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randallsquared comments on Continuity in Uploading - Less Wrong
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It's not the book, it's the story.
Moby Dick is not a single physical manuscript somewhere. If I buy Moby Dick I'm buying one of millions of copies of it that have been printed out over the years. It's still Moby Dick because Moby Dick is the words, characters, events etc. of the story and that is all preserved via copying.
A slight difference with this analogy is that Moby Dick isn't constantly changing as it ages, gaining new memories and whatnot. So imagine that Melville got half way through his epic and then ran out of space in the notebook that I want you to also imagine he was writing it in. So we have a notebook that contains the first half of Moby Dick (presumably, this is a pretty big notebook). Then he finishes it off in a second notebook.
Some time later he pulls a George Lucas and completely changes his mind about where his story was going ("Kill off Ahab? What was I thinking?") and writes a new version of the story where they go into a profitable, if ethically dubious, whaling business with rather more success than in the first version. This is then written up in a third notebook. Now we have three notebooks, the last two of which are both legitimate continuations of the first, carrying on from the exact same point at which the first notebook was ended.
There is no interesting sense in which one of these is some privileged original, as Eliezer puts it. If you can't get your head around that and want to say that, no, the published (in real life) version is the 'real' one imagine that the published version was actually the third notebook. There is no equivalent of publication for identity that could confer 'realness' onto a copy. In real life, neither or them are notebook 1 but they're both continuations of that story.
If Will Riker discovers that he was non-destructively copied by the Transporter and that there's another version of him running around, he will likely think, 'I don't acknowledge this guy as 'me' in any meaningful sense.' The other guy will think the same thing. Neither of them are the same person they were before they stepped into the Transporter. In fact, you are not the same person you were a few seconds ago, either.
Identify yourself as the book and your concept of identity has big problems with or without uploading. Start by reconciling that notion with things like quantum physics or even simple human ageing and you will find enough challenges to be getting on with without bringing future technology into it.
But you are not some collection of particles somewhere. You are the story, not the book. It's just that you are a story that is still in the process of being written. Uploading is no different that putting Moby Dick on a Kindle. If there's still a meat version of you running around then that is also a copy, also divergent from the original. The 'original' is (or was) you as you were when the copy was made.
"Moby Dick" can refer either to a specific object, or to a set. Your argument is that people are like a set, and Error's argument is that they are like an object (or a process, possibly; that's my own view). Conflating sets and objects assumes the conclusion.
I'm not conflating them, I'm distinguishing between them. It's because they're already conflated that we're having this problem. I'm explicitly saying that the substrate is not what it's important here.
But this works both ways: what is the non-question begging argument that observer slices can only be regarded as older versions of previous slices in the case that the latter and the former are both running on meat-based substrates? As far as I can see, you have to just presuppose that view to say that an upload's observer slice doesn't count as a legitimate continuation.
I don't want to get drawn into a game of burden of proof tennis because I don''t think that we disagree on any relevant physical facts. It's more that my definition of identity just is something like an internally-forward-flowing, indistinguishable-from-the-inside sequence of observer slices and the definition that other people are pushing just...isn't.
All I can say, really, is that I think that Error and Mark et al are demanding an overly strong moment-to-moment connection between observer slices for their conception of identity. My view is easier to reconcile with things like quantum physics, ageing, revived comatose patients etc. and that is the sort of thing I appeal to by way of support.
Hm. Does "internally-forward-flowing" mean that stateA is a (primary? major? efficient? not sure if there's a technical term, here) cause of stateB, or does it mean only that internally, stateB remembers "being" stateA?
If the former, then I think you and I actually agree.
Details please.
Quantum physics? Max Tengmark does this subject better than I have the time to. And btw, he's on our side.
Aging? Don't see the connection. You seem to argue that information patterns are identity, but information patterns change greatly as you age. Mark at age 12, the troubled teenager, is very different than Mark at age 29, the responsible father of two. But I think most people would argue they are the same person, just at two separate points in time. Why?
Comatose patients? Connection please? I am not aware what objective data you are pointing to on this.
I'm like a third of the way through that Tegmark paper and I agree with it so far as I understand it but I don't see how it contradicts my view here. He claims that consciousness is a state of matter, i.e. a pattern of information. You can make a table out of a variety of materials, what matters is how the materials are arranged (and obviously brains are a lot more complicated than tables but it's what they can do by virtue of their arrangement in terms of the computations they can perform etc. that matters). To Tegmark (and I think to me, as well) consciousness is what certain kinds of information processing feel like from the inside. Which is is pretty much exactly what I'm saying here (that is equivalent to the story in my Moby Dick analogy). If the information processing is indistinguishable from the inside and internally forward-flowing in the sense that the resulting observer slice is a continuation of a previous one to same degree as meat-based humans, then mission accomplished. The upload was successful.
I hold that Mark at age 29 is a legitimate continuation of Mark at age 12 but I also hold that this is true of Mark the upload, age 29. Neither are made of the same particles nor do they have the same mental states, as Mark, age 12. so I don't see why one is privileged with respect to the other. I actually make this same point, with almost the same example, in support of my position that non-meat based future observer slices are just as valid as meat based ones.
As for comatose patients, some possible objections that someone could make to my view are that it doesn't constitute a legitimate continuation of someone's conscious narrative if there is a significant interruption to that narrative, if significant time has passed between observer slices or if the later observer slice is running on a significantly different substrate. However, someone revived from a coma after ten years, say, ought to still be regarded as the same person even though there has been a massive discontinuity in their conscious narrative, ten years have passed between observer slices and, even on classical physics, every single one of the particles of which they were composed prior to the coma has now been replaced, meaning they are now literally running on a different substrate.