Philosophy is often presented as a rather useless, if perhaps interesting, type of thought. Arguably, however, defective philosophies of mind are a leading cause of death today! Exhibit one, Bryan Caplan
Sleep is a red herring, to raise it in this context is essentially to engage in a fallacy of equivocation.
Sleep is definitively unconsciousness only in the sense of not being aware of ones surroundings, while the sort of unconsciousness germane to this issue is the interruption of one's personal thread of experience. Sleep does not necessarily imply unconsciousness of this latter sort--when one wakes up from a dream one suddenly becomes aware of ones surroundings, but one's experience is continuous before and after waking.
It's not even entirely clear that sleep ever involves that sort of unconsciousness at all--in studies even subjects wakened from non-REM sleep often recall perceiving something even if it's not anything terribly distinct. The sense of discontinuity sleep gives rise to could simply be the result of the brain not laying down memories while sleeping, a kind of natural blackout, rather than any actual temporary cessation of experience.
Although I found the premise that exponents of a Parfit-like theory of identity lack a theater of consciousness to be absurd, I decided to humor you by reflecting on the experiences engendered by several sensory stimuli immediately available to me, including:
- the redness of a red plastic Glad container lid (a little off from true red, similar to the color of watermelon flesh)- the bumpiness of a textured doorknob as I ran my finger over it- the sharp, but very minor pain of poking my thumbtip with a piece of metal- the coolness of water as I drank it
I also spent some time on attempting to experience qualia unrelated to me personally, including qualia of other people and of my future selves, although having no idea how one would go about this it would more fall under the heading of 'sitting around being confused' than 'an effort'.
My view on personal identity allows for my identifying with- my brain restarted after a prolonged period of inactivity- a sufficiently accurate copy of a future version of my brain (if my original brain remained active, or there was more than one copy made, my *present* self would identify with all of them, although some of them might eventually come not to identify with each other very much)- probably an upload of me, although there remains a slight doubt over whether there might be a meaningful difference between a simulation of a conscious being and a conscious being. However, if a (sufficiently high-quality) upload of me would be a mind at all, I am quite certain that it would be *my* mind.
I am also certain that if being uploaded were ever found to be a mistake it would be a reversible one, at least for a while. While perhaps I would have missed out on some conscious experiences during my time as an upload, a reembodiment (or other adaptation to a suitable substrate) would be able to begin having *my* experiences again, and could even (re?)experience what I missed as memories. I evaluate the chance of there being a difference as less than 5% anyway.
I am fairly certain that had I participated upthread you would have judged me as likely to be lacking in conscious experience, especially since I would have been unlikely to have mentioned a 5% doubt earlier. Yet nonetheless my qualitative experiences exist and are particular to me.
If I had needed any convincing to begin with, I would probably be at least somewhat convinced by now that your theory was false. However, I have no idea how/if any of this will convince you.
I can only assure you that you are being paranoid.
Thanks for your reply, though you may not be aware of this late response... now that you come to mention the Star Trek, it does sound familiar, I may have seen some of it; I was pretty sure it was hardly an original idea; not that you were suggesting as much.
Mitchell,Interesting comment, my response to a couple salient parts.
"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.
Within your population of interest (scientific immortalists), I think these differences may have more of a conceptual than a phenomenological origin.
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).
To make this point more colorfully, suppose you're an epileptic, and the doctors want to cut your corpus callosum, which should alleviate the seizures. When you wake up after the operation will you be the left brain, or the right? And yes, there's plenty of evidence that describing them as two separate entities is more appropriate in those with severed corpus callosums.
You're discussing the minority of the population with a certain interest, I'm discussing the entire population because I have no a priori reason to think that subset is unusual in any particular way when it comes to frequencies for a hypothetical subjective-experience gene. If large numbers of people have it, I would expect that the gene began its march to fixation long before there was anything like a feasible science of radical life extension. I had not made explicit that my question was partly intended to ask how reasonable it is to believe there is such a gene corresponding well to our hypothetical, but we can also stay in the hypothetical assuming it does exist and make guesses about its nature.
In this thought experiment we can assume that the coded brain is self aware. If the two repos' are modified AFTER the branching, then each repo would have a different state, so they would be subjectively different. If the original were killed before any modifications happened they could be considered subjectively equal. What I'm saying is that I think Robin is arguing that the two instances ARE subjectively (or structurally) equal, while Bryan is arguing that the two instances ARE NOT objectively (or physically) equal. Essentially it seems they might be arguing past each other over something akin to this: http://en.wikipedia.org/wik... and could possibly come to an agreement in that they are both supporting valid points.
TGGP,Well, first of all, we're starting with the minority of the population interested in discussing solving the problem of mortality through science. Within that population it's not clear to me that only a minority makes a distinction between immortality for a doppelganger and immortality for whatever vessel can maintain their subjective conscious experience. The portion of the population that makes that distinction, I intuit would share that "subjective-experience gene".
I trust I will not have to add a hundred footnotes explaining every short-hand term or allusion here for third parties.
@Richard_Silliker: Yes, color is that. The purpose of my post was to identify color (either phenomenal or detectable) as being a case of an "a high-level pattern" that has "an ontologically real, consciousness-relevant persistent physical identity when it is decomposable into smaller parts which are known not to have such identities" in response to Eliezer_Yudkowsky's question.
Sleep is a red herring, to raise it in this context is essentially to engage in a fallacy of equivocation.
Sleep is definitively unconsciousness only in the sense of not being aware of ones surroundings, while the sort of unconsciousness germane to this issue is the interruption of one's personal thread of experience. Sleep does not necessarily imply unconsciousness of this latter sort--when one wakes up from a dream one suddenly becomes aware of ones surroundings, but one's experience is continuous before and after waking.
It's not even entirely clear that sleep ever involves that sort of unconsciousness at all--in studies even subjects wakened from non-REM sleep often recall perceiving something even if it's not anything terribly distinct. The sense of discontinuity sleep gives rise to could simply be the result of the brain not laying down memories while sleeping, a kind of natural blackout, rather than any actual temporary cessation of experience.
Hopefully_Anonymous:
Although I found the premise that exponents of a Parfit-like theory of identity lack a theater of consciousness to be absurd, I decided to humor you by reflecting on the experiences engendered by several sensory stimuli immediately available to me, including:
- the redness of a red plastic Glad container lid (a little off from true red, similar to the color of watermelon flesh)- the bumpiness of a textured doorknob as I ran my finger over it- the sharp, but very minor pain of poking my thumbtip with a piece of metal- the coolness of water as I drank it
I also spent some time on attempting to experience qualia unrelated to me personally, including qualia of other people and of my future selves, although having no idea how one would go about this it would more fall under the heading of 'sitting around being confused' than 'an effort'.
My view on personal identity allows for my identifying with- my brain restarted after a prolonged period of inactivity- a sufficiently accurate copy of a future version of my brain (if my original brain remained active, or there was more than one copy made, my *present* self would identify with all of them, although some of them might eventually come not to identify with each other very much)- probably an upload of me, although there remains a slight doubt over whether there might be a meaningful difference between a simulation of a conscious being and a conscious being. However, if a (sufficiently high-quality) upload of me would be a mind at all, I am quite certain that it would be *my* mind.
I am also certain that if being uploaded were ever found to be a mistake it would be a reversible one, at least for a while. While perhaps I would have missed out on some conscious experiences during my time as an upload, a reembodiment (or other adaptation to a suitable substrate) would be able to begin having *my* experiences again, and could even (re?)experience what I missed as memories. I evaluate the chance of there being a difference as less than 5% anyway.
I am fairly certain that had I participated upthread you would have judged me as likely to be lacking in conscious experience, especially since I would have been unlikely to have mentioned a 5% doubt earlier. Yet nonetheless my qualitative experiences exist and are particular to me.
If I had needed any convincing to begin with, I would probably be at least somewhat convinced by now that your theory was false. However, I have no idea how/if any of this will convince you.
I can only assure you that you are being paranoid.
''Accept it and grab a precious chance to live longer, or reject it and die.''
no offence, but what can be worse than a wacko with a PHd?
You think philosophy kills? My inner intuition tells me that science kills too....
''Monozygotic twins are different people because they’ve had different life experiences. ''
This is untrue. From the moment of cell division in the womb they are already 2 diff persons with no life experience yet whatsoever.
Thanks for your reply, though you may not be aware of this late response... now that you come to mention the Star Trek, it does sound familiar, I may have seen some of it; I was pretty sure it was hardly an original idea; not that you were suggesting as much.
thanks
...please where can I buy a unicorn?
Mitchell,Interesting comment, my response to a couple salient parts.
"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.
Within your population of interest (scientific immortalists), I think these differences may have more of a conceptual than a phenomenological origin.
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).
To make this point more colorfully, suppose you're an epileptic, and the doctors want to cut your corpus callosum, which should alleviate the seizures. When you wake up after the operation will you be the left brain, or the right? And yes, there's plenty of evidence that describing them as two separate entities is more appropriate in those with severed corpus callosums.
You're discussing the minority of the population with a certain interest, I'm discussing the entire population because I have no a priori reason to think that subset is unusual in any particular way when it comes to frequencies for a hypothetical subjective-experience gene. If large numbers of people have it, I would expect that the gene began its march to fixation long before there was anything like a feasible science of radical life extension. I had not made explicit that my question was partly intended to ask how reasonable it is to believe there is such a gene corresponding well to our hypothetical, but we can also stay in the hypothetical assuming it does exist and make guesses about its nature.
I suggest that discussion of Eliezer's specific argument move to LessWrong.
In this thought experiment we can assume that the coded brain is self aware. If the two repos' are modified AFTER the branching, then each repo would have a different state, so they would be subjectively different. If the original were killed before any modifications happened they could be considered subjectively equal. What I'm saying is that I think Robin is arguing that the two instances ARE subjectively (or structurally) equal, while Bryan is arguing that the two instances ARE NOT objectively (or physically) equal. Essentially it seems they might be arguing past each other over something akin to this: http://en.wikipedia.org/wik... and could possibly come to an agreement in that they are both supporting valid points.
TGGP,Well, first of all, we're starting with the minority of the population interested in discussing solving the problem of mortality through science. Within that population it's not clear to me that only a minority makes a distinction between immortality for a doppelganger and immortality for whatever vessel can maintain their subjective conscious experience. The portion of the population that makes that distinction, I intuit would share that "subjective-experience gene".
I trust I will not have to add a hundred footnotes explaining every short-hand term or allusion here for third parties.
Wait, never mind ignore the color example; it violates the persistence criterion.
@Richard_Silliker: Yes, color is that. The purpose of my post was to identify color (either phenomenal or detectable) as being a case of an "a high-level pattern" that has "an ontologically real, consciousness-relevant persistent physical identity when it is decomposable into smaller parts which are known not to have such identities" in response to Eliezer_Yudkowsky's question.
"By being color."
Colour is just one of the attributes of constraint on the flow of mass.