There’s an idea in physics that there might in fact be only one electron in the universe, an electron that moves through space and time in such a way that it appears, when humans observe the world around them, like there’s many different electrons all throughout the universe, all with precisely the same physical properties. There might be more to it, I wouldn’t be qualified to say, but I view this one-electron universe model as an ontological koan. It makes us think “hey, reality could be this way rather than the way we think it is and we would be none the wiser — let’s try to deepen our understanding of reality in light of that.”
There’s a short story by Andy Weir called The Egg. It falls under the umbrella of metaphysics porn which also covers The Matrix and Fight Club, the kind of story that makes some part of you believe it’s true for the first half hour after you read/watch it, giving you a philosophical high — an intimation of a mystical experience. I don’t want to deny you that, so go read it; it’s short, shorter than this post, you’ve got no excuse. Did you read it? Well in case you’re reading this after the collapse of civilization and Weir’s story has been lost to time, I’ll summarize the relevant detail. A man dies and meets God, who informs him that he (the man) is everyone. Everyone he has met, and everyone he hasn’t across the planet and throughout history, past and future, is him. Every time he dies, he’s sent to be born again as a different person in a different place and at a different time. God then sends the man off to be reincarnated as someone else. The Egg describes a one-consciousness universe.
Derek Parfit’s theory of personal identity detailed in Reasons and Persons relies on what he calls person-slices, snapshots of a person at an instant in time. This is somewhat contentious because it’s hard to make sense of what a person-slice is — what would it be like to be a person-slice? This seems to me to be analogous to asking “how can we observe a snapshot of an electron in time?” We can’t! Observation can only be done over an interval of time, but just because we can’t observe electron-slices doesn’t mean that we shouldn’t expect to be able to observe electrons over time, nor does the fact that we can observe electrons over time suggest that electron-slices are a nonsensical concept. Likewise, if there’s nothing it’s like to be a person-slice, that doesn’t mean that person-slices are nonsense.
The one-consciousness universe in The Egg is beautiful because it’s easy to comprehend, but it’s painfully anthropocentric. If consciousness is fundamental to the universe, we shouldn’t expect it to obey laws that reference human beings. This would be operating on the wrong layer of abstraction: human beings are not fundamental to the universe, they are emergent properties of some fundamental building blocks, like quarks and electrons. I find the one-electron universe model to be useful for helping us transcend our parochial intuitions about consciousness because it is sufficiently weird, without being too hard to comprehend. Let’s say that there is a fundamental constituent of the universe called the conscion. It flits around throughout space-time visiting places all throughout the universe, and imbuing everything it visits with consciousness. Certain physical configurations, namely person-slices, exhibit continuity properties which make it like something to be the continuous sequence of those configurations through time. The order in which the conscion visits your person-slices makes no difference to what it’s like to be you — in fact, it could visit one of your person-slices, then visit someone else’s, then go back to yours and it would make no difference. It could even visit one of your person-slices more than once, without changing what it’s like to be you in that instant.
You are your person-slice at this very instant. The continuity of your experience is not the result of the essence of consciousness (the conscion) flowing through you from one moment to the next, it is not necessary that it do so. For your subjective experience to be continuous requires only that the person-slice that you are in this instant be continuous with person-slices past. And the notion of a person-slice doesn’t rely on the existence of consciousness, even a p-zombie can be viewed as a continuous set of person slices.
“The order in which the conscion visits your person-slices makes no difference to what it’s like to be you”. Then how does it make a difference? What does it even mean for a conscion to visit someone before someone else? If it makes no difference, then you should adapt the theory to reflect that. And then we are left with two sets of points of spacetime (those visited by the conscion and those not), which sounds rather epiphenomenal.
Have you read the Sequences? The most important post is Mysterious Answers to Mysterious Questions. It’s intended to prevent exactly the error you’re making with the “particle of consciousness”, using the example of people who made similar errors with phlogiston (essence of fire) and elan vital (essence of life). Key quotes:
Then again, I was lucky to read that post before making any errors of similar type. It would’ve been harder to admit such an error after making it, because I’d be too invested. In case you have that kind of problem, there’s a sequence post for that as well: The Crackpot Offer. It shows the right attitude to take whenever you abstractly, distantly, realize that you’re probably wrong.
I criticize Eliezer from time to time, but he did some damn good work. Let’s use it.
You’ve woven a story in which I am wrong, and it will be hard for me to admit that I am wrong. In doing so, you’ve made it tricky for to defend my point in the case that I’m not wrong.
You’re accusing my “conscion” of being the same kind of mysterious answer as phlogiston. It would be, if I were seriously proposing it as an answer to the mystery of consciousness. I’m not.
I’ll gladly concede a failure of my writing in not making it clearer that I’m not making any claim that the conscion exists, but rather that thinking about what it would mean for our understanding of consciousness if the conscion did exist, as described. I’m trying to force people to drop their intuition about the “flow” of consciousness. I’m saying that all our observations about consciousness can be equally well explained by this weird conscion hypothesis as can be by the conventional consciousness-as-the-christian-soul hypothesis, so we should notice that many of our intuitions about consciousness have simply been transplanted from theology, and we should not trust those.
We can’t make conclusions about the feeling of flow (whether we should drop it, etc.) by comparing two theories neither of which have the gears to explain it. That’s why I linked to the mysterious answers post.
I’m not trying to explain the theory of flow (not in this post, I do have some thoughts on the matter). I’m merely trying to induce doubt.
The conventional understanding of consciousness as the Christian soul doesn’t explain anything, really, just like the “conscion.” But because it’s tied up in millennia of Christian scholarship, there are suppositions attached to it that are indefensible.
Religious Bob: My continuity of experience is due to having a soul that continuously moves from one moment to the next.
You: Imagine another theory, with a particle of consciousness permeating the universe.
Religious Bob: Would that theory also predict continuity of experience?
You: I don’t know, just trying to induce doubt.
Religious Bob: …
You posted this reply before I finished editing my previous comment to include its second clause, but I’ll respond as though the order were more natural.
That’s the wrong comparison to be making. Suppose the deist idea about the origin of the universe were dominant, and I proposed that God may not have created the universe. After all, deists, what created God? He was an unmoved mover? Well why couldn’t the universe have just been an unmoved movse in the first place? Sound like you’re just passing the recursive buck, deists! I’m not proposing any kind of better explanation, just offering a different non-explanation to induce doubt.
Doubt in what? Well I admit I don’t know all that much about deism, but let’s suppose that deists believed that even though god never intervened in the universe, he had intentions for how the universe should turn out, and it’s our job as his creations to honor his intentions like we would honor the intentions of our fathers. This baggage is not entailed by the core theory of deism, it just came along for the ride when deism evolved from older Christian metaphysics. That’s why even though my proposed alternative to deism is no more an explanation of the origin of the universe than deism is, it brings to attention the fact that that deism’s baggage is unnecessary and we should forsake it.
I’m not saying we need to doubt the conventional understanding of consciousness entirely, rather that we should recognize that it has baggage and forsake it. What’s the evidence that it has baggage? Well conventional intuition makes the idea of person-slices seem suspect, as I described in the post. Person-slices don’t seem suspect when you use the conscion model of consciousness. If the two hypotheses are equally non-explanatory, then it is baggage that causes the different intuition.
I think this is where the argument cracks. Person-slices could still seem suspect due to some other reasoning, not just due to religion. You’re getting a positive conclusion (“consciousness can be based on person-slices”) from nowhere.
I’m not sure at this point what my goal was with this post, it would be too easy to fall into motivated reasoning after this back-and-forth. So I agree with you that my post fails to give evidence for “consciousness can be based on person-slices,” I just don’t know if I ever intended to give that positive conclusion.
I do think that person-slices are entirely plausible, and a very useful analytical tool, as Parfit found. I have other thoughts on consciousness which assume person-slices are a coherent concept. If this post is sufficient to make the burden of proof for the existence of person-slices not clearly fall to me, then it’s served a useful purpose.
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By the way, I did give a positive account for the existence of person slices, comparing the notion of a person slice to something that we more readily accept exists:
Trying to think of how to respond to this. On the one hand it’s some nice babble, but on the other it doesn’t lay out much if any evidence that it might correspond to the way the world works. I don’t really think this post is inappropriate for LW, but I also think it’s current low score at this time of reading (4) is probably appropriate. My best guess is that it asks readers to cross more inferential distance than they can or care to and so fails to resonate with many readers.
As for myself I get what you’re pointing at and I think you’re turning your thoughts in a way that may eventually lead you to an understanding of the world not unlike my own, but given the gaps you leave I also suspect you have a long way to go in developing this understanding if you choose to. Relatedly I also like the back and forth in the comments here so far, and hope it proves fruitful.
Could you perhaps elaborate on what is this understanding of the world you hold?
PKD was the grandaddy of that sort of thing particularly The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch.
It’s worth not taking the common-sense concept of consciousness seriously, as it more or less just looks like the idea of a soul dressed up in 21st century jargon. However, as you noted, this idea doesn’t rely on the existence of consciousness, but rather is a sort of panpsychist frame of looking at the world. I tend to agree with this view.
If one truly internalizes this view—not just intellectually, but on a deep emotional level—I think that it is probably the best argument for altruism that exists. If I told you that you were going to be in excruciating pain in five minutes unless you did something to avoid it, you would probably go to great lengths to avoid the suffering. The human mind is good at internalizing future person-slices as a continuation of its current self, and therefore acts altruistically towards those future selfs. If only we were able to do the same for all person slices on Earth.
This is precisely the kind of gymnastics you need to do if you want to justify the foundational claim of altruism, that other people should matter to you. But what you’ve said is not sufficient to justify that. Why should I care about the person-slices the conscion visits if they are not my own?
Perhaps I did not make my point clear. If you are asking for me to justify the terminal value of altruism, I can’t. By definition, terminal values cannot be justified by appealing to other values. However, I was simply pointing out that our concept of identity can break very easily, as you noted as well. If one thinks that all they should care about are “continuations of their current self” and then they think that only this chunk of matter is a continuation of their current self, then no, this is insufficient to justify altruism. However, as your post reveals, one can imagine switching between person slices spatially, just as one switches between time slices temporally.
Asking “Why should I care about person-slices the conscion visits if they are not my own?” well, you’ve presupposed that they aren’t your own. I am making the opposite connection.
It relates. To everything to anything and everything. In some form or the other. Because all is one. one is all. It questions every question and belives to question every answer given. It speaks what he believes in. It thinks in both ways. For all. For everything. Forevery face he sees and every face who sees him. Always looking for perfection in every action or inaction.
Daniel Kolak has a 600-page-long book (“I Am You”) arguing for basically this position.
It is interesting point, about which I has been thinking a lot. Moreover, I think that I have seen a phylosophical paper, which tries to defend this idea many years ago, but I didn’t preserve the link.
The idea of what you called “consion” may be useful in solving so called “measure problem” in the infinite universe. If consion exists, it has different probability of visioting different “slices ” and thus we could calculate probabilities.
If it doesn’t exist, all possible slices are equal, and in that case most strange and complex ones should dominate, which contradict the fact that my expirience is rather simple.
Surely, we may not call this “consion”, but using terms of “blobs of probability” or “biggest part of my measure” (often on some lesswrong writing) is even more confusing and looks like “misterious answers”. There is much less mysterious In the “consion” , consion is just similar to an elevator which moves between different floors of the building.