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Nornagest comments on Open Thread, October 1-15, 2012 - Less Wrong Discussion
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Comments (477)
I used to think this way. I stopped thinking this way when I realized that there are discontinuities in consciousness even in bog-standard meat bodies -- about one a day at minimum, and possibly more since no one I'm aware of has conclusively established that subjective conscious experience is continuous. (It feels continuous, but your Star Trek transporter-clone would feel continuity as well -- and I certainly don't have a subjective record of every distinct microinstant.)
These are accompanied by changes in physical and neurological state as well (not as dramatic as complete disassembly or mind uploading, but nonzero), and I can't point to a threshold where a change in physical state necessitates subjective death. I can't even demonstrate that subjective death is a coherent concept. Since all the ways I can think of of getting around this require ascribing some pretty sketchy nonphysical properties to the organization of matter that makes up your body, I'm forced to assume in the absence of further evidence that there's nothing in particular that privileges one discontinuity in consciousness over another. Which is an existentially frightening idea, but what can one do about it?
(SMBC touched on this once, too.)
What do you mean by discontinuities? I have not heard about this.
Sleep, total anesthesia, getting knocked on the head in the right way, possibly things like zoning out. Any time your subjective experience stops for a while.
Actually, I expect that our normal waking experience is also discontinuous, in much the same sense that our perception of our visual field is massively discontinuous. Human consciousness is not a plenum.
Yeah, I was trying to get at that with the parenthetical bit in my first paragraph. Could probably have been a bit more explicit.
Ok are you saying that temporarily going unconscious is the same as permanently going unconscious?
Would you assert that because we temporarily go unconscious that permanent unconsciousness is not death?
Temporarily going unconscious is not the same as permanently going unconscious.
Whether we temporarily go unconscious or not does not entail permanent unconsciousness being or not being death.
Now, some questions of mine: you said "If I were to be disassembled by a Star Trek transporter, I'd stop experiencing. That's death."
When you fall asleep, do you stop experiencing?
If so, is that death?
If it isn't death, is it possible that other things that involve stopping experiencing, like the transporter, are also not death?
We need to focus on the word "I" to see my point. I'm going to switch that out with something else to highlight this difference. For the original, I will use the word "Dave". As tempting as it is to use "TheOtherDave" for the copy, I am going to use something completely different. I'll use "Bob". And for our control, I will use myself, Epiphany.
Epiphany takes a nap. Her brain is still active but it's not conscious.
Dave decides to use a teleporter. He stands inside and presses the button.
The teleporter scans him and constructs a copy of him on a space ship a mile away.
The copy of Dave is called Bob.
The teleporter checks the copy of Bob before deleting Dave to make sure he was copied successfully.
Dave still exists, for a fraction of a second, just after Bob is created.
Both of them COULD go on existing, if the teleporter does not delete Dave. However, Dave is under the impression that he will become Bob once Bob exists. This isn't true - Bob is having a separate set of experiences. Dave doesn't get a chance to notice this because in only fractions of a second, the teleporter deletes Dave by disassembling his particles.
Dave's experience goes black. That's it. Dave doesn't even know he's dead because he has stopped experiencing. Dave will never experience again. Bob will experience, but he is not Dave.
Epiphany wakes up from her nap. She is still Epiphany. Her consciousness did not stop permanently like Dave's. She was not erased like Dave.
Epiphany still exists. Bob still exists. Dave does not.
The problem here is that Dave stopped experiencing permanently. Unlike Epiphany who can pick up where Epiphany left off after her nap because she is still Epiphany and was never disassembled, Bob cannot pick up where Dave left off because Bob never was Dave. Bob is a copy of Dave. Now that Dave is gone, Dave is gone. Dave stopped experiencing. He is dead.
Ah! So when you say "If I were to be disassembled by a Star Trek transporter, I'd stop experiencing" you mean "I'd [permanently] stop experiencing." I understand you now, thanks.
So, OK.
Suppose Dave decides to go to sleep. He gets into bed, closes his eyes, etc.
The next morning, someone opens their eyes.
How would I go about figuring out whether the person who opens their eyes is Dave or Bob?
Well, first, is there a human copier nearby? If not, you're probably Dave.
How about this: If you had stepped into a teleporter and pressed the button, how would you know that it killed you?
This is exactly backwards.
I recognize a copier because it makes copies. That's how I know something is a copier.
If I need to know whether something is a copier before I can decide whether what it creates is a copy or not, there's something wrong with my thinking.
I wouldn't, naturally.
Of course, if Dave steps into an incinerator and presses the button, Dave also doesn't know that the incinerator killed Dave.
Dave is just dead, and knows nothing.
OTOH, if Dave steps into a non-incinerator and presses the button, Dave knows it didn't kill Dave.
And the way that Dave knows this is that something is standing there, not-dead, after pressing the button, and that something identifies as Dave, and resembles Dave closely enough.
This happens all the time... I have pressed many buttons in my life, and I know they haven't killed me, because here I am, still alive.
And I expect this is exactly what happens with a properly functioning teleporter. I press the button, and in the next moment something is aware of being Dave, and therefore not dead. It just happens to be in a different location.
Okay, so would you recommend I check under my bed tonight for anything that might make a copy of me and disassemble the original? I need something more to go on. I'm having a hard time not equating this with worrying about boogeymen.
Actually, for at least a few seconds, possibly a few minutes, Dave would be screaming in agony and he would most certainly notice that he is experiencing death by incineration.
Unless the non-incinerator happens to be a human copier, and Dave did not recognize it at first.
Yes, exactly. The original Dave has died in such a way that he didn't even notice. Dave2 definitely doesn't want to think that an exact copy of himself died just a moment ago, and really definitely doesn't want to have to worry that he will need to cease experiencing in order to "go back" to where he came from, so due to normalcy bias, Dave2 declares that the fact that Dave2 exists means that Dave1 never died, and enjoys the confirmation bias that this non-sequitur gives him until he ceases to experience when "loaded" back onto his space ship.
That's one insidious death.
Two, actually. :p
No, temporary unconsciousness is not the same thing as permanent unconsciousness; you perceive yourself to return to consciousness. The tricky part is unpacking the "you" in that sentence. Conventionally it unpacks to a conscious entity, but that clearly isn't useful here because you (by any definition) aren't continuously conscious for the duration. It could also unpack to about fifty to a hundred kilos of meat, but whether we're talking about a transporter-clone or an ordinary eight hours of sleep, the meat that wakes up is not exactly the meat that goes unconscious. In any case, I'm having a hard time thinking of ways of binding a particular chunk of meat to a particular consciousness that end up being ontologically privileged without invoking something like a soul, which would strike me as wild speculation at best. So what does it unpack to?
It's actually very tricky to pin down the circumstances which constitute death, i.e. permanent cessation of a conscious process, once you start thinking about things like Star Trek transporters and mind uploading. I don't claim to have a perfect answer, but I strongly suspect that the question needs dissolving rather than answering as such.