On 4/16/2015 2:12 AM, LizR wrote:
On 16 April 2015 at 14:23, Bruce Kellett <bhkell...@optusnet.com.au
<mailto:bhkell...@optusnet.com.au>> wrote:
LizR wrote:
In Bruno's "COMP 2013" paper he says
The notion of the first person, or the conscious knower, admits the
simplest possible definition: it is provided by access to basic
memories. Consciousness, despite its non-definability, facilitates
the train of reasoning in humans; but we justifiably might have used
digital machines instead.
Given this, in my opinion there is no problem with what is meant by
step 3.
Bruno makes no attempt to define personal identity beyond the contents
of
memories. Whether one "really" survives being teleported, or falling
asleep and
waking up the next day, isn't relevant. "Moscow man" is just the guy who
remembers being Helsinki man, then finding himself in Moscow (for
example).
Hence Helsinki man can't predict any first person experience, only what
will
happen from a 3p view. Or if he didn't know duplication was involved,
he would
assume that he had a 50-50 chance of ending up in M or W.
But this is a rather self-serving definition -- designed to fit in with the
conclusion he wants to draw. We are entering the realm of the Humpty-Dumpty
dictionary -- words no longer have their ordinary, everyday meaning.
In what way is it self-serving? It seems quite reasonable to say that a person is their
memories, at least in a lot of important senses (Brent says it quite often, and he isn't
a huge fan of comp).
As a side issue, I think it's the same - or similar - to the definition that was used by
Everett? I haven't read his paper for a while but I seem to remember he used something
like this, after all, what else can you really use apart from memory if you want to
study how identity will persist over time within a given theory of physics? (For
contrast, consider amnesia cases or the guy in "Memento").
That's an interesting question (although Bruno always says it's not relevant to his
argument). Having a coherent, narrative memory seems like an obvious desideratum. But as
you point out the guy in "Memento" stays the same person even though he can't form new
long-term memories. So another possibility is what we would call in AI "running the same
program". This seems to be what is captured by "counter-factual correctness". Of course
any human-level AI will learn and so there will be divergence; but in a sense one could
say two instances a program instantiated the same "person" with different memories. It
would correspond to having the same character and predilections. For example we might
build several intelligent Mars Rovers that are landed in different places. They would
start with the same AI and memories (as installed at JPL) but as they learned and adapted
they would diverge.
Brent
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