From: Brett Paatsch (paatschb@optusnet.com.au)
Date: Tue Jul 01 2003 - 00:53:28 MDT
NB: I've changed references from Most Selfish Individual
to just Individual with a survival-orientation and deleted
the side issue of altruism. If I've over-simplified please
feel free to restore.
Lee Corbin writes
> Brett writes
>
> > > > I will grant that to me and everyone relating to
> > > > you the duplicate will be satisfactory. I am more
> > > > "selfish" when it comes to me.
<snip>
> >
> > The {..} Individual's well-informed decision can only
> > be as good as his knowledge base. He is presumably
> > rational and open to learning better survival options...
> > Any 'leap of faith' this (..) Individual takes will be
> > as *small* and late as he can make them.
<snip>
> > > But we are talking about a survival-oriented, {..}
> > > view of {what is "in it" for} an individual.
> >
> > *I* perceive the world from a stand-point that is
> > necessarily self-centred. *My* senses collect data
> > and *my* brain interprets it as information. My "self",
> > a process which I understand emerges along with
> > consciousness has amongst its attributes a desire for
> > "self" preservation. It's a pretty strong desire and my
> > worldview rightly or wrong informs *my* self about
> > what seem to be more and less optimal ways to
> > pursue that desire.
>
> All that is very true.
<snipped altruism as a side issue>
> > > Suppose that there existed a machine that could
> > > decompose you into your constituent elements
> > > within a microsecond.
> > >
> > > Then suppose that a few microseconds later, it
> > > reconstitutes you. Now suppose that this entire
> > > process happens hundreds of times per second...
> > >
<snip>
> >
> > Ok. Stipulations noted. If I was to discover that this
> > had in fact been happening my worldview would
> > necessarily change. I might conclude that continuity
> > cannot be a necessary precondition for self-hood, as
> > I have come to experience it, because I hadn't ever
> > had continuity, I'd have been mistaken.
<snip>
> However, we might further imagine that you lived in a
> population one-half of which underwent this operation
> one hundred times per second. At this point, your
> intuition might suggest that since everyone acted as if
> they were conscious, and were the same person,
> then perhaps it was true.
This extra scenario doesn't advance us very far because
I already conceded that all others are only knowable to
me in a discontinuous and inferential way. I only experience
myself as a continuity because it is only myself as conscious
and unconscious processes that I have access to. Now if
I were to discover I was one of the 50% that had undergone
the operations previously unbeknownst to me then that
would have the same effect on me as your above scenario.
I.e. As my worldview would now include the acceptance
that I had been interrupted in the past in fact 100 times
every second that I would have to abandon either my notion
self-hood could not survive an interruption of continuity or
I'd have to alter my notion of self-hood into something more
sophisticated.
>
> We routinely avoid solipsism by extending this notion to
> other people (even though we feel no pain when they
> are pinched), and also go so far as to extend it to animals.
>
> But what is important is the *story*, the *explanation*
> behind the scenes. If it's not at all compelling, then the
> above thought experiment has little point. The story is
> that when you examine the *physics* associated with
> this operation happening to someone else, then you
> wonder just what could be the difference between
> the various 1/100 second versions.
Well from my point of view if I'm not one of the 1/100
second versions I can accept that a sufficiently faithful
copy is going to be good enough to satisfy me in the
case of others. I only had a discontinuous relationship
with them anyway, If they are happy and I am unable
to tell the difference then I let the result, that I can
pick up my relationship with these others and they
with me seamlessly speak for itself.
> In what sense are they different
> people?
Sure I'd wonder about what the differences might be
between them and me if any. Sure it would make me
consider that *perhaps* continuity *might* not be
crucial to the preservation of my self-hood.
>How is it possible that a person associated with one of them
> vanishes the next instant?
Ah this is not hard at all really. As an atheist its standard stuff
for me to hold that all persons historically have lived lives
of limited duration. I assume no person is a person before
birth (or perhaps somewhat after when they are conscious)
and no person is a person after death but in between their
personhood is continuous. Its the continuous vs.
discontinuous thing that is of major significance. Any
discontinuity at all however brief (of the mental processing
in the wetware substrate) requires me to revisit my view of
self-hood.
>
> The only way that I have been able to figure out how it
> might be possible for another person to flash into existence
> for 1/100th of a second, and then to vanish forever into
> non-existence, is if indeed there is someone overhead Who
> is stamping out souls, and assigning them to these copies.
>But we reject this (most of us).
I do. I think we tend to over anthropomorphise when we
confront unknowns. We tend to posit creatures like ourselves
less some of our limitations.
Consciousness is associated with some forms of life.
Historically all forms of animal live for a time then die.
Some insects live very briefly, some mammals quite
long. The soul stuff doesn't help either way in my view
its a red herring.
> Instead, it seems far more likely that our minds are
> contaminated with lingering notions of a soul, and that
> this is responsible for our uneasiness at the prospect,
> say, of being teleported, or disassembled and reassembled.
I don't think so. Our experience of life as involving
development (sometimes accompanied by development
of consciousness) over a period followed by death is
enough I think.
> > > ... the question is once an adult level of sentience is
> > > > achieved can you capture the recursion counters
> > > > in the wetware? A snapshot of the conscious
> > > > process and memories and restore it either onto
> > > > an identical wetware substrate or a different set
> > > > of firmware on an upload. I don't know.
> > >
> > > Why not? [why couldn't these "recursion counters"
> > > be captured]
Given that the recursion counters would be in the brain
I guess they should be capturable (in principle) given a
sufficiently fast technology. But this going to need a
snapshot of a massively parallel and dynamic set of
processes.
> >
> > Because I don't *know* enough about how my
> > consciousness and the experience of self-hood
> > manifests to assume that it can persist completely
> > decoupled from a matter substrate for any
> > length of time.
>
> No one that I know of imagines that it can persist
> without a material substrate, except non-materialists.
Aren't cryonicists and uploaders positing that all that is
important to the self can be captured as information,
stored for some period of time, even if its only briefly,
then the self is recreated from that information? In the
middle, a substrate is there, it may be a tape or optical
disk or something but the transfer to substrate is
wholesale (and there is a big question as to how this
could be done - outside this discussion).
Do you imagine the transfer of all the info happens at
the speed of light?
I see discontinuity of self-hood as part of either the
cryonics or uploading processes (perhaps not if an
incremental upload is done on a living brain).
>
> > My current thinking is no substrate means no conscious
> > processing (or unconscious processing either). No
> > consciousness process means no self concept process.
> > In short I assume that no brain means a discontinuation
> > of me because it seems prudent to do so.
>
> Yes, certainly.
<snip>
> > How do you bring about that instant in wetware when
> > all the pieces come together at once? This would
> > require an extraordinary feat not just of construction
> > but of coordinating the synchronous assembly of
> > perishable components in real time and bringing them
> > together in that instant that is the deadline.
> > Doesn't seem "easy".
>
> ;-) I meant easy in the philosophical sense. Since
> we are mechanical devices, the same applies to us as
> to any other machine that you disassemble.
Thinking of ourselves as mechanical devices may be a
mistake. We are not supernaturally configured I agree.
But there *may* be an important distinction between
growing and being assembled. There are no mechanical
devices that I am aware of that change their substrate
and develop anything that looks like consciousness over
time in doing so yet.
> When a heart ceases to beat, indeed, a jolt may be
> necessary to get it once again into the state wherein it
> begins to operate all by itself. An ideal brain brought to
> a complete state of readiness one day may require a
> similar jolt (perhaps merely along sensory nerves) to
> get it going again.
Seems your positing a brain sitting there doing nothing
and not being dead. Perhaps its like being critically
dead.
> But I believe that neurons can be prepared in states
> such that they fire spontaneously.
But in massively parallel architectures such as must
occur with even unconscious processes like dreams?
> So one hardly need fear that one's brain would just "sit"
> there if one were uploaded, copied, or teleported.
Your reassurances are not overly reassuring for some
reason ;-)
> In
> fact, the usual philosophical questions are pursued by
> even adding in that all the original atoms are given
> their original velocities as well. Thus the brain
> resumes its activity in a way that is physically completely
> equivalent to the original.
So in say cryonics your positing not the substitution of
atoms of the same type into a corresponding space but
the actual original atoms themselves? This seems
problematic.
> It is disturbed less by this operation (in principle) than
> it is by an annoying phone call.
By here the difference between principle and practice
become important. Some things like Esher's drawings
may look superficially plausible but would be impossible
for a builder to construct.
Besides if we don't know what it is that's crucial to
preserve for self-hood uploading to a different type of
substrate won't work. The substrate is the brain.
Consciousness would have most likely have emerged
as the brain developed it would not have been ported
onto it like software onto hardware.
- Brett
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