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TheOtherDave comments on Timeless Identity - Less Wrong
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Eliezer...the main issue that keeps me from cryonics is not whether the "real me" wakes up on the other side.
The first question is about how accurate the reconstruction will be. When you wipe a hard drive with a magnet, you can recover some of the content, but usually not all of it. Recovering "some" of a human, but not all of it, could easily create a mentally handicapped, broken consciousness.
But lets set that aside, as it is a technical problem. There is an second issue. If and when immortality and AI are achieved, what value would my revived consciousness contribute to such a society?
You've thus far established that death isn't a bad thing when a copy of the information is preserved and later revived. You've explained that you are willing to treat consciousness much like you would a computer file - you've explained that you would be willing to destroy one of two redundant duplicates of yourself.
Tell me, why exactly is it okay to destroy a redundant duplicate of yourself? You can't say that it's okay to destroy it simply because it is redundant, because that also destroys the point of cryonics. There will be countless humans and AIs that will come into existence, and each of those minds will require resources to maintain. Why is it so important that your, or my, consciousness be one among this swarm? Is that not similarly redundant?
For the same reasons that you would be willing to destroy one of two identical copies of yourself because having two copies is redundant, I am wondering just how much I care that my own consciousness survives forever. My mind is not exceptional among all the possible consciousnesses that resources could be devoted to. Keeping my mind preserved through the ages seems to me just as redundant as making twenty copies of yourself and carefully preserving each one.
I'm not saying I don't want to live forever...I do want to. I'm saying that I feel one aught to have a reason for preserving ones consciousness that goes beyond the simple desire for at least one copy of ones consciousness to continue existing.
When we deconstruct the notion of consciousness as thoroughly as we are doing in this discussion, the concept of "life" and "death" become meaningless over-approximations, much like "free will". Once society reaches that point, we are going to have to deconstruct those ideas and ask ourselves why it is so important that certain information never be deleted. Otherwise, it's going to get a little silly...a "21st century human brain maximizer" is not that much different from a paperclip maximizer, in the grand scheme of things.
How do you go to sleep at night, not knowing if it is the "real you" that wakes up on the other side of consciousness?
Your comment would make more sense to me if I removed the word "not" from the sentence you quote. (Also, if I don't read past that sentence of someonewrongonthenet's comment.)
That said, I agree completely that the kinds of vague identity concerns about cryonics that the quoted sentence with "not" removed would be raising would also arise, were one consistent, about routine continuation of existence over time.
Hrm.. ambiguous semantics. I took it to imply acceptance of the idea but not elevation of its importance, but I see how it could be interpreted differently. And yes, the rest of the post addresses something completely different. But if I can continue for a moment on the tangent, expanding my comment above (even if it doesn't apply to the OP):
You actually continue functioning when you sleep, it's just that you don't remember details once you wake up. A more useful example for such discussion is general anesthesia, which shuts down the regions of the brain associated with consciousness. If personal identity is in fact derived from continuity of computation, then it is plausible that general anesthesia would result in a "different you" waking up after the operation. The application to cryonics depends greatly on the subtle distinction of whether vitrification (and more importantly, the recovery process) slows downs or stops computation. This has been a source of philosophical angst for me personally, but I'm still a cryonics member.
More troubling is the application to uploading. I haven't done this yet, but I want my Alcor contract to explicitly forbid uploading as a restoration process, because I am unconvinced that a simulation of my destructively scanned frozen brain would really be a continuation of my personal identity. I was hoping that “Timeless Identity” would address this point, but sadly it punts the issue.
Well, if the idea is unimportant to the OP, presumably that also helps explain how they can sleep at night.
WRT the tangent... my own position wrt preservation of personal identity is that while it's difficult to articulate precisely what it is that I want to preserve, and I'm not entirely certain there is anything cogent I want to preserve that is uniquely associated with me, I'm pretty sure that whatever does fall in that category has nothing to do with either continuity of computation or similarity of physical substrate. I'm about as sanguine about continuing my existence as a software upload as I am about continuing it as this biological system or as an entirely different biological system, as long as my subjective experience in each case is not traumatically different.
I wrote up about a page-long reply, then realized it probably deserves its own posting. I'll see if I can get to that in the next day or so. There's a wide spectrum of possible solutions to the personal identity problem, from physical continuity (falsified) to pattern continuity and causal continuity (described by Eliezer in the OP), to computational continuity (my own view, I think). It's not a minor point though, whichever view turns out to be correct has immense ramifications for morality and timeless decision theory, among other things...
When you write up the post, you might want to say a few words about what it means for one of these views to be "correct" or "incorrect."
Ok I will, but that part is easy enough to state here: I mean correct in the reductionist sense. The simplest explanation which resolves the original question and/or associated confusion, while adding to our predictive capacity and not introducing new confusion.
Mm. I'm not sure I understood that properly; let me echo my understanding of your view back to you and see if I got it.
Suppose I get in something that is billed as a transporter, but which does not preserve computational continuity. Suppose, for example, that it destructively scans my body, sends the information to the destination (a process which is not instantaneous, and during which no computation can take place), and reconstructs an identical body using that information out of local raw materials at my destination.
If it turns out that computational or physical continuity is the correct answer to what preserves personal identity, then I in fact never arrive at my destination, although the thing that gets constructed at the destination (falsely) believes that it's me, knows what I know, etc. This is, as you say, an issue of great moral concern... I have been destroyed, this new person is unfairly given credit for my accomplishments and penalized for my errors, and in general we've just screwed up big time.
Conversely, if it turns out that pattern or causal continuity is the correct answer, then there's no problem.
Therefore it's important to discover which of those facts is true of the world.
Yes? This follows from your view? (If not, I apologize; I don't mean to put up strawmen, I'm genuinely misunderstanding.)
If so, your view is also that if we want to know whether that's the case or not, we should look for the simplest answer to the question "what does my personal identity comprise?" that does not introduce new confusion and which adds to our predictive capacity. (What is there to predict here?)
Yes?
EDIT: Ah, I just read this post where you say pretty much this. OK, cool; I understand your position.
Yes, that is not only 100% accurate, but describes where I'm headed.
I am looking for the simplest explanation of the subjective continuity of personal identity, which either answers or dissolves the question. Further, the explanation should either explain which teleportation scenario is correct (identity transfer, or murder+birth), or satisfactorily explain why it is a meaningless distinction.
If I, the person standing in front of the transporter door, will experience walking on Mars, or oblivion.
Yes, it is perhaps likely that this will never be experimentally observable. That may even be a tautology since we are talking about subjective experience. But still, a reductionist theory of consciousness could provide a simple, easy to understand explanation for the origin of personal identity (e.g., what an computational machine feels like from the inside) and which predicts identity transfer or murder + birth. That would be enough for me, at least as long as there's not competing equally simple theories.
I don't know what "computation" or "computational continuity" means if it's considered to be separate from causal continuity, and I'm not sure other philosophers have any standard idea of this either. From the perspective of the Planck time, your brain is doing extremely slow 'computations' right now, it shall stand motionless a quintillion ticks and more before whatever arbitrary threshold you choose to call a neural firing. Or from a faster perspective, the 50 years of intervening time might as well be one clock tick. There can be no basic ontological distinction between fast and slow computation, and aside from that I have no idea what anyone in this thread could be talking about if it's distinct from causal continuity.
What relevance does personal identity have to TDT? TDT doesn't depend on whether the other instances of TDT are in copies of you, or in other people who merely use the same decision theory as you.
It has relevance for the basilisk scenario, which I'm not sure I should say any more about.
Like TheOtherDave (I presume), I consider my identity to be adequately described by whatever Turing machine that can emulate my brain, or at least its prefrontal cortex + relevant memory storage. I suspect that a faithful simulation of just my Brodmann area 10 coupled with a large chunk of my memories would restore enough of my self-awareness to be considered "me". This sim-me would probably lose most of my emotions without the rest of the brain, but it is still infinitely better than none.
There's a very wide range of possible minds I consider to preserve my identity; I'm not sure the majority of those emulate my prefrontal cortex significantly more closely than they emulate yours, and the majority of my memories are not shared by the majority of those minds.
Interesting. I wonder what you would consider a mind that preserves your identity. For example, I assume that the total of your posts online, plus whatever other information available without some hypothetical future brain scanner, all running as a process on some simulator, is probably not enough.
At one extreme, if I assume those posts are being used to create a me-simulation by me-simulation-creator that literally knows nothing else about humans, then I'm pretty confident that the result is nothing I would identify with. (I'm also pretty sure this scenario is internally inconsistent.)
At another extreme, if I assume the me-simulation-creator has access to a standard template for my general demographic and is just looking to customize that template sufficiently to pick out some subset of the volume of mindspace my sufficiently preserved identity defines... then maybe. I'd have to think a lot harder about what information is in my online posts and what information would plausibly be in such a template to even express a confidence interval about that.
That said, I'm certainly not comfortable treating the result of that process as preserving "me."
Then again I'm also not comfortable treating the result of living a thousand years as preserving "me."
You'll need the rest of the brain because these other memories would be distributed throughout the rest of your cortex. The hippocampus only contains recent episodic memories.
If you lost your temporal lobe, for example, you'd lose all non-episodic knowledge concerning what the names of things are, how they are categorized, and what the relationships between them are.
That said, I'm not sure why I should care much about having my non-episodic knowledge replaced with an off-the-shelf encyclopedia module. I don't identify with it much.
If you only kept the hippocampus, you'd lose your non-recent episodic memories too. But technical issues aside, let me defend the "encyclopedia":
Episodic memory is basically a cassette reel of your life, along with a few personalized associations and maybe memories of thoughts and emotions. Everything that we associate with the word knowledge is non-episodic. It's not just verbal labels - that was just a handy example that I happened to know the brain region for. I'd actually care about that stuff more about non-episodic memories than the episodic stuff.
Things like "what is your wife's name and what does her face look like" are non-episodic memory. You don't have to think back to a time when you specifically saw your wife to remember what her name and face is, and that you love her - that information is treated as a fact independent of any specific memory, indelibly etched into your model of the world. Cognitively speaking, "I love my wife stacy, she looks like this" is as much of a fact as "grass is a green plant" and they are both non-episodic memories. Your episodic memory reel wouldn't even make sense without that sort of information. I'd still identify someone with memory loss, but retaining my non-episodic memory, as me. I'd identify someone with only my episodic memories as someone else, looking at a reel of memory that does not belong to them and means nothing to them.
(Trigger Warning: link contains writing in diary which is sad, horrifying, and nonfiction.): This is what complete episodic memory loss looks like. Patients like this can still remember the names of faces of people they love.
Ironically...the (area 10) might actually be replaceable. I'm not sure whether any personalized memories are kept there - I don't know what that specific region does but it's in an area that mostly deals with executive function - which is important for personality, but not necessarily individuality.
I take it you're assuming that information about my husband, and about my relationship to my husband, isn't in the encyclopedia module along with information about mice and omelettes and your relationship to your wife.
If that's true, then sure, I'd prefer not to lose that information.
Well...yeah, I was. I thought the whole idea of having an encyclopedia was to eliminate redundancy through standardization of the parts of the brain that were not important for individuality?
If your husband and my husband, your omelette and my omelette, are all stored in the encyclopedia, it wouldn't be a "off-the-shelf encyclopedia module" anymore. It would be an index containing individual people's non-episodic knowledge. At that point, it's just an index of partial uploads. We can't standardize that encyclopedia to everyone: If the the thing that stores your omelette and your husband went around viewing my episodic reel and knowing all the personal stuff about my omelette and husband...that would be weird and the resulting being would be very confused (let alone if the entire human race was in there - I'm not sure how that would even work).
(Also, going back into the technical stuff, there may or may not be a solid dividing line between very old episodic memory and non-episodoc memory
What's the difference between personality and individuality?
In my head:
Personality is a set of dichotomous variables plotted on a bell curve. "Einstein was extroverted, charismatic, nonconforming, and prone to absent-mindedness" describes his personality. We all have these traits in various amounts. You can some of these personality nobs really easily with drugs. I can't specify Einstein out of every person in the world using only his personality traits - I can only specify individuals similar to him.
Individuality is stuff that's specific to the person. "Einstein's second marriage was to his cousin and he had at least 6 affairs. He admired Spinoza, and was a contemporary of Tagore. He was a socialist and cared about civil rights. He had always thought there was something wrong about refrigerators." Not all of these are dichotomous variables - you either spoke to Tagore or you didn't. And it makes no sense to put people on a "satisfaction with Refrigerators" spectrum, even though I suppose you could if you wanted to. And all this information together specifically points to Einstein, and no one else in the world. Everyone in the world a set of unique traits like fingerprints - and it doesn't even make sense to ask what the "average" is, since most of the variables don't exist on the same dimension.
And...well, when it comes to Area 10, just intuitively, do you really want to define yourself by a few variables that influence your executive function? Personally I define myself partially by my ideas, and partially by my values...and the former is definitely in the "individuality" territory.
There are things that when I go to bed to wake up eight hours later are very nearly preserved but if I woke up sixty years later wouldn't be, e.g. other people's memories of me (see I Am a Strange Loop) or the culture of the place where I live (see Good Bye, Lenin!).
(I'm not saying whether this is one of the main reasons why I'm not signed up for cryonics.)
Point.