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Furcas comments on What makes you YOU? For non-deists only. - Less Wrong
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No one here is denying that subjective experience is real, but that's not enough to conclude that there is a magical thread linking DanArmak, DanArmak-10, and DanArmak+10. In other words, that DanArmak, DanArmak-10, and DanArmak+10 are all conscious doesn't mean there's anything connecting them beside similarity.
Also, if you try specifying what you mean by 'I', as you used it in your post, I'm pretty sure you'll run into a few problems.
Subjective experience is that thread, and it is the precise and complete meaning of I. And it is also the same thing I, and some but not all other people, mean by the word consciousness.
You can't distinguish between two DanArmaks appearing in sequence (one is the future version of the other), and two appearing together (no necessary relation between them, causal or otherwise). But I can because I am one and will in due time become the other.
Yes, it's magic. In the sense that we don't understand it. We can't even properly define or describe it - that is, we can't describe it in the same framework and terms we use for the physical universe. (Or in any other framework either.) It's not required to explain my behavior in any way. It's completely subjective. That doesn't mean I can just ignore it.
I don't know whether there is or even can be a legitimate explanation or reduction of the phenomenon of consciousness and subjective experience. But I do know the phenomenon is there. The experience is there. The essential difference between the subjective and the objective (and there exists a perfectly valid objective view point of myself, that I can apply to myself - the two things aren't exclusive).
A challenge to all doubters.
Omega comes to you with a proposition - heck, I may be able to do it myself in a few decades. I offer to create N atomically precise clones of yourself on the other side of the planet, and give each one the dollar value of all your assets. You can set N as high as you like, provided there's a value that will make you accept the bargain. The price is that I'll kill you ten seconds later.
I assure you that, from past experience, you will not notice the creation of these clones during the ten seconds you have to live. Your extreme similarity will not cause any magical sharing of experiences. And the clones will not notice anything when, ten seconds from their creation, you die; no empirically measurable (including self-reported) consciousness transfers from you to them.
Do you accept the offer?
If you do, and you don't care about your own death, and you don't give as the reason the accomplishment of some external goals that are more important to you than life - then there's a fundamental disconnect between me and you. Indeed, between you and what I naively consider to be universal human ways of thinking. (Of course, if this is the case, the fault lies in my understanding; I'm not trying to denigrate anyone who responds.)
If someone thinks the external goals thingy is a problem (e.g., that all decisions are ultimately taken to satisfy external goals, because you believe a continuous self does not exist) then I can try to formulate a version of the scenario where this is not a consideration.
Yes, I accept the offer. If it's repeatable and I get to pick where the copy ends up, I'd do it for N=1: that's a teleporter. Getting rich in the process for N>1 (we would of course pool our assets for any large project; only a small fraction of that is needed to cover the increased living expenses), and obtaining some backups (this world is too dangerous to keep only one copy of anything important) are gravy.
If death were instantaneous I'd have fewer qualms with using this as a teleporter, but 10 seconds is a long time to lock in to a particular "string of consciousness". I'd also be curious about the way I'd be killed.
I would accept the offer and try to make N as large as possible. When you create the copies, I have an N/(N+1) chance of being one of them and only a 1/(N+1) chance of being the poor schmuck who gets killed.
Of course, and neither will they; that's the point. From the duplicate's perspective (I'm going to avoid the word clone, which I usually take to mean something else), it just seems like being magically teleported to the other side of the world.
Eagerly! Say N equals, oh, I don't know, nine. There's a lot of stuff I want to do with my life, and if I don't get the chance to do it all sequentially, then I might as well do it in parallel.
But why exactly do you apply your I to these duplicates?
Because I anticipate that 15 seconds from now, if I reject then there will be 1 thing with the subjective experience I anticipate I will have 15 seconds from now, and if I accept then there will be 9 things with the subjective experience I anticipate I will have 15 seconds from now.
That's not exactly why, but I think it's not bad for the amount of time I spent thinking about how to phrase it...
But each separate person will only experience one subjective experience. Why does it matter how many persons there will be?
I accept. After which I may possibly decide to execute a coordinated suicide of something like N-3 or N-4 copies so as to increase the subjective payoff.
I certainly do acknowledge a subjective experience of consciousness. However, I don't understand why you treat its interruption as so catastrophic. Sleep does it all the time. If you define "I" solely in terms of consciousness, do you agree that "you" have only truly existed since you last awoke?
The intuition behind my acceptance of the local death you propose is based very much in my subjective experience of consciousness. Have you ever awakened in the middle of the night, had a verbal exchange with someone, and then fell asleep and forgot the entire experience, even when reminded of it? This seems entirely analogous to local death: You experience a few minutes of subjective existence, but then your thread then gets "reverted" to a previous state, and continues from there.
That's also why I'd have no problem suiciding most of the copies. If someone came to me right now and offered me a large sum of money in exchange for reverting all trace and memory of the previous two hours of my existence, I'd accept in a heartbeat.
It does seem probable. Certainly if I didn't need to sleep, I wouldn't agree to start sleeping, on these grounds - it looks much too dangerous!
As I just wrote in another reply, I am convinced that my way of looking at things is incomplete and does not extend to new types of experiences (e.g., cloning), but I am not at all convinced that any of the alternative theories proposed in this thread are better.
Quick confirmation: you'll kill the dude on this side of the planet - not any of the ones on the other side. Right?
Assuming that's the case, and assuming I can quell my guilt at ripping you off for a substantial sum of money, and assuming proper guarantees are put into effect so that I may be certain that the clones are properly created and financed before the original is destroyed ... N = 2. RobinX can give RobinY the money for a plane ticket back to the States and use the remainder to sign up for philosophy classes at Adelaide, and all shall be well in my book.
I think you'll find many of us willing to bite this particular bullet. I had the same reaction when Dennett and Hofstadter described a similar thought experiment in The Mind's I.
Will you do it while I'm unconscious? If so, N=2 here also (provided "the other side of the planet" is not a hostile environment).
Ooh, another good caveat - maybe we should just put in the general good-genie clause: "Assuming you're not ripping us off..."
(Actually, I'm not that bothered about the while-I'm-unconscious part.)
I'm really surprised that so many people here think this way. Even a bit shocked. (Especially pengvado with N=1(!)). Which on the whole is a great experience :-)
Could someone try to explain to me, please, why you feel this way? How you came to feel this way? I have never seen any reason to stop thinking in terms of a thread of consciousness.
Feel probably isn't the right word here. I'm sure we all feel the same kind of irreducible subjective thread of consciousness that you do. Just like we all have the same illusions of free will and objective morality. But on careful reflection, taking into account all the science you know, and performing a few relevant thought experiments, it gradually becomes clear that these folk concepts just don't make sense. The species-typical intuitions don't go away; you just learn to stop trusting them.
Free will and objective morality are claims about how the universe works, objectively. On reflection it becomes clear that they are contradictory and false, respectively.
But the subjective thread of consciousness isn't a fact about the universe. It's a fact about my experience. It makes no sense to say, as you seem to be suggesting, "I may feel conscious, but really it's an illusion". Because if I deny it, then the whole concept of feeling is undefined, and consequently, the concept of illusion is undefined. The idea of illusions, after all, implies that we might instead experience or believe something else which is not an illusion but is true.
You can't claim that subjective thread consciousness is "wrong" because it's not an objective, empirical claim. We can imagine experiencing counterfactuals, but what would it be like not to have experiences? It's not a meaningful question, so there's no answer.
What I was asking is how, due to objective, physical events (you had ideas, read books...) you came to adopt this belief - although I don't quite understand the belief yet, either.
Just look at all this "reality" business as a framework for understanding experience: how do you know that "reality" is "out there"? Why do you believe such claims? You are not entitled to your subjective experience, no more than to believing that Venus the planet is a goddess of love and beauty.
I'm going to pull my parenthetical about spells of unconsciousness out in a separate comment, because the point seems to have been lost in the course of the discussion:
DanArmak, you seem to propose that the key process which defines the identity of a person at one time with a person at the other time is the thread of consciousness trailing through spacetime from one to the other. How does your model deal with human beings - individual human organisms! - which undergo literal loss of consciousness? I do not refer to sleep, but to the actual shutdown of conscious perception, such as occurred to Jo Walton (papersky) when she hit her head and (I have heard) to many people under general anesthesia. In these cases, the persons describing their memories explicitly state that there is a finite period of time during which no conscious recollection occurs. Does that imply that the speculative fiction writer named Jo Walton living in Montreal on February 20th, 2006 is a different individual than the speculative fiction writer named Jo Walton living in Montreal on February 22nd, 2006? If not, why not?
To address the loss of consciousness scenario: I can't speak from experience, and as I said, my theory is not formal and strict and provable enough to be sure of things outside my experience.
The basic problem here is discontinuity. If the loss of consciousness is brief enough (a fraction of a second) and does not affect my future mental processes, it seems likely "I" will continue to exist. Any other boundary (of length and severity of unconsciousness) would be arbitrary, and so unlikely.
But my experience is discrete. I always have exactly one experience at a time (if conscious), so I always experience being "me", not three-quarters me. "Me" is whatever "I" experience at the time :-) This is no good as a definition, but it's a description every human understands. How to reconcile the two? I have no clear idea.
As I said before, my theory is far from complete - it's more a list of facts than a structured model. It only describes those things that happen in typical human life. It may not be extensible to events like loss of consciousness, let alone cloning. In fact I've been pretty much convinced by this whole thread that my naive model probably can't be fixed and extended to describe the entire space of physical and experential possibilities. I'll drop it happily for a better alternative - please give me one!
Any new theory has got to include the fact that I have actual experiences of being me. The theories being proposed here of anticipating equally to "become" one of my future clones, smack to me of just doing away with the conception of anticipation entirely.
I think we have, at least in sketch form - here's Alicorn's nutshell summary, and here's mine. Both of our theories, if they are distinct, fit this intuition of yours - that a person is not destroyed and a new person created after a spell of unconsciousness - better that the thread of consciousness approach.
As for the rest, quite frankly you should expect to get weird results in weird situations like duplication. One weird result I expect is that, if you are duplicated, there will be two people afterwards, both of whose experiences suggest that they are DanArmak.
I took the time to think all this through before replying. I think I grok now your and Alicorn and the other posters' theory(s). And I pretty much accept it now. Thanks for your explanations.
The problem with my old approach, as I now see it, is the impossibility of empirically distinguishing it from infinitely many other possible theories. In such a situation, it is indeed best to choose an approach that optimizes outcome over all my configuration-descendants, because I might subjectively become any of them.
Of course, if I give up personal continuity, then the above statement becomes merely "because each of them will have memories indicating it is my descendant". But I am forced to this point of view due to the apparent impossibility of describing a personal continuity in terms of physics, which does not break down in the face of (arbitrarily short) lapses of consciousness.
Thanks again to everyone else who participated and helped convince me.
I don't see any reason to privilege the thread of consciousness - I'm confident it doesn't actually work the way you're supposing. My personal instinct is that I at every instant am identical to this particular configuration of particles, and given that such a configuration of particles will persist after the experiment (though on the other side of the world), it doesn't seem particularly as if I've been killed in any permanent way. (I'm fairly sure I couldn't collect on my estate, for example.) Sure, it's risky, but if sufficient safeguards are in place, it's teleporting, as pengvado said (?).
A note: even if I hadn't had this instinct before, the idea of a persistent and real thread of consciousness is brought into doubt in a number of ways by Daniel Dennett's revolutionary work, Consciousness Explained. My copy is on my shelf at home at the moment, but Dennett explains several instances in which the naive perception of consciousness is shown to be unreliable. I don't think it's a valid marker to use to identify identity.
(Besides, what of spells of unconsciousness? Should someone whose thread of consciousness is interrupted be considered to have been literally killed and reborn as a facsimile?)
I offer you a choice: either you suffer torture for an hour. Or I create a clone of you, torture it for ten hours, and then kill it. In the second option, you are not affected in any way.
From what you've said, I gather you'll choose the first option. You won't privilege what you actually experience. But... I truly cannot understand why.
It's often useful to think as if you're deciding for all copies of yourself. You can maximize each copy's expected outcome that way in many situations. You can also optimize your expected experience if you don't know in advance which of ten thousand copies you'll be. This kind of argument has often been made on LW. Perhaps I mistook some instances of arguments like yours, which truly don't privilege experience, for this milder version (which I endorse).
You're begging a very important question when you use "you" to refer only to the template for subsequent duplication. On my wacky view, if you duplicate me perfectly, she's also me. If it's time T1 and you're going to duplicate Alicorn-T1 at T2, then Alicorn-T1 has two futures - Alicorn-T2* and Alicorn-T2** - and Alicorn-T1 will make advance choices for them both just as if no duplication occurred. If you speak to Alicorn-T1 about the future in which duplication occurs, "you" is plural.
Your "wacky view" sounds quite similar to mine - I would be interested to read that thesis when it is published.
The 'you' I used referred only to the pre-duplication person, who is making the choice, and who is singular.
The view you describe is the view I described in the last paragraph of my previous comment (the one you replied to). I understand and agree that you decide things for all identical copies of you who may appear in the next second - because they're identical, they preserve your decisions. But you can only anticipate experiencing some one thing, not a plurality.
If someone creates a clone (or several) of me, I may not even know about it; and I do not expect to experience anything differently due to the existence of that clone.
If someone destroys my body, I presume I'll stop experiencing, although I have no idea what that would be like.
By inference, if someone creates a precise clone of me elsewhere and destroys my body at the same moment, I won't suddenly start experiencing the clone's life. I.e., I don't expect to suddenly experience a complete shift in location. Rather, I would experience the same thing (or lack of it) that I would experience if someone killed me without creating a clone.
Yes, this begs the question of why I experience continuity in this body, since physics has no concept of a continuous body. And why do I experience continuity across sleep and unconsciousness? I don't have an answer, but neither do the alternative you're proposing. The only real answer I've seen is the timeless hypothesis: that at each moment I have a separate moment-experience, which happens to include memories of previous experiences, but they are not necessarily true - they are just the way my brain makes sense of the universe, and it highlights or even invents continuity. But this is too much like the Boltzmann's Brain conjecture - consistent and with explanatory power, but unsatisfying.
"You" sure seemed like it referred to only one of the postduplication individuals here:
(This when one of me seems to be quite seriously affected, in that you plan to torture and kill that one.)
And here:
(This when I do privilege what I actually experience, and simply think of "I" in these futures as a plural.)
(But I'll be all of them! It's not as though 9,999 of these people are p-zombies or strangers or even just brand-new genetically identical twins! They're my futures!)
No, I wouldn't. I'd choose the second option so as to prevent my torture from being compounded with my total death.
Er, the second option is the one where I kill the clone. In both options, only you remain alive after 10 hours, no clone.
How about this cleaner version: I create a clone of you (no choice here). Then I torture you for an hour, OR the clone for ten hours, after which you're both free to go.
I'd choose one hour I think.
How about this: choose between 59 minutes of torture for you and 10 hours for the clone, vs 1 hour for you and the clone, with the experience for both you and the clone being indistinguishable for the first 59 minutes.
If you choose the 59min/10hrs, what's going through your mind in minute 59 ? Is it "this is all about to stop, but some other poor bastard is going to have a rough 9 hours" ? Or is it "ohgodohgodohgod I hope I'm not the clone" ?
...I see. That doesn't change my answer, as it happens; my clone dies, yes, and you bear moral culpability for it, but it is better for one to make it out (relatively) unscathed than for the only survivor to be traumatized. In the new version, I would prefer there be only one hour of torture between us, and accept the first option.
See, the thing is: in my utility function, I don't have a special ranking for "my" experiences over everyone else's. When I do the math, I come out paying a lot more attention to my own situation for purely pragmatic reasons.
How do you think it does work? That is, are you suggesting there is a thread of consciousness that sometimes works differently from how I've experienced it so far? I haven't seen a good model so far.
I've read Dennett's book. It does a good job of deconstructing and disproving existing models, but I don't remember that it proposed a good new model, just some interesting ideas and pointers.
Meanwhile, your model:
has its own share of problems. For instance, you have no idea how many configurations identical or epsilon-similar to yours exist elsewhere at any given moment. You can't know when they're created or destroyed or modified. How can you not privilege the pattern-instance that right now is posting on LW, if you have no idea if it's the only instance or one of a million, the others being clones I just created in my basement?
Okay, I'll grant you that I privilege the one I am at the moment, but the nine hundred ninety nine thousand nine hundred and ninety nine duplicates will each privilege themselves - and if I knew that they would be created in advance, I would be concerned for what they would experience for the same reason I care about any other future experience of mine.
Would you still say yes if there was more than 10 seconds between copying you and killing you - say, ten hours? Ten years? What's the maximum amount of time you'd agree to?
...no, I don't think so. It would change what the original RobinZ would do, but not a lot else.
So ten seconds isn't enough time to create a significant difference between the RobinZs, in your opinion. What if Omega told you that in the ten seconds following duplication, you, the original RZ, would have an original thought that would not occur to the other RZs (perhaps as a result of different environments)? Would that change your mind? What if Omega qualified it as a significant thought, one that could change the course of your life - maybe the seed of a new scientific theory, or an idea for a novel that would have won you a Pulitzer, had original RZ continued to exist?
I think the problem with this scenario is that saying "ten seconds" isn't meaningfully different from saying "1 Planck time", which becomes obvious when you turn down the offer that involves ten hours or years. Our answers are tied to our biological perception of time - if an hour felt like a second, we'd agree to the ten hour option. I don't think they're based on any rational observation of what actually happens in those ten seconds. A powerful AI would not agree to Omega's offer - how many CPU cycles can you pack into ten seconds?
I don't quite understand the idea that someone who accepted the original offer (timespan = 10 seconds) would turn down the offer for any greater timespan. Surely more lifespan for the original (or for any one copy) is a good thing? If you favor creation of clones at cost of your life, why wouldn't you favor creation of clones at no immediate cost at all?
I don't know if I'll claim that.
I accept. N=34. They have an orgy. I die happy.
I'd accept the offer. (With some irrelevant-to-the-point-of-the-thought-experiment qualifications.)
The “subjective thread of experience” is a useful shortcut in thinking (note I don't mean that we consciously invent it), not an essential.
I think in practice I'd probably set N pretty high (10? 100? 10k?) - it's hard to know what one will do in extreme situations, particularly such unlikely ones.
But an alternative question might be: what should a rational entity do? The answer to this alternative is much easier to compute, and I think it's where the N=1 or N=2 answers are coming from. Would you agree that a creature evolved in an environment with such teleporter-and-duplicators would casually use them at N=1 and eagerly use them at N=2?
Yes, of course such a creature would agree at N=2 and 1. It's a direct way to maximize number of descendants.
Don't describe it as the rational choice though. Rationality has nothing to do with goals. It's the right thing to do only if your goal is to maximize the number of descendants, or clones.
I agree with you that an entity with different goals would behave differently, and that evolution's "goal" isn't (entirely) the same as my goals.
However, there's a sense of coherence with the physical world that I admire about evolution's decisions, and I want to emulate that coherence in choosing my own goals.
The fact that evolution values "duplicate perfectly, then destroy original" equivalently to "teleport" isn't a conclusive argument I should value them equivalently, but it's a suggestive argument towards that conclusion. The fact that my evolutionary environment never contained anything like that is suggestive that my gut feeling about it isn't likely to be helpful.
The balance of evidence seems to be against any such thing as continuous experience existing - an adaptive illusion analogous to the blind spot. Valuing continuous experience highly just doesn't seem to cut nature at its joints.
I think you run into logistical problems when N gets large, by the way.