Excellent job on this post! It is very well written with some awesome & very memorable passages. (And it’s going to make me think about the nature of identity way too much over next few days… :)
I watched a couple lectures from this course. It really helped me approach the issue of identity (and death) from a new perspective. Specifically, I think memories are the defining characteristic of identity.
From my recall, Kagan gave the example of someone who lived forever, but whose memory was fully erased every X years. Who would they be at any given moment? It seems to me, in that case, they would lose identity each time their memories were fully erased. You’d have a completely new person after each “reboot”. Even if personality and every other aspect of identity were perfectly preserved, memories are the key in my view. (It seems really obvious to me now [and maybe it is really obvious to most people], but I remember it shifting my understanding pretty significantly at the time I first encountered the idea.)
From my recall, Kagan gave the example of someone who lived forever, but whose memory was fully erased every X years. Who would they be at any given moment? It seems to me, in that case, they would lose identity each time their memories were fully erased. You’d have a completely new person after each “reboot”.
What if, instead of perfect erasure, those memories were simply altered slightly, every time they recalled them—thus creating an ever-shifting continuum of identities, each subtly different from the last? When is someone a completely new person, then?
I don’t know. I suppose that would feel a lot like what we feel in our current state, since, as you point out, memory recall isn’t flawless. I guess we are always shifting identities; re-engaging with our memories, preserved at whatever level of fidelity they may be, in each present moment.
The question of “when we become a new person” seems to be asking for something that may not be possible to define or answer. It feels like the only answer that makes sense is that we are a completely new person perpetually, and that static identity, of any kind, is only a (pretty damn persistent) illusion.
Identity seems to be a bit more than memory. Consider this post which explicitly tries to brdige a memory gap:
I’m not sure that is “identity” in the way I’m defining it.
If pre-memory-erase me writes down everything he can about himself in extreme detail—events he has experienced, how they made him feel, what goals he was interested in, what he had learned about how to optimize his pursuits, etc. -- and then post-memory-erase me is given those volumes, it still seems to me the essence of identity is lost.
I’m not sure if I’m using it correctly, but the term that comes to mind would be qualia—the pre-erase me and post-erase me will be experiencing fundamentally different conscious subjective experiences.
The process described above (manual memory back-up plan) would go a long way to making the two mes seem the same from the outside, I think. But they’d be different from the perspective of each me. I can imagine pre-erase me saying, “I’ll write this stuff for him, so he can be like me—so he can become me”, where post-erase me might say, “I’m glad he wrote this stuff down because it is interesting and helpful...we sure do have a lot in common. But it’s weird: It’s almost like he wants to become, and take over, me and my body. That can’t really happen though, because I am me, and he cannot be me.”
Excellent job on this post! It is very well written with some awesome & very memorable passages. (And it’s going to make me think about the nature of identity way too much over next few days… :)
I watched a couple lectures from this course. It really helped me approach the issue of identity (and death) from a new perspective. Specifically, I think memories are the defining characteristic of identity.
From my recall, Kagan gave the example of someone who lived forever, but whose memory was fully erased every X years. Who would they be at any given moment? It seems to me, in that case, they would lose identity each time their memories were fully erased. You’d have a completely new person after each “reboot”. Even if personality and every other aspect of identity were perfectly preserved, memories are the key in my view. (It seems really obvious to me now [and maybe it is really obvious to most people], but I remember it shifting my understanding pretty significantly at the time I first encountered the idea.)
What if, instead of perfect erasure, those memories were simply altered slightly, every time they recalled them—thus creating an ever-shifting continuum of identities, each subtly different from the last? When is someone a completely new person, then?
I don’t know. I suppose that would feel a lot like what we feel in our current state, since, as you point out, memory recall isn’t flawless. I guess we are always shifting identities; re-engaging with our memories, preserved at whatever level of fidelity they may be, in each present moment.
The question of “when we become a new person” seems to be asking for something that may not be possible to define or answer. It feels like the only answer that makes sense is that we are a completely new person perpetually, and that static identity, of any kind, is only a (pretty damn persistent) illusion.
Identity seems to be a bit more than memory. Consider this post which explicitly tries to brdige a memory gap:
http://lesswrong.com/lw/itx/how_do_i_backup_myself/
One avenue to this end is collective memory which is the topic of these comments:
http://lesswrong.com/lw/itx/how_do_i_backup_myself/9we3
I’m not sure that is “identity” in the way I’m defining it.
If pre-memory-erase me writes down everything he can about himself in extreme detail—events he has experienced, how they made him feel, what goals he was interested in, what he had learned about how to optimize his pursuits, etc. -- and then post-memory-erase me is given those volumes, it still seems to me the essence of identity is lost.
I’m not sure if I’m using it correctly, but the term that comes to mind would be qualia—the pre-erase me and post-erase me will be experiencing fundamentally different conscious subjective experiences.
The process described above (manual memory back-up plan) would go a long way to making the two mes seem the same from the outside, I think. But they’d be different from the perspective of each me. I can imagine pre-erase me saying, “I’ll write this stuff for him, so he can be like me—so he can become me”, where post-erase me might say, “I’m glad he wrote this stuff down because it is interesting and helpful...we sure do have a lot in common. But it’s weird: It’s almost like he wants to become, and take over, me and my body. That can’t really happen though, because I am me, and he cannot be me.”