User Comment Replies

I've just read this article by Ben Best (President of CI): http://www.benbest.com/philo/doubles.html

He admits that the possibility of duplicating a person raises a serious question about the nature of personal identity, that continuity is no solution to this problem, and that he can find no other solution. But he doesn't seem to consider that the absence of any solution points to his concept of personal identity being fundamentally flawed.

2byrnema15y

Interesting. However, I don't see any problems with the nature of personal identity. My hunch is that I'm actually not confused about it. In a lifetime, there is continuity of memories and continuity of values and goals even as they slowly change over time. I can trust that the person who wakes up tomorrow will be 'me' in this sense. She may be more refreshed and have more information, but I trust her her to act as "I" would. On the other hand, she might be excessively grouchy or suffer a brain injury, in which case this trust is misplaced. However, she is not me personal-identity wise for a variety of reasons: * I do not have access to her stream of consciousness. * I do not have operative control of her body. [In both cases, the reason is because her thoughts and actions take place in the future. Eventually, I will have access to her thoughts and control of her body and then she becomes "me".] * Personal identity exists only for a moment. It is the running of some type of mental thought process. Suppose I was duplicated overnight, and two byrnemas woke up in the morning. Both byrnemas would have continuity with the previous byrnema with respect to memories, values and goals. However, neither of them are the personal identity of byrnema of the night before just as whenever I wake up I'm not the personal identity of the night before, exactly for the reasons I bulleted. With the two duplicates, there would be two distinct personal identities. You simply count the number of independent accesses to thoughts and motor control of bodies and arrive at two. Both byrnema have a subjective experience of personal identity, of course, and consider the other byrnema an "other". However, this "other" is similar to oneself in a way that is unprecedented, a twin sister that also has your memories, goals and values. I think duplicates would be most problematic for loved ones. They would find themselves in a position of loving both duplicates, and being able to empathize w

Abnormal Cryonics

RichardW15y30

Hi Blueberry. How is that a rational reason for me to care what I will experience tomorrow? If I don't care what I will experience tomorrow, then I have no reason to care that my future self will have my memories or that he will have experienced a continuous flow of perception up to that time.

We have to have some motivation (a goal, desire, care, etc) before we can have a rational reason to do anything. Our most basic motivations cannot themselves be rationally justified. They just are what they are.

Of course, they can be rationally explained. My care for ... (read more)

1JenniferRM15y

Richard, you seem to have come to a quite logical conclusion about the difference between intrinsic values and instrumental values and what happens when an attempt is made to give a justification for intrinsic values at the level of values. If a proposed intrinsic value is questioned and justified with another value statement, then the supposed "intrinsic value" is revealed to have really been instrumental. Alternatively, if no value is offered then the discussion will have necessarily moved out of the value domain into questions about the psychology or neurons or souls or evolutionary mechanisms or some other messy issue of "simple" fact. And you are quite right that these facts (by definition as "non value statements") will not be motivating. We fundamentally like vanilla (if we do) "because we like vanilla" as a brute fact. De gustibus non est disputandum. Yay for the philosophy of values :-P On the other hand... basically all humans, as a matter of fact, do share many preferences, not just for obvious things like foods that are sweet or salty or savory but also for really complicated high level things, like the respect of those with whom we regularly spend time, the ability to contribute to things larger than ourselves, listening to beautiful music, and enjoyment of situations that create "flow" where moderately challenging tasks with instantaneous feedback can be worked on without distraction, and so on. As a matter of simple observation, you must have noticed that there exist some things which it gives you pleasure to experience. To say that "I don't care what I will experience tomorrow" can be interpreted as a prediction that "Tomorrow, despite being conscious, I will not experience anything which affects my emotions, preferences, feelings, or inclinations in either positive or negative directions". This statement is either bluntly false (my favored hypothesis), or else you are experiencing a shocking level of anhedonia for which you should seek professio

Abnormal Cryonics

RichardW15y120

Hi Jennifer. Perhaps I seem irrational because you haven't understood me. In fact I find it difficult to see much of your post as a response to anything I actually wrote.

No doubt I explained myself poorly on the subject of the continuity of the self. I won't dwell on that. The main question for me is whether I have a rational reason to be concerned about what tomorrow-Richard will experience. And I say there is no such rational reason. It is simply a matter of brute fact that I am concerned about what he will experience. (Vladimir and Byrnema are making si... (read more)

2Blueberry15y

I don't understand why psychological continuity isn't enough of a rational reason. Your future self will have all your memories, thoughts, viewpoints, and values, and you will experience a continuous flow of perception from yourself now to your future self. (If you sleep or undergo general anesthesia in the interim, the flow may be interrupted slightly, but I don't see why that matters.)

Abnormal Cryonics

RichardW15y100

I share the position that Kaj_Sotala outlined here: http://lesswrong.com/lw/1mc/normal_cryonics/1hah

In the relevant sense there is no difference between the Richard that wakes up in my bed tomorrow and the Richard that might be revived after cryonic preservation. Neither of them is a continuation of my self in the relevant sense because no such entity exists. However, evolution has given me the illusion that tomorrow-Richard is a continuation of my self, and no matter how much I might want to shake off that illusion I can't. On the other hand, I have no eq... (read more)

5JenniferRM15y

I don't mean to insult you (I'm trying to respect your intelligence enough to speak directly rather than delicately) but this kind of talk is why cryonics seems like a pretty useful indicator of whether or not a person is rational. You're admitting to false beliefs that you hold "because you evolved that way" rather than using reason to reconcile two intuitions that you "sort of follow" but which contradict each other. Then you completely discounted the suffering or happiness of a human being who is not able to be helped by anyone other than your present self in this matter. You certainly can't be forced to seek medical treatment against your will for this, so other people are pretty much barred by law from forcing you to not be dumb with respect to the fate of future-Richard. He is in no one's hands but your own. Hume was right about a huge amount of stuff in the context of initial epistemic conditions of the sort that Descartes proposed when he extracted "I think therefore I am" as one basis for a stable starting point. But starting from that idea and a handful of others like "trust of our own memories as a sound basis for induction" we have countless terabytes of sense data from which we can develop a model of the universe that includes physical objects with continuity over time - one class of which are human brains that appear to be capable of physically computing the same thoughts with which we started out in our "initial epistemic conditions". The circle closes here. There might be some new evidence somewhere if some kind of Cartesian pineal gland is discovered someday which functions as the joystick by which souls manipulate bodies, but barring some pretty spectacular evidence, materialist views of the soul are the best theory standing. Your brain has physical continuity in exactly the same way that chairs have physical continuity, and your brain tomorrow (after sleeping tonight while engaging in physical self repair and re-indexing of data structures) wi

LESSWRONG
LW

All of RichardW's Comments + Replies