>> On 28 Sep 2015, at 12:26 AM, Bruce Kellett <[email protected]> wrote:
>>
>>> On 28/09/2015 2:35 pm, Stathis Papaioannou wrote:On 27 Sep 2015, at 10:32
>>> PM, Bruce Kellett <[email protected]> wrote:
>>>> On 25/09/2015 2:58 pm, Stathis Papaioannou wrote:
>>>>> On 24 Sep 2015, at 6:07 PM, Bruce Kellett <[email protected]>
>>>>> wrote:
>>>>>> On 25/09/2015 12:53 am, Stathis Papaioannou wrote:
>>>>>> You present "closest continuer theory" as if it is obviously correct,
>>>>>> and it is not. In any case, even granting the theory, why should the
>>>>>> causal or physical connection make a difference? I've sometimes
>>>>>> encountered this claim in these discussions but it is just ad hoc.
>>>>> The theory is no more ad hoc than any other theory of personal identity.
>>>>> When we seek to encapsulate an intuitive notion in language, any attempt
>>>>> could be criticized as being ad hoc, so that charge is of no substance.
>>>> It's ad hoc to say that if one copy differed from the original by 1% and
>>>> the other copy by 1.001%, then the 1% copy is the continuation of the
>>>> original and the other copy a different person. It sounds like something
>>>> made up by legislators rather than philosophers, like an arbitrary cutoff
>>>> for a speed limit.
>>>
>>> That is a contrived situation. The full theory has a defined metric (which
>>> may or may not be a personal preference) by which one quantifies the
>>> differences between copies (or potential other persons). That metric will
>>> specify when differences become too small to be significant -- we then
>>> claim ties for 'closest' continuer. There need be no conundrums if one does
>>> things sensibly.
>>>
>>>> If you can't "encapsulate an intuitive concept in language" then you
>>>> should state that, or conclude that there is something wrong with the
>>>> intuitive notion.
>>>
>>> I suggest you tell this to Plato and suggest that he withdraws his
>>> Theaetetus! The majority of philosophy (100% for linguistic philosophers)
>>> is the attempt to make the intuitive concepts of language more precise --
>>> to encapsulate an intuitive notion is language.
>>>
>>> But sometimes the conclusion is that the intuitive concept is wrong or
>>> useless. Derek Parfit came to essentially that conclusion about personal
>>> identity by considering duplication thought experiments.
>> One does not have to follow Parfit in this, or anything else. I think the
>> confusion arising from thought experiments about duplication of computerized
>> simulations is just that, confusion. It is only when we have actually
>> achieved full AI and we can proceed to duplicate that we can ask those
>> thereby duplicated what they think about it.
>
> What do you think a duplicated human or AI would possibly say, other than
> that they feel they are the same person as before?
>
>> Until then, it is all hypothetical, and our common experiences of personal
>> identity, and the way we judge the identity of others we meet will govern
>> how we think about personal identity. The concept is not wrong or useless,
>> and will not be made so by any number of duplication experiences.
>
> The concept is not practically problematic because we don't have copying
> technology. It is philosophically nonetheless, because we can easily consider
> what would happen if we did have such technology.
>
>>>>> But my more substantive dispute was with your assertion that if a copy
>>>>> arose through random processes then it wouldn't really count as a
>>>>> continuation of the original. That's like saying that if car fell
>>>>> together from parts in a junkyard stirred up by a whirlwind it wouldn't
>>>>> really be a car - even though it functioned exactly like a car made in a
>>>>> factory.
>>>>
>>>> That analogy does not fly. Your random car is not the continuation of any
>>>> previously existing car: the random person appearing in the
>>>> Andromeda galaxy is not a continuation of me, no mater how similar it is
>>>> to me on the relevant metric. That random object may well be a person,
>>>> just as the car in your junk yard is a car -- it is just that neither is
>>>> the continuer of any existing person or car.
>>>
>>> The person's psychological continuity would be preserved. I consider I
>>> would survive if my psychological continuity was preserved without my
>>> physical continuity necessarily being preserved; in fact, the only reason I
>>> endeavour to have my physical continuity preserved is because it's the
>>> easiest way to preserve psychological continuity. Preservation of physical
>>> continuity without psychological continuity, for example if someone has a
>>> head injury that wipes out all cognitive function, is not something anyone
>>> aspires to.
>>
>> That might be your opinion, but others beg to differ. It is a common
>> experience that people feel crises of personal identity after losing limbs;
>> after mastectomy for breast cancer; after severe facial disfigurement.
>
> What is colloquially called a "crisis of personal identity" in these cases is
> not the same thing as we are discussing. People may consider that they have
> changed in a fundamental way, but they don't think they are not a
> continuation of the person they were before the problem occurred. Moreover,
> insofar as physical changes cause a change in the sense of self, it is
> entirely through their psychological effect. If your face were disfigured
> while you were asleep, it would not affect you until you looked in the mirror
> in the morning.
>
>> I suggest that since it is unlikely that you have undergone any of these in
>> their more extreme forms, your personal opinions on the matter count for
>> very little. I have had very close and personal experience of the latter
>> case -- loss of most cognitive function with essentially no visible physical
>> change to the body. There was never any doubt that that body continued to be
>> the person I knew. One certainly does not aspire to that situation, but if
>> it arises by mischance, personal identity is not destroyed. Why do many
>> people continue to love and care for their loved ones, even when they are in
>> the extreme end states of Alzheimer's? Or in a long lasting coma?
>
> I have had both personal and professional contact with people who have severe
> dementia. The reason it is so terrible a disease is that in its end stages
> the person you knew has gone.
>
>>>>> ........
>>>>>>
>>>>>>> The Copernican Principle in conjunction with the observation that the
>>>>>>> universe is uniform in all directions is enough.
>>>>>> No, that is not enough. The Copernician principle is not a law of
>>>>>> physics -- or of anything else, for that matter. It is a useful
>>>>>> heuristic, nothing more. The so-called "uniformity of the universe
>>>>>> (isotropy and homogeneity)" is also nothing more than a useful
>>>>>> approximation that can be used only on the largest scales -- when you
>>>>>> average over all local structure. Such arguments have no force against
>>>>>> the position I am arguing.
>>>>>
>>>>> Your argument misses the point, which is that IF the universe is infinite
>>>>> and uniform THEN there would be infinite copies of you and everything you
>>>>> see, and you could not know which of these copies you were at any moment.
>>>>
>>>> This is false. It is like the old probability problem of how many people
>>>> you need in a room for there to be a greater than 50% probability of two
>>>> having the same birthday. The answer, iirc, is 23. However, the number
>>>> required in order for there to be a greater than 50% chance for there to
>>>> be a person who has the same birthday as you do is substantially greater.
>>>> The necessity for copies does not imply that you are copied.
>>>>
>>>> Think of it this way. Take the Tegmark Type I multiverse and suppose that
>>>> you are unique (no copies anywhere. Or better, that our
>>>> life-friendly universe is unique). Then, by time reversal invariance,
>>>> continue that universe back to the big bang to recover the initial state.
>>>> Is that initial state impossible? Or any less likely than any other
>>>> potential initial state? Duplicates there will be in the multiverse, but
>>>> there is no necessity that you, or our observed O-region, be duplicated.
>>>
>>> It's possible that there are no copies of you, but it seems implausible.
>>> There would have to be infinite copies of other things, but not you. What
>>> makes the non-copied configurations special?
>>
>> Nothing. It is just that they are a priori as likely as any other
>> configuration.
>
> In an infinite random sequence of numbers it is possible that my phone number
> appears once and never repeats, while other eight digit sequences appear
> multiple times; but I wouldn't bet on it.
>
>>>> And even if you are duplicated as Tegmark suggests, so that there are many
>>>> copies far outside our O-region, or even our particle horizon, then there
>>>> is absolutely no possibilitiy of any interaction between these copies, so
>>>> their existence or non-existence can have no effect on you, so they are
>>>> irrelevant -- in principle, not just FAPP.
>>>
>>> They cannot interact with each other, but they are psychologically
>>> continuous with each other.
>>
>> That is a meaningless assertion. Can you suggest any operational way in
>> which you could establish the truth of such an assertion? Are you suggesting
>> that psychological influences can travel faster than light? Objects outside
>> our Hubble volume cannot now interact with us; objects outside our particle
>> horizon can never have interacted with us and can never do so in the future.
>> The expansion of space makes these interactions impossible. Psychology is
>> not exempt from these physical facts.
>
> It follows from the meaning of the words "psychologically continuous". If I
> have the same psychological properties as I did yesterday then I am
> psychologically continuous with my yesterday self. It is nonsensical to
> assert that yes, I remember everything I did yesterday, I have the same
> personality that I did yesterday, the same cognitive abilities that I did
> yesterday, etc., but I am not actually psychologically continuous, because
> there has been some sort of physical discontinuity. In fact, it is reflecting
> on this that should make it clear that physical change is irrelevant to
> psychological continuity except insofar as the physical change makes a
> psychological difference. If you feel the same, look the same, behave the
> same etc. today as you did yesterday but you are informed that advanced
> aliens performed a procedure X on you in your sleep, then that means that
> whatever X was, it did not affect psychological continuity.
>
>
>>> You can't know which copy is generating your mind.
>> So what? That is another useless assertion.You are you. It does not matter
>> how many non-interacting copies there are. Given Leibniz's identity of
>> indiscernibles, there is only ever one person given even this 'psychological
>> continuity'.
>
> Yes, but the multiple implementations provide redundancy in case some of them
> break, and it is possible that the multiple copies will affect the
> probability of what you will experience next if they diverge.
>
>>> If you were implemented in two parallel simulations on two computers
>>> running in lockstep, you would not be able to interact with your copy, and
>>> you would not be able to know which computer you were being implemented on.
>>
>> Again, so what? Can this make any operational difference?
>>
>>> Alternatively, it could be said that your mind was distributed across the
>>> two computers.
>>
>> No. That is a silly statement.
>
> That's more or less what you said above: "it does not matter how many
> non-interacting copies there are... there is only ever one person". However,
> if the copies diverge, there will be multiple persons.
>
>>> If one of the computers were switched off, your mind would continue
>>> running, unable to notice that anything unusual had happened.
>>
>> Which simply means that the scenario you describe is operationally just the
>> situation of one person. The only thing that making copies achieves is that
>> the environments will differ, so that the copies will diverge. Consequently,
>> they cease to be the same person after the odd nanosecond or two. Anything
>> else is hypothetical nonsense because not achievable in practice.
>
> In a non-interactive computer simulation the environment can be exactly the
> same so the copies need not diverge.
>
>>>> The situation then is just like that with the disjoint worlds of the MWI
>>>> in QM: the separate worlds are disjoint -- non interacting -- so their
>>>> existence has no bearing on you or your future. In fact, Susskind and
>>>> others have identified Tegmark's level I multiverse with the MWI of
>>>> quantum mechanics. I think this identification is nonsense, but the
>>>> relevance of the potential copies is the same in both cases -- zero!
>>>
>>> It is not zero if you could be any of the copies.
>
> It is generally held that there is no difference in the empirical predictions
> of the various interpretations of QM, so some physicists consider it is a
> waste of time even thinking about it.
>
>> Demonstrate to me how this makes an operational difference. If it makes no
>> measurable or operational difference, then, the relevance of the copies is
>> precisely zero.
>
> There is one difference between the MWI and other interpretations, revealed
> through the quantum suicide experiment, but this can't be used to gather
> evidence to convince anyone else.
>
>>>>> There is reason to believe that in fact the universe is infinite and
>>>>> uniform; but if it is not, which is possible, the conditional argument
>>>>> still stands. So, do you think you would experience the world differently
>>>>> if there were infinite copies of you and of every possible variation of
>>>>> you?
>>>>
>>>> No. Not that I believe that there are such copies, but even if there were,
>>>> they would be of zero consequence for anything whatsoever.
>>>
>>> What would it mean for probability if your mind were spread over infinite
>>> copies?
>> Nothing, because it would make no operational difference to anything -- even
>> if such a concept made any sense at all.
>
> You have IIRC said that there is a problem defining probabilities in an
> infinite multiverse. Given that we observe certain probabilities, what does
> this mean for the hypothesis that we are living in a multiverse?
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