TimFreeman comments on Timeless Identity - Less Wrong

23 Post author: Eliezer_Yudkowsky 03 June 2008 08:16AM

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Comment author: TimFreeman 19 April 2011 10:53:48PM *  2 points [-]

I'm quite familiar with the Buddhist notion of no self, but I don't think for a second that study of Buddhist philosophy would convince anyone that a cryonically frozen person will wake up as themselves

If there is no self, then cryonics obviously neither works nor doesn't work at making a person wake up as themselves, since they don't have a self to wake up as. From this point of view, cryonics works if someone wakes up, and the person who originally signed up for cryonics would have preferred for that person to wake up over not having that person wake up, given the opportunity costs incurred when doing cryonics.

Cryonics is similar in kind to sleep or the passage of time in that way.

Whether most Buddhists are able to figure that out is another question. I agree that I'm not describing the Buddhist consensus on cryonics, and I agree that Buddhist philosophy does not motivate doing cryonics. My only points are that they're consistent, and that Buddhist philosophy frees me from urgently trying to puzzle out what "Timeless Identity" is supposed to mean.

I'm slightly concerned that the OP apparently doesn't say how timeless identity is supposed to work, and nobody seems to have noticed that.

Comment author: shokwave 20 April 2011 06:45:20AM *  2 points [-]

I'm slightly concerned that the OP apparently doesn't say how timeless identity is supposed to work, and nobody seems to have noticed that.

The explanation of identity starts when he kicks off around the many-worlds heads diagram. Specifically the part that makes timeless identity work (as long as you accept most reductionist physical descriptions of identity - configurations of neurons and synapses and such) is this:

We also saw in Timeless Causality that the end of time is not necessarily the end of cause and effect; causality can be defined (and detected statistically!) without mentioning "time". This is important because it preserves arguments about personal identity that rely on causal continuity rather than "physical continuity".

Comment author: TimFreeman 20 April 2011 12:44:01PM 0 points [-]

Ah. The assumption that identity = consciousness was essential to recognizing that this was an attempt to answer the question of how timeless identity works. He only mentions identity = consciousness in passing once, and I missed it the first time around, so the problem was that I was reading too fast. Thanks.

If you need a notion of identity, I agree that identity = consciousness is a reasonable stand to take.

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