thanks

As long time readers know I often take speculative excursions into imaginings of the Singularity (which might better be thought of as the Singularities, but that ends up in semantic contortions, better left unsaid.) One element of the Singularity that….

“some people say that consciousness is already periodically terminated by sleep, and the elements that give you your individuality, like memories, beliefs, and desires, also change during your life,”

Only some people? I think that’s the widespread consensus, of which I’m a part. That’s an important element in thinking carefully about consciousness, not a fact that leads inexorably, or even strongly, to “copy X or substrate jump Y must retain one’s (highly punctuated) conscious stream”.

As we depart from areas where the punctuated conscious stream seems to persist (something closer to normal human life arcs), it seems to me we’re being riskier and less conservative about preserving it.

I’ve had these discussions in great detail on my blog, and the natural end point (until scientific insight changes the details) seemed to be with me acknowledging Carl Shulman’s point that discussion of solving mortality becomes messy under sustained analysis, but that I’m still motivated to maintain my earthy (not referring to the planet here) life despite the shitstorm of paradoxes and impossibilities that stand in the way after the little things like heart disease and dementia are solved.

“a willingness to identify with one’s copies.”

That seems supremely arbitrary to me. I sort persistence desires into two basic categories. The first is the persistence of one’s observer subjective conscious experience (call it theatre of consciousness, threshold minimum of qualia, or something else that captures that experience). The second is desires for any other arbitrary thing to persist. It could be copies of oneself to a particular degree of accuracy, it could be one’s genetic line, it could be concept of “social justice” or one’s nation-state. For people like me in the first category it’s all fucking arbitrary if I’m not around to observe it. The strangeness of the fact that there are a bunch of people in the second category who think that the first category conflates with a doppleganger that doesn’t involve careful thought of the problem of sufficiently good detection technology, leads me to think that the observer subjective conscious experience is an artifact that doesn’t correlate 100% with social, interactive humans.

At this stage, I feel like I’m repeating myself to people with very different intuitions, and perhaps who are neuroanatomically different in some way our technology can’t yet identify. The two different perspective are worth intense study as natural phenomena, in my opinion. And my life (in the sense of the word meaningful to me) may depend on it.

And TGGP, I don’t have time to answer you in depth, no I’m not endorsing a single gene hypothesis. I accepted your shorthand for it, but you seem to be latching on too strongly to that one, god knows why, you’re a GNXP reader. I’m interested in exploring a undetected-as-yet biological difference, but I’m not endorsing a narrow explanation like “theatre of consciousness is a single gene mutation”, so I don’t see the point of us using that limiting framework to discuss an interesting topic.

Let’s consider three differences of opinion that have been seen on this site and elsewhere:
- willingness to believe that the number of persons in a given physical situation is not an objective fact
- willingness to believe that a replication of the causal structure of one’s cognitive system (or whatever) in some new physical medium will produce a consciousness like one’s own
- willingness to identify with such a copy of oneself, to the point that the elimination of the physical original is no longer regarded as death

The first opinion is a response to the “conscious sorites paradox”, the inability to come up with an objective physical criterion as to whether a particular physical configuration contains a conscious mind. It is not a tenable position, and to reject it as untenable you have to take your own subjectively revealed existence seriously, and reason a little on this basis; but for someone to hold such an opinion does not mean they are completely lacking in introspective self-awareness, it just means they haven’t taken those further steps, or refuse to do so, perhaps because they believe very strongly in a certain physical ontology.

The second opinion is a theory about the nature of the physical correlate of consciousness, namely, that it consists of a modular causal structure of some sort. The problems with that view have been enough in the end to make me advocate a monadic interpretation of quantum physics in which the self is a single bundle of entanglement rather than a cluster of disjoint parts, but that’s a fairly intricate debate. The first opinion is much easier to rebut, since you only have to admit that if a stream of conscious experience exists, it exists definitely, for that opinion to be falsified. Rebutting the second opinion requires a lot of wrangling about “subjective unity” and “binding relations”, it’s extremely hazy in places, and so the second opinion remains, with some reason, materialist orthodoxy and far more common that the first opinion.

The third opinion is something else again – a willingness to identify with one’s copies. As seen elsewhere on this thread, some people say that consciousness is already periodically terminated by sleep, and the elements that give you your individuality, like memories, beliefs, and desires, also change during your life, and so it’s not such a big thing to regard a copy as another you, to regard the capacity for restoration from a backup as a form of immortality, and so on. Most of those people would be willing to admit that each copy has its own stream of consciousness, that copies will increasingly diverge as they experience different things, that when one copy dies it is indeed the local end of consciousness, and so on – they are just making a different value judgment from the person who only cares about the continuation of the original stream of consciousness. There is no evidence here of an impaired faculty of self-awareness (though I guess that would help).