or copied to an external device. If my computer falls apart and is put back together again, it’s still my computer. If my computer is taken apart, and an identical computer with my files on its hard drive is built (with different parts), it’s a different computer. If my computer slowly has all its parts replaced, one at a time, I don’t really know what I’d think; I want to say it’s no longer the same computer at some point, but I don’t know which point. Maybe when the hard drive is replaced, but that’s a bad example because replacing individual chunks of atoms in the hard drive is a weird concept. Actually, I’d probably think of the new chunks as “the new chunks”, and more or less treat it as portions of two separate disks acting as one. (And if files are modified, deleted, copied, etc, then they are modified, deleted, copied, etc, and this does not make it stop being “my computer”.)
So what does that mean for the brain? The brain changes a lot; does its component parts get replaced all that often? A huge portion of the cells in the body get replaced at varying rates; do they play into this at all? How would my conclusions change if the brain replaces its cells frequently and I was just that bad at understanding neurology? I’m not really sure about the answers to these. It’s possible that the answers could change my mind. It’s possible that I would just stay in the same boat and remain existentially horrified forever or something.
But flipping the switch from on to off to on is more or less irrelevant. I feel like we are using the same words to describe completely different phenomena, then debating as though everyone is using the words in the same way. (Compare “Congress” to “the 75th congress” to “the 76th congress”. The first is defined by an enduring pattern with interchangeable components, such that it describes the both of the other two; the second refers to a specific configuration of components and behaviors; the third is as specific as the second, but it’s entirely possible that only a few members from the 75th congress were replaced for the 76th. If someone was particularly attached to the 75th congress, and by the 80th congress, the last member from the 75th was replaced, what would we take from such a person’s reaction? Keeping in mind that people tend to write dramatic articles whenever an enduring group loses or replaces all of its original members, or all of the members present for particularly charished events, etc. What if a band breaks up, then most of its members form a new band?)