CEV Sequence - On What is a Self - Part 1

Summary: The CEV sequence is an attempt to strenghten the text Coherent Extrapolated Volition. I take CEV to be the subject which offers more room for improvement in our potential route towards a desirable post-humanity. In text 1 “On What is a Self” I’ll clarify what people are, since it is people’s extrapolated volitions that ought to be implemented. My main target audiences are non-philosophers and AIs who may underestimate the complexity underlying the concepts of selves and people. To this end I’ll use standard analytic philosophy methods such as conceptual, semantic and linguistic analysis. The second text “Troubles with CEV” will present several problems (conceptual, practical, computational) of CEV’s current conception. Objections to the overall suggestion will also be considered. Some alternatives to CEV by many authors will be presented. The second text targets a general audience of CEV interested people and does not rely mainly on philosophical analysis.

For your convenience, I’ll be posting every two days. Text 1, Part 1

On What Is a Self

Intro-Background

Granted, Selves Are Coalescences of Symbols

Some of what is taken for granted in this text is vividly subsumed by pg 204 and 289-290 of Hofstadters “I Am a Strange Loop”(2007), to those who are still in the struggle relating to monism, dualism, qualia, Mary the neuroscientist, epiphenomenons and innefable qualities, it is worth it to read through his passage to understand the background metaphysical view of the universe from which it is derived. To those on the other hand who are good willed reductionists of the non-greedy, no-skyhook, no ‘design only from Above’ kind may jump straight to the text:

[What makes and “I” come seemingly out of nowhere] is ironically, an inability—namely our [...] inability to see, feel, or sense in any way the constant frenetic, churning and roiling of micro -stuff, all the unfelt bubbling and boiling that underlies our thinking. This, our innate blindness to the world of the tiny, forces us to hallucinate a profound schism betqenn the goal-lacking material world of balls and sticks and sounds and lights, on the one hand, and a goal-pervaded abstract world of hopes and beliefs and joys and fears, on the other, in which radically different sorts of causality seem to reign. [...]

“[Your] “I” was not an a priori well-defined thing that was predestined to jump, full-fledged and sharp, in to some just-created empty physical vessel at some particular instant. Nor did your “I” suddenly spring into existence, wholly unanticipated but in full bloom. Rather, your “I” was the slowly emerging outcome of a million unpredictable eventsthat befell a particular body and the brain housed in it. Your “I” is the self-reinforcing structure that gradually came to exist not only in that brain, but thanks to that brain. It coudn’t have come to exist in this brain, because this brain went through different experiences that led to a different human being.”

This general view will be being taken for granted as the Meta Physically correct approach to thinking about mental entities, what will be discussed lies more in the domain of conceptual usage, word meaning, psychological conceptions, symbolic extension, explicit linguistic definition, and less on trying to find underlying substrates or metaphysical properties of selves.

Selves and Persons Are Similar

On the eight move of your weekly chess game you do what feels same as always: Reflect for a few seconds on the many layers of structure underlying the current game-state, specially regarding changes from your opponent’s last move. It seems reasonable to eat his pawn with your bishop. After moving you look at him and see the sequence of expressions: Doubt “Why did he do that?”, distrust “He must be seeing something I don’t”, inquiry “Let me double check this”, Schadenfreud “No, he actually failed” and finally joy “Piece of cake, I’ll win”. He takes your bishop with a horse that from your perspective could only be coming from neverland. Still stunned, you resign. It is the second time in a row you lose the game due to a simple mistake. The excuse bursts naturally out of your mouth: “I’m not myself today”

The functional role (with plausibly evolutionary reasons) of this use of the concept of Self is easy to unscramble.

1) Do not hold your model of me as responsible for these mistakes

2) Either (a) I sense something strange about the inner machinery of my mind, the algorithm feels different from the inside. Or (b) at least my now visible mistakes are realiable evidence of a difference which I detected in hindsight.

3) If there is a person watching this game, notice how my signaling and my friend’s not contesting it is reliable evidence I normally play chess better than this

A few minutes later, you see your friend yelling histerically at someone in the phone, you explain to the girl who was watching: “He is not that kind of person”

Here we have a situation where the analogous of 1 and 3 work, but there is no way for you to tell what the algorithm feels from the inside. You still know in hindsight that your friend doesn’t usually yell like that. Though 1, 2, and 3 still hold, 2(a) is not the case anymore.

I suggest the property of 2(a) that blocks interchangeability of the concepts of Self and Person is “having first person epistemic information about X”. Selves have that, people don’t. We use the term ‘person’ when we want to talk only about the epistemically intersubjective properties of someone. Self is reserved for a person’s perspective of herself, including, for instance, indexical facts.

Other than that, Self and Person seem to be interchangeable concepts. This generalization is useful because that means most of the problem of personhood and selfhood can be collapsed into one thing. Unfortunately, the Self/Person intersection is a concept that is itself a Mongrel Concept, so it has again to be split apart.

Mongrel and Cluster Concepts (and why Selves are both)

When a concept seems to defy easy explanability, there are two interesting possibilities of how to interact with it. The first would be to assume that the disparate uses of the term ‘Self’’ in ordinary language and science can be captured by a unique, all-encompassing notion of Self. The second is to assume that different uses of ‘Self’’ reveal a plurality of notions of Selfhood, each in need of a separate account. I will endorse this second assumption: Self is a mongrel concept in need of disambiguation. (to strenghten the analogy power of thinking about mongrels, it may help to know that Information, Consciousness and Health are thought to be mongrel concepts as well).

Without using specific tags for the time being, let us assume that there will be 4 kinds of Self, 1,2,3, and 4. To say that Self is a concept that sometimes maps into 1, sometimes into 3 and so on is not to exaustivelly frame the concept usage. That is because 1 and 2 themselves may be cluster concepts.

The cluster concept shape is one of the most common shapes of concepts in our mental vocabulary. Concepts are associational structures. Most of the times, instead of drawing a clear line around a set in the world inside of which all X fits, and outside of which none does, concepts present a cluster like structure with nearly all core area members belonging and nearly none in the far fetched radius belonging. Not all of their typical features are logically necessary. The recognition of features produces an activation, the strength of which depends not only on the degree to which the feature is present but a weighting factor. When the sum of the activations crosses a threshold, the concept becomes active and the stimulus is said to belong to that category.

Selves are mongrel concepts composed of different conceptual intuitions, each of which is itself a cluster concept, thus Selves are part of the most elusive, abstract, high-level entities entertained by minds. Whereas this may be aesthetically pleasant, presenting us as considerably complex entities, it is also a great ethical burden, for it leaves the domain of ethics, highly dependant on the concepts of Selfhood and Personhood, with a scattered slippery ground-level notion from which to create the building blocks of ethical theories.

Several analogies have been used to convey the concept of Cluster Concept, these convey images of star clusters, neural networks lighting up, and sets of properties with a majority vote. A particularly well known analogy used by Wittgenstein is the game analogy, in which language games determine/prescribe normative meanings which constrict a word’s meaning, without determining a clear cut case. Wittgenstein defended that there was no clear set of necessary conditions that determine what a game is. Bernard Suits came up with a refutation of that claim, stating that there is such a definition (modified from “What is a game” 1967, Philosophy of Science Vol. 34, No. 2 [Jun., 1967], pp. 148-156):

“To play a game is to engage in activity designed to bring about a specific state of affairs, using only means permitted by specific rules, where the means permitted by the rules are more limited in scope than they would be in the absence of such rules, and where the sole reason for accepting the rules is to make possible such activity.”

Can we hope for a similar soon to be found understanding of Self? Let us invoke:

The Hidden Variable Hypothesis: There is a core essence which determines the class of selves from non-selves, it is just not yet within our current state-of-knowledge reach.

While desirable, there are various resons to be skeptical of The Hidden Variable Hyphotesis: (1) Any plausible candidate core would have to be able to disentangle selves from Organisms in general, Superorganisms (i.e. insect societies) and institutions (2) We clearly entertain different models of what selves are for different purposes, as shown below in Section Varieties of Self-Systems Worth Having. (3) Design consideration: Being evolved structures which encompass several resources of a recently evolved mind, that came to being through a complex dual-inheritance evolution of several hundred thousand replicators belonging to two kinds (genes and memes), Selves are among the most complex structures known and thus unlikely to possess a core essence, due to causal design considerations independent of how untractable it would be to detect and describe this essence.

From now on then, I will be assuming as common ground that Selves are Mongrel concepts, comprised of some yet undiscussed number of Cluster Concepts.

(To Be Continued)

CEV Sequence—On What is a Self—Part 1