Re: A calculus of personal identity
John Mikes writes (quoting Brent Meeker): Well that's the question isn't it. Is there something besides memories and personality that makes you you... But how much do we (already???) know about our memories which for sure is a concoction with our personality, of which we just as well know very little. Different people have different memories of the same event (not only the biased eyewitnesses). \ Never ask a psych-professional because he may be just as biased in knowing his profession as you are with yours. (Stathis, no hard feelings, please, you have disclosed a lot of thinking beyond your learned topics) We have a crude fractional picture of who we are and what we know (or don't) and memory is a big mystery. Bigger only is personality. We can't be sure that our memories are accurate. This puts us in a similar position when we consider our own past as when we consider someone else's past: we think that we know what it was like to be five years old, but our brains may have changed so much in the intervening years that this recollection may be little more vivid or accurate than if we were imagining what someone else's childhood was like after reading a book about it. There is no reason why every other mental quality, including the sense of identity, might not also change greatly over decades, with the only reason we think we remain the same person being that this change is gradual. Stathis Papaioannou _ Try Live.com: where your online world comes together - with news, sports, weather, and much more. http://www.live.com/getstarted --~--~-~--~~~---~--~~ You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com To unsubscribe from this group, send email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list -~--~~~~--~~--~--~---
Re: A calculus of personal identity
Bruno, I have cut out some of your detailed response to my post where I think we basically agree. There remain some differences, and some failings on my part to understand more technical aspects of your work. Memories of our past are generally more vivid and hold more information than writing, film etc., but there may come a time when people directly share memories with each other as easily as they now share mp3 files. Selling, buying, sharing memories belongs to the future of applied bio-information science, I guess. But still, despite infinite possible progress in that matter, what will always really be shared will be numbers and partially similar decoding and interpreting procedures. For example, the mp3 files contains binary digits, and people share indeed the same first level decoding machinery (a Mac, a PC, an ipod, etc.). They does not share the personal experience (ex: for one the music will makes him/she recall nice memories, for someone else: only bad memories). Now you make one step further and share the good/bad memories. This can only partially be done, and then it will be similar to number-mp3 sharing. To share the first person experience completely you will have to erase memories for maintaining enough (self-) consistency, and you will actually fuse the persons. The quantum analog is quantum erasure of information which allows interference effects (and thus history-fusion) to (re)appear. The first person itself is not first person-self-definable (I will come back on this, but those following the diagonalization post can already smell this phenomenon: the collection of all computable functions from N to N cannot be enumerated by a computable function). Yes, sharing the memory is *not* the same as having the original experience, but this applies to recalling one's own past as well. You may argue that recalling our past is different because we have just the right brain structure, other associated memories and so on to put it all in context, but in principle all of these might be lacking due to illness or the passage of time, or might be duplicated in a very good simulation made for someone else to experience. The only way to unambiguously define a first person experience is to make it once only; perfect recollection would be indistinguishable from the original experience, and it would be impossible for the experiencer to either know that he was recalling a memory or to know how close to the original the recollection was. The postulate of a first person entity persisting through time violates the 1st person/ 3rd person distinction, since it assumes that I-now can have 1st person knowledge of I-yesterday or I-tomorrow, when in fact such knowledge is impossible except in a 3rd person way. I believe it is this confusion which leads to the apparent anomaly of 1st person indeterminacy in the face of 3rd person determinacy in duplication experiments. Let us assume as little as possible and make our theories as simple as possible. I *have* to accept that there is something special about my experiences at the moment which distinguish them from everyone else's experiences: this is the difference between the 1st person POV and the 3rd person POV. It is tempting to say that my 1st person POV extends into the future and the past as well, explaining why I think of myself as a person persisting through time. However, this latter hypothesis is unnecessary. It is enough to say that the 1st person POV is valid only in the present, and when I consider my future and past that is only 3rd person extrapolation. What I consider myself to be as a person is then explained as the set of 1st person experiences related in a particular way, such as believing themselves to be moments in the life of a single individual, having memories or quasi-memories in common, and so on. If I split into two that presents no problem for the 3rd person POV (there are two instantiations of Stathis extant where before there was one) nor for the 1st person POV (each instantiation knows it is experiencing what it is experiencing as it is experiencing it). A problem does arise when I anticipate the split (which one will I become?) or look back at the split (*I* was the original!); there is no correct answer in these cases because it is based on 3rd person extrapolation of the 1st person POV, which in addition to its other failings assumes only a single entity can be extant at any one time (only a single 1st person exists by definition, but multiple 3rd persons can exist at the one time). This is not to say that my mind can or should overcome [Lee Corbin disagrees on the should] the deeply ingrained belief or illusion that I am a unique, one-track individual living my life from start to finish, which is why in symmetrical duplication experiments I anticipate that I will become one of the duplicates with equal probability. In
Re: Only Existence is necessary?
Lee Corbin wrote: Stephen writes it seems that we have skipped past the question that I am trying to pose: Where does distinguishability and individuation follow from the mere existence of Platonic Forms, if process is merely a relation between Forms (as Bruno et al claim)?! In my previous post I tried to point out that *existence* is not a first-order (or n-th order) predicate and thus does nothing to distinguish one Form, Number, Algorithm, or what-have-you from another. I don't know about that; I do know that 34 and 3 are not the same thing, nor are they very similar. I wonder if you are joining those who might say that I cannot speak of 34 or 3 without mentioning the process by which I know of them. (In my opinion, that puts the cart before the horse. A lot more people in history were more certain, and rightly so, that there was a moon than that they had brains.) The property of individuation requires some manner of distinguishability of one thing, process, etc. from another. Mere existence is insufficient. We are tacitly assuming an observer or something that amounts to the same thing any time we assume some 3rd person PoView and such is required for any coherent notion of distinguishability to obtain and thus something to whom existence means/affects. Well, I just disagree. Before there were people or even atoms, quarks and leptons were not the same thing. They didn't have to be perceived by anyone in order for that to be true. I know that you disagree with this: they didn't even have to affect anything in order for that to be true. If there had been just one quark and one electron in the whole universe, and if they were separately by almost infinitely many light- years, then there would still have been one quark and one electron. Unfortunately, I probably can be of no more assistence to you on this question. Lee Lee, Bruno, Stephen, I think this is an issue that lies at the heart of the matter. (I don't know if it's the same as Smullyan's heart of the matter, but in a sense it very well could be.) The difference between a quark and a lepton can be described with mathematics, even though perhaps it's harder to pin down than the difference between 3 and 34. I think most of us wouldn't have a crucial problem with that. But alas the difference between 3 and 34 is in the counting. Here is the heart of the matter, I believe. It takes an observer to count, since it takes an observer to decide when to start counting, or to define a group of things. This is where meaning and affect comes in. Even numbers require an observer. Bringing in prime numbers and multiplication doesn't prove that you don't need an observer. (=) Yes, numbers are observer-independent (hence the success of looking for invariance), but this doesn't necessarily imply that you don't need an observer in the first place! (=) Extra, to Bruno: In my view, we define numbers with invariance, by recognizing, when we make sense of what is around us, or even when we make sense of our own thoughts. On the TV program Sesame Street they have small children singing One of these things is not like the others even before they introduce numbers. This is what I mean by looking for invariance. Tom --~--~-~--~~~---~--~~ You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com To unsubscribe from this group, send email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list -~--~~~~--~~--~--~---
Re: A calculus of personal identity
Stathis Papaioannou wrote: Bruno, I have cut out some of your detailed response to my post where I think we basically agree. There remain some differences, and some failings on my part to understand more technical aspects of your work. Memories of our past are generally more vivid and hold more information than writing, film etc., but there may come a time when people directly share memories with each other as easily as they now share mp3 files. Selling, buying, sharing memories belongs to the future of applied bio-information science, I guess. But still, despite infinite possible progress in that matter, what will always really be shared will be numbers and partially similar decoding and interpreting procedures. For example, the mp3 files contains binary digits, and people share indeed the same first level decoding machinery (a Mac, a PC, an ipod, etc.). They does not share the personal experience (ex: for one the music will makes him/she recall nice memories, for someone else: only bad memories). Now you make one step further and share the good/bad memories. This can only partially be done, and then it will be similar to number-mp3 sharing. To share the first person experience completely you will have to erase memories for maintaining enough (self-) consistency, and you will actually fuse the persons. The quantum analog is quantum erasure of information which allows interference effects (and thus history-fusion) to (re)appear. The first person itself is not first person-self-definable (I will come back on this, but those following the diagonalization post can already smell this phenomenon: the collection of all computable functions from N to N cannot be enumerated by a computable function). Yes, sharing the memory is *not* the same as having the original experience, but this applies to recalling one's own past as well. You may argue that recalling our past is different because we have just the right brain structure, other associated memories and so on to put it all in context, but in principle all of these might be lacking due to illness or the passage of time, or might be duplicated in a very good simulation made for someone else to experience. The only way to unambiguously define a first person experience is to make it once only; perfect recollection would be indistinguishable from the original experience, and it would be impossible for the experiencer to either know that he was recalling a memory or to know how close to the original the recollection was. The postulate of a first person entity persisting through time violates the 1st person/ 3rd person distinction, since it assumes that I-now can have 1st person knowledge of I-yesterday or I-tomorrow, when in fact such knowledge is impossible except in a 3rd person way. I believe it is this confusion which leads to the apparent anomaly of 1st person indeterminacy in the face of 3rd person determinacy in duplication experiments. Let us assume as little as possible and make our theories as simple as possible. I *have* to accept that there is something special about my experiences at the moment which distinguish them from everyone else's experiences: this is the difference between the 1st person POV and the 3rd person POV. It is tempting to say that my 1st person POV extends into the future and the past as well, explaining why I think of myself as a person persisting through time. However, this latter hypothesis is unnecessary. It is enough to say that the 1st person POV is valid only in the present, and when I consider my future and past that is only 3rd person extrapolation. Well said! I agree completely. What I consider myself to be as a person is then explained as the set of 1st person experiences related in a particular way, such as believing themselves to be moments in the life of a single individual, having memories or quasi-memories in common, and so on. But what can that related in a particular way be? It is certainly not the case that I, at every moment am experiencing a belief that I'm a single individual. I cannot think of any 1st person experience that is connecting my 1st person moments. Rather it is something unconscious which I experience only on reflection, i.e. in a 3rd person way. I think this poses a difficulty for a world model consisting only of observer moments. There's nothing to connect them. A model in which there is an external substrate, either the physical world or a computer simulation, avoids this problem by providing the unexperienced connection. Julian Barbour proposes a similar model in which the world consists of time capsules; each capsule is a moment in time. But these capsules contain much more than a conscious thought; they contain something like a state of the world and so they provide enough information to be well ordered. If I split into two that presents
RE: A calculus of personal identity
Lee Corbin writes: Stathis writes Hal Finney in his recent thread on teleportation thought experiments disagrees with the above view. He suggests that it is possible for a subject to apparently undergo successful teleportation, in that the individual walking out of the receiving station has all the appropriate mental and physical attributes in common with the individual entering the transmitting station, but in reality not survive the procedure. I have difficulty understanding this, as it seems to me that the subject has survived by definition. Well, if you've characterized his views correctly, then he's not in agreement with you, me, and Derek Parfit. What might be fun to explore is how desperate some people would have to be in order to teleport (or perhaps how lucrative the opportunity?). Also, I suppose that if you confided to them that this was happening to them all the time thousands of times per second, they'd still have some unfathomable reason not to go near a teleporter. Sorry, I have been reading the list somewhat lightly recently and have missed some threads. What I argued was that it would be easier to find the trace of a person's thoughts in a universe where he had a physically continuous record than where there were discontinuities (easier in the sense that a smaller program would suffice). In my framework, this means that the universe would contribute more measure to people who had continuous lives than people who teleported. Someone whose life ended at the moment of teleportation would have a higher measure than someone who survived the event. Therefore, I would view teleportation as reducing measure similarly to doing something that had a risk of dying. I would try to avoid it, unless there were compensating benefits (as indeed might be the case, just as people willingly accept the risk of dying by driving to work, because of the compensating benefits). You can say that by definition the person survives, but then, you can say anything by definition. I guess the question is, what is the reasoning behind the definition. As far as Lee's suggestion that people could be dying thousands of times a second, my framework does not allow for arbitrary statements like that. Given a physical circumstance, we can calculate what happens. It's not just arbitrary what we choose to say about life and death. We can calculate the measure of different subjective life experiences, based on the physical record. If we wanted to create a physical record where this framework would be compatible with saying that people die often, it would be necessary to physically teleport people thousands of times a second. Or perhaps the same thing could be done by freezing people for a substantial time, reviving them for a thousandth of a second, then re-freezing them again for a while, etc. If we consider the practical implications of such experiments I don't think it is so implausible to view them as being worse than living a single, connected, subjective life. It would be quite difficult to interact in a meaningful way with the world under such circumstances. However, if one were so unfortunate as to be put into such a situation, then it would no longer be particularly bad to teleport. You're being broken into pieces all the time anyway, so the event of teleportation would presumably not make things any worse. Particularly if you were somehow being teleported thousands of times a second, then adding a teleportation would basically be meaningless since you're teleporting anyway at every instant. So I don't agree with Lee's conclusion that in this situation people would still resist teleportation. Hal Finney --~--~-~--~~~---~--~~ You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com To unsubscribe from this group, send email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list -~--~~~~--~~--~--~---
Re: Only Existence is necessary?
Hi Lee, - Original Message - From: Lee Corbin [EMAIL PROTECTED] To: everything-list@googlegroups.com Sent: Wednesday, June 28, 2006 1:02 AM Subject: RE: Only Existence is necessary? Stephen writes it seems that we have skipped past the question that I am trying to pose: Where does distinguishability and individuation follow from the mere existence of Platonic Forms, if process is merely a relation between Forms (as Bruno et al claim)?! In my previous post I tried to point out that *existence* is not a first-order (or n-th order) predicate and thus does nothing to distinguish one Form, Number, Algorithm, or what-have-you from another. [LC] I don't know about that; I do know that 34 and 3 are not the same thing, nor are they very similar. I wonder if you are joining those who might say that I cannot speak of 34 or 3 without mentioning the process by which I know of them. (In my opinion, that puts the cart before the horse. A lot more people in history were more certain, and rightly so, that there was a moon than that they had brains.) [SPK] Think of the meaning of what you just wrote if you where to remove all references that implied in one form or another some kind of act of distinguishing I am merely trying to drill down to the source of our notion of the act of distinguishing and to see what remains when we strip away all forms of notions of observers. The property of individuation requires some manner of distinguishability of one thing, process, etc. from another. Mere existence is insufficient. We are tacitly assuming an observer or something that amounts to the same thing any time we assume some 3rd person PoView and such is required for any coherent notion of distinguishability to obtain and thus something to whom existence means/affects. [LC] Well, I just disagree. Before there were people or even atoms, quarks and leptons were not the same thing. They didn't have to be perceived by anyone in order for that to be true. I know that you disagree with this: they didn't even have to affect anything in order for that to be true. If there had been just one quark and one electron in the whole universe, and if they were separately by almost infinitely many light- years, then there would still have been one quark and one electron. [SPK] Interesting claim, especially if we where to buy into the thinking of many prominent physicist today: If we where to go back in time far enough we would find that all the particles would indeed be identical to each other! But I digress. ;-) I am not making any claims about whether or not some statement is true, I am merely trying to make sense of the metaphysical positions that we are taking here on the Everything List. I wish to be sure that we are not allowing assumptions to be made about metaphysical primitives that may lead us into deep errors. For example, my appearent attack on Platonism is an attempt to understand its intricate details and implications, especially when they are taken the the wonderful extreems that Bruno is toiling to explain to us. ;-) [LC] Unfortunately, I probably can be of no more assistence to you on this question. [SPK] Your posts are always valuable and greatly appreciated. Onward! Stephen --~--~-~--~~~---~--~~ You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com To unsubscribe from this group, send email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list -~--~~~~--~~--~--~---
Re: Only Existence is necessary?
Hi Tom, I completely agree with you on this and could only add that it seems almost impossible for us to comprehend the seemingly subconscious bias that we bring into discussions of the nature of Meaning and Existence. It is as if it is impossible to remove all vestiges of the existence of the act of observation... Onward! Stephen - Original Message - From: Tom Caylor [EMAIL PROTECTED] To: Everything List everything-list@googlegroups.com Sent: Wednesday, June 28, 2006 12:46 PM Subject: Re: Only Existence is necessary? snip Lee, Bruno, Stephen, I think this is an issue that lies at the heart of the matter. (I don't know if it's the same as Smullyan's heart of the matter, but in a sense it very well could be.) The difference between a quark and a lepton can be described with mathematics, even though perhaps it's harder to pin down than the difference between 3 and 34. I think most of us wouldn't have a crucial problem with that. But alas the difference between 3 and 34 is in the counting. Here is the heart of the matter, I believe. It takes an observer to count, since it takes an observer to decide when to start counting, or to define a group of things. This is where meaning and affect comes in. Even numbers require an observer. Bringing in prime numbers and multiplication doesn't prove that you don't need an observer. (=) Yes, numbers are observer-independent (hence the success of looking for invariance), but this doesn't necessarily imply that you don't need an observer in the first place! (=) Extra, to Bruno: In my view, we define numbers with invariance, by recognizing, when we make sense of what is around us, or even when we make sense of our own thoughts. On the TV program Sesame Street they have small children singing One of these things is not like the others even before they introduce numbers. This is what I mean by looking for invariance. Tom --~--~-~--~~~---~--~~ You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com To unsubscribe from this group, send email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list -~--~~~~--~~--~--~---
