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Mark_Friedenbach comments on Continuity in Uploading - Less Wrong Discussion
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What if I rewire your neurons so you think you're Donald Trump? Would that make you Donald Trump? If Mr. Trump died in a tragic boating accident tomorrow, could his family rest easy knowing that he didn't actually experience death, but lives on in you?
If you rewrite my nuerons such that I have all of Donald Trump's memories (or connections) and none of my own, yes. If you only rewrite my name, no, for I would still identify with the memories. There's lots of space between those where I'm partially me and partially him, and I would hazard to forward-identify with beings in proportion to how much of my current memories they retain, possibly diluted by their additional memories.
Ok, what if - like Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind - I slowly over a period of time eliminate your memories. Then maybe - like Dark City - I go in and insert new memories, maybe generic, maybe taken from someone else. This can be done either fast or slowly if it matters.
This future continuation of your current self will have nothing other than a causal & computational connection to your current identity. No common memories whatsoever. Would you expect to experience what this future person experiences?
Based on your other comments, I infer that you consider this question entirely different from the question "Are you willing to consider this future person you?" Confirm?
Correct.
Cool, thanks. Given that, and answering for my own part: I'm not sure what any person at any time would possibly ever observe differentially in one case or the other, so I honestly have no idea what I'd be expecting or not expecting in this case. That is, I don't know what the question means, and I'm not sure it means anything at all.
That's fair enough. You got the point with your first comment, which was to point out that issues of memory-identity and continuous-experience-identity are / could be separate.
Perhaps I understand more than I think I do, then.
It seems to me that what I'm saying here is precisely that those issues can't be separated, because they predict the same sets of observations. The world in which identity is a function of memory is in all observable ways indistinguishable from the world in which identity is a function of continuous experience. Or, for that matter, of cell lineages or geographical location or numerological equivalence.
And I'm saying that external observations are not all that matters. Indeed it feels odd to me to hold that view when the phenomenon under consideration is subjective experience itself.
I didn't say "external observations".
I said "observations."
If you engage with what I actually said, does it feel any less odd?
Of course not. But what does thinking you're Donald Trump have to do with it? The question at hand is not about who I think I am, but what properties I have.
No, the question at issue here is continuity of experience, and the subjective experience (or rather lack thereof) when it is terminated - death.
Ah, OK. You confused me by bringing up trist thinking they were Donald Trump, which seemed unrelated.
For my own part, I'm not sure why I should care about the nominal difference between two things with identical properties, regardless of how continuous their subjective experience is/has been, and regardless of whether one of them is me.
But I acknowledge that some people do care about that. And not just for subjective experience... some people care about the difference between an original artwork and a perfectly identical copy of it, for example, because the continuity of the original's existence is important to them, even though they don't posit the artwork has subjective experiences.
That's fine... people value what they value. For my own part, I don't value continuity in that sense very much at all.
Taboo "think". If you rewire my neurons* to give me the false propositional belief that I am Donald Trump, then no. If you rewire my neurons to an exact copy of Donald Trump's, then yes.
And, yes, they could, to the exact same degree that they would accept a miraculously-resuscitated Trump who was amnesiac about the previous day leading up to the boating accident, and also looked totally different now. But this is a looser requirement. There could be a whole bunch of threshold people who would be recognised by my family as a valid continuation of me, but who I could not have anticipated becoming.
*and any other skull-stuff that bears on the problem