From: Brett Paatsch (paatschb@optusnet.com.au)
Date: Thu Jun 26 2003 - 15:04:38 MDT
Hal Finney writes:
> Brett raises one of our oldest and most fruitlessly debated
> topics: whether an upload or a cryonics revivee is "the same"
> person he was before.
Ah a challenge :-) !
> I believe the question is meaningless, based in part on
> questions like these:
Let me paraphase and you can correct me if I misrepresent
you.
You hypothesis that the question (above) is meaningless and
offer the following questions as corroborative evidence.
I have some doubt as to the validity of such a process for
getting at the truth but let's move on.
> Are you "the same" person you were yesterday?
Depends on how we define the slippery word "person". But for
the moment I'll say that yes I am essentially the same person I
was yesterday. Some of my atoms have changed. But that there
has been no interuption of the "super-conscious".
> How do you know?
I don't *know* I merely hold it as more likely than the alternative.
> Isn't this ultimately just as much a "leap of faith"
> as believing that you are the same person after awakening
> from an upload or cryonic suspension?
No not as much. Not if the 'super-consciousness' (unconscious
plus conscious) is interrupted in cryonic suspension.
The difference is some sort of continuity. Whilst asleep or in
a coma my brain would continue to show activity. The
ceasation of brain activity is an extra difference. Given what
we (scientists) and mores specifically me, a more limited
amateur instance of the class) understands about
consciousness, this extra difference gives rise to a *higher*
degree of uncertainty that person X is the same after
coming out of a coma as opposed to coming out of cryonic
suspension.
> Or, suppose you are an upload. Let's leave aside for
> the moment the question of whether you are "the same"
> person as before, but consider your identity going forward.
This *seems* to me to be a shift in topic now, but ok.
> Suppose you learn that the computer that is running you
> uses a time-sharing architecture like most computers today.
> It occasionally stops your program for a short while, running
> other people's programs. It rapidly switches among
> everyone's program, giving the illusion that everyone is
> running at once. Does this make you doubt that you are
> not "the same" person from moment to moment?
We have supposed I have *learnt* that the computer I am
running on time-shares. That additional knowledge *must*
influence my world-view. Something in my world-view has
to change. Either my operating assumption that personhood
requires continuation of the 'super-conscious' or my concept
of personhood in someother respect.
Within the constraint of this clearly I *cannot* be exactly
"the same" person from moment to moment as in some
moments I am have learn that I am not a running program
at all. (Raises an interesting question as to how I might have
learnt such a thing but that is an aside).
> Suppose the computer were shut down for a longer time,
> and your program then allowed to run again. Do you have
> greater doubts that you are "the same" person?
No. The duration of the ceasation of the "super-conscious'
does not affect the notion that any ceasation potentially snuffs
it out and what is restarted is a new super-conscious.
The granularity of a moment is probably related to something
like the speed of light.
> For me, the intuition that there is an objective fact about
> whether you are "the same" in one incarnation as another
> does not work well given these kinds of gray areas.
I'm not sure I see the gray areas as you do yet. I am wondering
instead how malleable you concept of personhood may turn
out to be.
> If "sameness" is really well defined, either you should be
> "the same" or not "the same". It doesn't work well to say
> that there are gray areas. It seems to be a binary relation, if
> you hold to this philosophical perspective.
I'm not sure I'm following you now, but if I am the notion of
who and what sort of phenomena one thinks one is can seemingly
change with additional data too.
> Yet the examples above, which can be further subdivided and
> permuted ad infinitum, demonstrate many kinds of gray areas
> based on advanced technology that can manipulate the
> substrates that embody our brains.
>
> Ultimately it does not work (for me at least) to imagine that there
> is a fact of the matter about whether two incarnations of a mind
> are "the same".
Are you allowing then mulitple fuzzy definitions. Being aware that
"the same" should be definable to the point it is not a variable but
that the tradoff of such certainty is that you introduce more
variability into what you consider the phenomena of you is.
Not sure I communicated that clearly or that it made sense.
Regards,
Brett Paatsch
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