The imperfect transporter
There's an argument that I came up with a little while ago against the position that transporters successfully transport consciousness. Firstly for anyone unfamiliar with the transporter problem I'll summarize in this spoiler:
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The transporter problem
The transporter problem concerns something like the transporters in star trek.
A person at one place, let's call it source, steps on a plate. The system then scans their body and creates a perfect copy of that person at another place, let's call it destination.
The person at source is killed, either deliberately or as some side effect of the scanning.
The question is: is it rational to use the transporter -- do you actually survive this process?
Both main answers to this question have flaws, and, humorously, both sides of the debate tend to accuse the other of believing in souls.
The position that the transporter does work, has the issue of what connects the person at source to the person at destination. Sure, they are qualitatively the same, but we don't say that two coins are really one if they are qualitatively the same, why are we treating consciousness differently?
The position that the transporter doesn't work has the issue of what the person at destination lacks in order to be a continuation of you? What if the transporter functioned by moving your actual atoms to destination? Is that now you? If so, what is so special about those atoms? If that wouldn't work, why not?
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The imperfect transporter
First of all, let me say that I've tried this argument on a couple of other forums and I don't think people got it, so please give me the benefit of the doubt for a moment. I'm happy to hear objections (it's why I'm here) but please not reflexive rubbishing.
Let's say the transporter has an error rate, X. What an error means doesn't matter; let's say that X is the number of atoms in the person at destination that are out of position by a significant amount.
Now, the position that the transporter works, entails there is an X where you are successfully transported, by definition. Even if that X is strictly zero errors, there must be some successful value of X.
And I think most proponents would also agree that there is an X where you are not transported. If Abraham Lincoln appears at destination, that's not you; it's irrelevant that he happens to be on a transporter plate, your consciousness is gone.
Now here's the problem: there has to be a line somewhere between "transported" and "not transported". Because, while "degree of difference" might be a continuous measure, whether you survive or not is binary (surviving in a imperfect state still counts as surviving).
And it seems impossible, in principle, to ever know where that line is, as that line makes no measurable difference to objective reality. And it's also totally arbitrary in terms of physical laws; why would the universe decree that, say, X=12,371 means being transported with brain damage, and X=12,372 means you just die at the source?
[hide]
The transporter problem
The transporter problem concerns something like the transporters in star trek.
A person at one place, let's call it source, steps on a plate. The system then scans their body and creates a perfect copy of that person at another place, let's call it destination.
The person at source is killed, either deliberately or as some side effect of the scanning.
The question is: is it rational to use the transporter -- do you actually survive this process?
Both main answers to this question have flaws, and, humorously, both sides of the debate tend to accuse the other of believing in souls.
The position that the transporter does work, has the issue of what connects the person at source to the person at destination. Sure, they are qualitatively the same, but we don't say that two coins are really one if they are qualitatively the same, why are we treating consciousness differently?
The position that the transporter doesn't work has the issue of what the person at destination lacks in order to be a continuation of you? What if the transporter functioned by moving your actual atoms to destination? Is that now you? If so, what is so special about those atoms? If that wouldn't work, why not?
[/hide]
The imperfect transporter
First of all, let me say that I've tried this argument on a couple of other forums and I don't think people got it, so please give me the benefit of the doubt for a moment. I'm happy to hear objections (it's why I'm here) but please not reflexive rubbishing.
Let's say the transporter has an error rate, X. What an error means doesn't matter; let's say that X is the number of atoms in the person at destination that are out of position by a significant amount.
Now, the position that the transporter works, entails there is an X where you are successfully transported, by definition. Even if that X is strictly zero errors, there must be some successful value of X.
And I think most proponents would also agree that there is an X where you are not transported. If Abraham Lincoln appears at destination, that's not you; it's irrelevant that he happens to be on a transporter plate, your consciousness is gone.
Now here's the problem: there has to be a line somewhere between "transported" and "not transported". Because, while "degree of difference" might be a continuous measure, whether you survive or not is binary (surviving in a imperfect state still counts as surviving).
And it seems impossible, in principle, to ever know where that line is, as that line makes no measurable difference to objective reality. And it's also totally arbitrary in terms of physical laws; why would the universe decree that, say, X=12,371 means being transported with brain damage, and X=12,372 means you just die at the source?
Comments (280)
I think that while X is a continuous measure, what is left of brain function after being transported doesn't physically function such that a difference of one missing atom will correspond to a meaningful difference in considering whether or not one has survived. That is to say that the brain probably functions in terms of structures and stuff that would exist at something like (potentially knowable) thresholds and not so much according to small changes in X. If one's brain functions could be determined after going through the transporter, even independently of knowing X, and they are more or less the same as they were before the transportation, then I'd say that they have "survived". You could, of course, ask at what capacity of one's original brain function one would need to be after being transported to be considered to have survived, and I would say we are on more solid ground with that than with worrying about a measure like X.
Sorry if that's kind of a boring answer to it.
Asking for a friend... I personally wouldn't dare chip in without having yet got around to reading Parfitt. But your clear exposition got me, sorry, got my friend thinking that if I politely decline use of your machine it's because I know full well that anyone waking up in a different (spatiotemporally non-overlapping) body and/or world is mistaken if they believe they are a continuation of me?
I'm a material token, not a type? So not a soul botherer?
Today, yes, if someone has brain damage we can talk about the degree to which that person's personality and other attributes have been preserved. It's the same person, it's just arbitrary how much we consider that person to have the same qualities as before.
However, in the transporter scenario, there's a binary that we've introduced: either you've survived the process -- whether or not you have brain damage -- or you simply died on the source plate, lights out. Remember I am talking about your own perspective. So if Picard uses the transporter, I am talking about the perspective of the Picard that entered at the source, not whether the rest of the bridge crew considers it to be the same Picard.
And there seems no basis for the universe to choose where to set such a line, nor for us to ever know where it is. It's not a refutation of the transporter working per se, it's just showing that there are a number of absurd entailments.
That said, if one assumes scattering all of the atoms in a living cell doesnt irreparably disintegrate the cell, and if one assumes one can put all of those atoms back in place and that the cell would just jump start into functioning again (why do we assume you can transport atoms any faster than whole cells anyway, why dont the atoms need to be broken apart into light waves or something, but ), then the transport process is just me being me while moving very far very fast and the differences between me before transport and me after transport are like the differences between me before walking across Europe and me after - things lost along the way and things gathered making me new with each step.
Quoting Mijin
I think that is the age old metaphysical question of identity and change. Transporter or not; surviving or not - these are ways of saying what is me when me is a changing thing? What about me survives one minute to the next no matter what process of change is occurring?
The fact that you can say things like Abe Lincoln appears at the destination makes the whole thought experiment utterly impossible to help think through this metaphysical issue. What is Abe Lincoln in the first place is the same question as what appears at the other end of the transporter, which are the same questions as are what appears at this end of the transporter and that end of the transporter the same thing or two different things.
The question is what is an individual thing, or, what gives it an identity over time?
This is Aristotle, or Heraclitus. Transporter confuses the confusing issue further. I think.
Okay, well I think this is different from your claims in the OP. I thought you were claiming that because the continuous measure X doesn't present a clear line at which one can be considered to have survived or not, we cannot set a line at which one can be considered to have survived at all.
Okay, tell me what you think is wrong with this answer just to make sure that we are on the same page: we might be able to introduce some sort of criteria for determining if someone could be considered to have survived based on the survival of brain function as a result of a certain X. If they pass a cognitive test at a certain X after being transported, then we can say that at that particular X, the person that was transported survived. Thus, it is no longer arbitrary (at least in terms of small differences in X not corresponding to meaningful differences in brain functioning) given we can determine how much someone must be the same after being transported to be considered to have survived.
I think that this resolves the question of drawing a line at which we can say someone survived transportation, even if it entails some amount of arbitrariness.
Honestly I think it's the same question with or without transportation.
That occurred to me too, actually. Getting bonked on the head with a rock could be substituted for a transporter (for that part of the problem).
Even without injury, or misplaced atoms from a transporter accident, even thinking about a perfect transporter and the question of continuity of consciousness...
I actually think there's an argument for consciousness NEVER being continuous, period. Like even just you, now, not being transported. There's an argument that the you that is experiencing the middle of this sentence now is a different you than the one experiencing the end of the sentence now. That continuity of experience is equally illusory in a way, all the time.
It's an interesting thought and I do find it genuinely compelling.
Over longer stretches, the invariance of personal identity is more dubious, though. Am I the same person at fifty as I was when I was five? (Or, to put it in your stark terms, did I survive the process of aging?) Legally and conventionally, I am considered to be the same person, but physically and mentally, we are so far apart as to make such an identification almost meaningless. But if I am not the same person as my past self, is there a precise boundary in time between the two identities? Or is there a precise number of microphysical or psychological differences that delineates such a boundary?
To sharpen the issue even further, consider that a stroke or dementia can alter a person's memory and personality much quicker than normal aging, so that people close to them note that they are literally a different person from the one they remember.
So, what does that imply for personal identity? If you hold to a view of an identity as something objectively existing atomic entity, then you must bite the bullet and maintain that there is a fact of the matter in each of these cases about whether the identity survives or perishes in the transition, even if no amount of reasoning or observation will allow us to nail it down.
But if you view personal identity as conventional and constructed, then the problem is dissolved. On that view, there isn't an objective fact to be nailed down. This view also suggests that paradoxical thought experiments, such as the transporter or the replicator thought experiments, are uninformative precisely because of their exoticism. If our understanding of personal identity is shaped by convention and intuition, then we should expect our understanding to break down in scenarios that break with convention and intuition.
As if right on cue! After my last post.
Quoting SophistiCat
Both of you make really good points, but I'm not sure if the transporter issue is totally resolved by this. Do the two of you think that a shrunken down interval of time could exist such that the mental processes responsible for our continuity of identity could be totally invariant over that interval?
I mention it because if one were able to be fully transported within one of these intervals (such that identity is invariant or nothing happens in the brain), then we have a phenomenon distinct from the flow of change in identity due to it being "conventional and constructed" because identity considered as such is invariably related to the passage of time. Thus, I think we would have to consider whether or not being transported in itself would result in loss of identity in a way that common experience doesn't quite entail - even if we generally accept the idea of identity the two of you put forward.
From the beginning it is we as humans who have defined the word transportation. The universe doesn't follow our definition but its own laws. I assume the transporter would follow or abuse these laws to work. as such there is no line for the universe to define a successful transportation. It is a line for us humans to define what we consider a successful transportation whether or not the transportation followed the laws of the universe. Losing an ear could be considered fine, losing fingernails could be considered failure. That is up to humans to define, not the universe.
Of course as earlier I said a lot of this was going over my head.
My words are useless if you are already discussing what the line should be as humans.
Or something else entirely about consciousness.
I would also like to state I did not understand the original problem.Quoting Mijin
It makes a little sense to me now. Are you saying that living is the measure for successful transportation?
I also don't think I understand the line you mention. If X is referring to Atoms out of place at the destination. Nothing determines which atoms these are. If it is completely random then there cannot be a specific number as the atoms come from random places of the body.
This is quite an interesting question, and it really gets my blood pumping.
I think however that without any specific information on the transporters workings any answer we come to would be based entirely on the additional statements or conditions you make.
Absolutely. Every time I have discussed, or seen discussions of, the transporter problem, it seems both sides assume that continuity of consciousness is real, and the question is just whether it's preserved through this process. But yes, it occurs to me that there's a third option; that there's never continuity of consciousness.
It seems an unpleasant option -- the me that is typing the last word of this sentence is a different entity to the one that typed the first -- but we have to admit, it's the one that fits the known facts right now. It's immune to all of the arguments against the other positions.
Well it's just a thought experiment. We also can't make Laplace's demon.
A difference though is that personal identity is an issue that will eventually be relevant to human technology. Because, even if transporters are impossible, brain augmentations, splicing etc seem pretty feasible within just the next few centuries. And, if strong AI is true, then transporter-like processes will be absolutely trivial as long as we have sufficient storage to make duplicates.
I still don't think you're following me, sorry. I am talking 100% about the first-person perspective of the person going into the transporter. You are talking about what is observable or measurable to third-parties.
In the original, vanilla transporter problem, where the transporter makes perfect copies, it's a given that the person at the destination is identical in every way to the person went in, such that Kirk's colleagues see no discontinuity in their interaction with him, and Kirk is convinced he's just been transported.
This premise is not a solution to the philosophical problem though, because that problem concerns the first person perspective of the Kirk entering at the source. From his own point of view, did he survive?
I am inferring from your answers that probably your position is that, no, the source person is dead, and our focus is just on whether we should consider the facsimile close enough to treat it as Kirk. Right?
I agree.
There is the Ship of Theseus paradox -if you replace one board on a ship, its still the same ship; but if over time you replace all of the boards, one by one, at what point does it become a new ship or is it still the same ship after all of the boards have been replaced.
Pre-star trek transporter problem.
Like the birth of a caterpillar, then it enters the cocoon, then becomes a butterfly, orbit is the same creature?
Or the swimming tadpole becomes the tree climbing frog.
@Mijin -your line between you being transported or not is certainly an interesting philosophical problem, but I just think all of the sci-fi of transporters of scattered atoms recombined totally confuses an issue that has perplexed mankind since a person fist said Hey, its me.
Identity is the line between this and that.
Over time (or over space in the case of a transporter) the line between this identifiable one and that identifiable new one is stretched and broadened.
In a way, I am reborn at each new moment and each new moment is a brand new me.
In another way, I can only make this observation, because something I also call me persists and remains across many moments. Its like two clocks are going at the same time in order for me to recognize new me.
Quoting Mijin
See that is the problem with the transporter problem - that is a fact question. Youd have to ask him. Youd have to run him through a test transporter and ask him. What else is a me but the one subject who reports when you ask whos there? Once transported, If he couldnt tell whether or not he died and was reborn, or died and was duplicated, or didnt die at all, who else could possibly determine that and how? What or who would care?
Youd have to run the experiment, or just think about the Ship of Theseus.
To my mind, identity is a concept with fuzzy boundaries, but at the same time, invariance over time and space is an important part of it; identity is the key word here. Me five minutes ago is not just someone very similar to me now: we are one and the same person. The same is also true for other things: the chair on which I now sit, the city in which I was born. The very idea of an identifiable person or object implies and requires such invariance.
But this idea of endurance of identity can come under strain. As things change, it becomes harder to maintain it. Paradoxical thought experiments can also strain this idea, but for reasons that I explained earlier, I find this unsurprising and, frankly, not very interesting (they could become interesting and relevant if they ever become reality, but we will cross that river when we get to it).
Again, the metaphysical challenge to identity arises only if you are committed to the idea of sharp-edged essences of things. They are not that challenging if identity is constructed. But I admit that that in itself can be a hard thing to swallow.
But so (by hypothesis) will any number of duplicates be convinced of their continuity with Kirk. So what? I'm convinced I'm Napoleon.
That was the point. I was explaining that duplicates being convinced they are the original, and third-parties believing the duplicate is the original, doesn't solve the philosophical problem of what happened to the original; whether they were in some sense "transported" or simply killed.
My original question was (because I'm curious), if we answer "quite obviously the latter", how does that convict us of
Quoting Mijin
?
Yes this is just an IME thing, so no worries if you disagree. But often when there are debates on the transporter problem, and you have the people forming into two groups of either "transported" or "killed" (and, as I say, no-one but me seems to occupy the third group of "no continuity even before the transporter"), the rhetoric is often like this:
"What connects the person at source to the person at the destination, instead of them being separate entities? What was actually transported? Is it a soul?"
Vs
"What does the person at the destination lack in order to be you? Is it the soul? If it makes a difference whether we literally move the individual atoms, does that mean you're suggesting that the atoms held the soul?"
Independent medical exam?
Quoting Mijin
Spatiotemporal continuity (with me).
Quoting Mijin
Held the continuity, yes. I suppose a one atom at a time transportation would destroy it, though. (Is this what Parfitt discusses?)
How not?
... By way of focusing on consciousness? I don't see that as crucial to the question whether I am personally continuous with spatiotemporally non-overlapping replicas.
In my experience
Quoting bongo fury
Why does that matter? And how, precisely, do we define it? Because of course it is vulnerable to the same sort of "imperfect copy" problem that I talked about in the OP. Whether I am alive or not is binary (NB: alive but damaged is still alive), but whether I as an organism have spatiotemporal continuity with an entity at a past state of the universe is something less clear. Does it matter whether it's the same atoms? What proportion of atoms must be in the same state?
I think @Mijin (and perhaps @flannel jesus) are error theorists about personal identity. My position (and @Fire Ologist's?) would be more akin to anti-realism.
I have wrestled with Parfit, and his teletransporter for a couple of years now.
I think this is the correct answer to the branch-line case. Any "one" who is me, yet occupied different atoms and extracts difference resources from the environment to maintain homeostatis, and occupies a different "moment' in space, cannot be me.
Whether this is true of the original case, I am yet to decide, but in principle, the transporter cannot transport me without "taking" me. And I agree, this gets around the Soul (further fact) problem.
Quoting Fire Ologist
I think this is a really stupid 'paradox' personally. A ship is "that ship" because of what people call it. There isn't, that I can see, a physical boundary to the identity of a utility/object. The identity of a 'person' is what's interesting, and we run into all sorts of problems because almost everyone has the intuition that "they" are non-physical (or, a further fact, in Partfitian terms) and ride around in a physical substrate. This said, I think many sorities problems are also stupid:
A heap of sand obtains once at least once grain of sand is suspended above the surface in question by other grains of sand. I cannot understand why this isn't a totally adequate answer that shows that people are silly and like to argue.
Quoting SophistiCat
I'm unsure. Identity, by definition, has those edges baked in. If we want to jettison personal identity then i agree.
At any rate, Parfit treats this problem at length when talking about surgeries replacing molecule by molecule, a person's brain. The conclusion is that the x literally doesn't matter. What matters is the outcome, and whether 0 or 1 obtains. ***That is, for Parfit, as long as there's a 1 (for him, relation R) on the other side of whatever process, then identity is irrelevant. "you" will continue. This is unsatisfying, but appears to be hte logical conclusion***.
Quoting flannel jesus
But lets be real - its a really tortured and unhelpful argument I think. We can't explain much of anything without continuous consciousness. Unless we want to go Parfit's way and just say "this isn't important, look over here instead" (as do Austin and Searle) I can't see a way to argue that there isn't continuity in consciousness.
I pause there to note that I see a difference between "continuity of consciousness" and "continuous consciousness". There's a continuity in a Playstation Memory Card re-booting and providing continuing as to wherever the saved game was left off.
Quoting Mijin***
It wouldn't. That would 'merely' be the case, if so. This relates back to the starred passage above.
But why? What is it that your specific atoms contain that hold your "essence"?
And how many such atoms need to be moved across for you to still be alive? Will 95% do it? 99%?
Quoting AmadeusD
Agreed, I hate the ship of Thesus. It's only a marginally interesting paradox in its own right, and though it is invoked for good faith reasons, I think it actually derails this topic. Because, as I said upthread, the problem of personal identity chiefly concerns the first-person perspective -- what it is, and under what circumstances it is preserved. The ship of thesus gets us immediately thinking of the third person perspective, and making a completely arbitrary judgement that doesn't actually matter.
Whether my first-person perspective still exists or not matters a hell of a lot to me! It's not like ship of thesus.
It seems crucial to the viability and identity of an organism, at least? Pre-sci-fi, of course.
Quoting Mijin
Mereologically? Topological closure? :yikes:
Quoting Mijin
Really? I suppose there are edge cases, like that of conjoined twins? But generally we, like the ship of Theseus, maintain our personal identity by losing and replacing a few planks at a time. Whereas, we lose it by being rebuilt from scratch. That produces only copies. More or less different: perhaps identical. But spatiotemporally non-overlapping. Lacking the spatiotemporal continuity that connects the "time-slices" of you.
Maybe we attach too much importance to this kind of identity? Perhaps we should regard our biological relatives, or our Star Trek duplicates, as equally entitled to our memories?
And I deserve Napoleon's?
But that's my question. When I ask why spatio-temporal continuity matters, I mean why is it critical to whether consciousness persists or not? If we believe that there is some persistence of consciousness from moment to moment then it is a valid question of what is required for this persistence. If the key thing is that it's the same atoms, why is that necessary?
Quoting bongo fury
Yes that is the case today but I am not talking about only what is biologically or technologically possible today. If that were a requirement for topics here, then 99% of threads on philosophy forums can be shut down right now.
I am talking about hypothetically copying entire brains, swapping out atoms etc to test a given position or model of personal identity.
It seems more realistic to infer episodes of relative coherence among otherwise fleeting and unconnected moments of consciousness?
They deserve identifying with (or as) one person because they arose in that particular (spatiotemporally continuous) brain and body.
My memory of Waterloo, however vivid and historically accurate, did not.
If it is not required, then your case reduces to, "How much damage can someone sustain before becoming a new person?"
I didn't content they did. Not sure where this is coming from.
Quoting Mijin
This doesn't have much relevance to my position, or the claim, to be clear. For sake of discussion, there will be no specific amount. You can lose both legs and still be alive, and you. It's a silly question, in context. That's not the belittle it. It just has no reasonable avenue to a response.
Quoting Mijin
Yes, indeed. And this is why my response to the branch line case is attractive to me. It removes the potential for my first-person to disappear, but someone to still be me. Which seems ridiculous and intuitively hogwash.
This seems to be alluding to different levels of consciousness. Sure, there are different levels of alertness largely corresponding to brainwave states. This seems a different topic though to personal identity.Quoting bongo fury
This is just asserting the position of bodily continuity. I'll ask again: what makes the particular atoms that you are made of special, and how many of your own atoms need to be incorporated into an entity for you to survive in any form?
Can we know that? What if the transporter functions by firing your actual atoms across space? If assembling your own atoms back into the configuration that they were in isn't you, then what is missing?
From the third person perspective yes that's what it boils down to. The question is what about the first-person perspective of the person that entered the transporter. Is he gone entirely?
Because I am trying to get your meaning. You're alluding to bodily continuity, so I am asking follow up questions of why bodily continuity is critical.Quoting AmadeusD
Hard disagree.
Look, in daily life we all implicitly subscribe to some form of bodily continuity. I have Mijin's memories and I assume that I am one and the same entity as Mijin. If I were to suffer an accident and have brain damage, then that is a damaged Mijin.
The problems for bodily continuity come with hypotheticals like the transporter problem and the follow up questions that I have summarized in this thread. It's much easier of course to insist that we keep our focus only on how personal identity works in daily and handwave questions like the imperfect transporter. But if we have a good model of personal identity we shouldn't need to dodge; we should be able to apply our model.Quoting AmadeusD
This is why the terminology is important here. Another entity could be qualitatively identical to me, but if he is not numerically identical to me, then he's arguably Mijin but not me. If you stick a pin in him, I don't feel a thing. And when I'm lights out, I have no reason to believe I will suddenly have his conscious experiences.
Lastthursdayism tells you, you should be skeptical that your entire existence didn't start last Thursday, with all your memories implanted but they didn't actually happen to you.
Radical Lastthursdayism says, that's constantly true, all the time - your existence is being renewed every moment and your memories are effectively implanted.
I'll answer again: nothing; only my continued corporeal integrity matters.
Quoting Mijin
And so, all of them would be not enough, if you rebuild me from scratch.
Quoting Mijin
I.e. Why isn't
Quoting LuckyR
??
Exactly. Perhaps arguing that he is Mijin doesn't add clarity. "Mijin 2" better.
Indeed. In fact, even talking of "your existence" being "renewed" could be misleading here, as what we're actually positing is that every instance of consciousness is essentially a new entity that just happens to inherit the memories of that body. And then its existence ends in an instant.
It's not a pleasant conception, but as I say, it's immune to the strong counter arguments to the two more obvious positions on the transporter problem. In fact, I've never heard any argument against it (but I've generally not heard this position discussed very much at all -- most people in this debate implicitly assume continuous existence).
Your answers are basically just asserting your position again.
What I am trying to get at, is why. And to also tease out the answers to questions that are problematic for bodily continuity, like why it would make a difference if I move your atoms from point A to point B in one piece or separated for a nanosecond. What was lost in that second scenario?
If the question is Quoting Mijin
then how is "nothing" not an answer? Perhaps you meant,
Is that what you meant? There must be something special (and sufficient) but what is it?
Quoting Mijin
Why is there nothing special? Or, why is the special thing special?
Quoting Mijin
Like why bother distinguish between different tokens of a linguistic type? Between original and facsimile?
Though that's still obviously very different from memories from a few days ago. You're not confusing your "smeared present" with memories from last Wednesday unless you have serious neurological problems.
I'm not equating lag with the classic understanding of memories. Or to put it another way, the definition of the term "real time" is from the perspective of the individual, not a third person observer with a stopwatch.
Agreed.
Quoting LuckyR
Yikes, not me.
More to the point, though, I'm denying that at any point the facsimile becomes a part or continuation of the original.
Sure, and I think that makes sense as well
The point is, the measure of our understanding of a phenomenon is what predictions and/or inferences we can make about it.
When it comes to your position on personal identity, a position that I think is basically the bodily continuity position, it seems it doesn't enable you to answer questions like the kind that I have posed; about a mixture of continuous and discontinous material, or of being discontinuous on a time frame far quicker than mental events.
And I've asked why we would take the position that bodily continuity matters, because that might give a clue about how we'll go about answering such questions. But you haven't given an answer why, you've tended to just repeat your position.
I don't want any of this to sound like snark, or as if I am accusing you of bad faith. I'm just saying it seems pretty pointless.
If I were to say that what defines an instance of consciousness is the mojo, but not answer any questions on what the mojo is, how I think this might work in practice, or what led me to think it was the mojo in the first place...then all anyone can say is "good for you". End of debate, nothing learned.
Quoting LuckyR
?
If you find this problematic, so do I. The imperfect transporter I think is a pretty good counter against this position.
But I also find bodily continuity problematic when it comes to questions of how much continuity is sufficient and/or how exactly we define continuity.
The best, though most unfortunate, explanation is simply that there's never really continuity. It's an illusion.
Why unfortunate?
Can you edit this to clarify which position is answering which, and what you mean by "existence is branched"?
When it comes to the transporter problem (also called the teletransporter problem) there are two major positions*, let's call them Sent (your consciousness is transported) and Copied (the person on Mars or wherever, is a new instance of consciousness).
I summarized one argument against Sent in the OP, but another common argument against the Sent position is what if the person at the source location is not killed? In such a situation it would be absurd to claim the consciousness has both been sent and retained in the original. They clearly aren't a singular instance of consciousness because I can stick a pin in one person and the other is not going to flinch.
Having been in transporter debates many times, I am familiar with the counter-argument that most Sent proponents will say. They will say that the consciousness was branched. Only for the instance of time that the two mental states were identical could the consciousness be said to be in two places. As soon as their experiences differ, they are two people.
I tried to find the formal name for the position that, essentially, being qualitatively identical entails being a singular instance of consciousness (the philosophical underpinnings of the Sent position), but all I could find was https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Personal_identity#Locke's_conception.
* And a third position, which I've already alluded and I won't expand on in this post to keep things clear.
Right, and most of us accept Copied, and you too, but you want to tackle Sent on their own ground (show them it's a quagmire), so it's tiresome if I don't join you on that ground?
Fair enough. But the ground over at Copied is perfectly firm? You keep saying it's soggy? Like,
Quoting Mijin
What's consciousness got to do with it? Copied doesn't need consciousness. (Nor unconsciousness of course.) It just needs a reliable basis for individuation (same what? different what?). Spatiotemporal continuity is such a basis.
E.g. same person?... stage of the same body?
Well explaining the context of the transporter problem was important to the OP. And then, I engaged people to the level that they engaged with me. If you consider Copied to already be refuted then great; I guess you don't need the imperfect transporter (although modified versions such as moving, or replacing, someone's atoms present equivalent problems).
Quoting bongo fury
Because firstly the whole problem is concerned with what happens to the consciousness.
It's much more important to me than what happens to my body. Whatever process I am subjected to, the most important questions are 1. Whether I am still alive, in any form, from my own point of view and 2. What form that consciousness is in (on earth, on mars, with brain damage etc).
And secondly I don't think we have a good model for answering these questions, apart from the proposition that perhaps our consciousness is never persistent.
Bodily continuity seems like the common sense approach, but only because today in 2025 the only way for a consciousness to be created is within a human brain (and probably other animals, though it's hard to know what level of consciousness to what kind of brain). All we can do is snuff consciousness out of existence or modify it with either trauma or drugs.
But if at some future time we can splice / copy / augment the mind, bodily continuity is way too vague, and our model of consciousness too ill-formed, to make concrete predictions.
You mean Sent?? Or confirmed? (Sent refuted or Copied confirmed.) Otherwise I don't know what's going on.
Quoting bongo fury
Rather, you think Copied can't answer:
Quoting Mijin
?
You don't think consciousness events must be at least as separate and numerically distinct as the regions of spacetime at which they occur? You do think they might rather achieve some inherent unity? Like entangled particles, perhaps? I guess it's far from inconceivable. I just don't see why you think that a technology of instant copying would demand such an explanation. Copying could just be copying, and why ever not?
Quoting Mijin
Maybe not as persistent as we'd like, but it often ebbs and flows in a fairly continuous stream, doesn't it? I need more help seeing the problem here?
I am not. I am alluding to bodily identity. It is subtle, to be fair but distinct issues, imo.
A perfect replica is still a replica. Is that a bit clearer? If you are not the exact atoms that make up my body, you couldn't be me. You could be a replica.
Consciousness coming along with it is a bit of an "in the weeds" thing for this specific claim. It was a response to one of your own comments and why I think the spatiotemporal consideration is strong. I think it is correct that even if the replica has your psychology, they cannot be you because of this. They occupy different space (and time). Also, immediately after they become conscious, their memories no longer mirror yours (again, that's partially "in the weeds").
Quoting Mijin
Hold up (because your explication doesn't touch on this). You disagree that someone who loses their legs (or other body parts) is still hte same person? If you don't disagree with that, then my argument goes through wholesale. Disagreements about "where the line is" aren't quite on the table yet, as i've resiled into a larger context to make the point I'm making. There is no specific point. People lose atoms and gain atoms constantly, with no change to their (intuitive) identity. If you disagree with that.. onward..
Quoting Mijin
I don't think we do. I think all non-further fact models fail entirely. I am not arguing that bodily continuity constitutes identity. I am suggesting that:
1. Bodily continuity is thought about wrongly (i.e without the spatio-temporal aspect here noted); and
2. That all this does is defeat certain claims (bodily continuity ones).
Perhaps you've misunderstood me.
Quoting Mijin
But if you are identical with Mijin, then no, that's not possible. I understand you to be saying that the qualifiers you're using make this possible. But that means there are two identities, which is again, intuitively hogwash. There can't be two yous. There can be two Mijins which are not identical.
How many of your atoms, and why does it matter?
If the transporter worked by just spitting your atoms across space and reassembling them, is that now you? If not, why not?
To be clear: I don't believe that the transported transports a single instance of consciousness, i am just saying that bodily continuity (or identity...I didn't really follow the distinction) is not as straightforward
an answer as might first appear.
Quoting AmadeusD
No, I disagree with the implied analogy to the problem and your suggestion that it is a "silly question".
Losing a limb does not involve splicing the consciousness. It doesn't solve the problem, it avoids it.Quoting AmadeusD
Yes it seems there is something not being communicated here, because bodily continuity is defined as requiring continued continuity of the spatio-temporal aspects. So I can't make sense of either your point (1) or point (2) here.Quoting AmadeusD
Well this is a critical thing in dispute. Right now I am Mijin, and Mijin is me. And it's all very simple because we have no technological means to duplicate, splice or augment my consciousness.
In a hypothetical time where I could be duplicated, and for some period of time (before they diverge) there are identical Mijin agents, how many are me?
Bodily continuity doesn't make a clear claim here, not in its basic form, and also requires we know the history of how we arrived at this configuration of the universe.
You really need to re-read this exchange. This is no longer a relevant question, and its one I've directly answered in two different ways. Please review.
Quoting Mijin
I can't understand what you're trying to describe here. This doesn't seem to say anything that could result in the experiment we're talking about. Can you please be clearer?
Quoting Mijin
This makes the preceding far more perplexing then.
I think its entirely straightforward and have given you the reasons why. Its an air-tight reason. You can reject it though. It doesn't bare this sort of scrutiny because its a brute claim. Numeral identity is what is required for bodily continuity to be the source of "me" along all the constituents of "me" at any given time. This is not a logical claim, other than that "if true" its a logical dead-end for identity discussions. In any case I don't think this constitutes Identity so not sure where you're going..
Quoting Mijin
Hmm. Unfortunately, I think logically, No. This instantiates that you are two people. Unless you hold that are, in fact, two people (you seem to rejecting that) at all times, all the follow-ons from that position fail immediately. Mijin is all of the things you see as "yourself" at the same time as they are one-and-the-same thing. That is exactly why it's so hard to sort this stuff out. If we had two aspects to ourselves, it would be much easier to talk about because we could have criteria for each. But Identity is, by definition singular. (this is out of order, because the next reply is hte meatier)
Quoting Mijin
I cannot understand what you're talking about. The analogy is that it is not relevant how many ,or which atoms are involved. For two reasons. Both of which make this an utterly ridiculous question (to me... it may be entirely reasonable on your understanding of what i've said). These are:
1. It had nothing whatsoever to do with consciousness. You questioned me the position that to answer to bodily continuity claims which get murky, we can say 'You are not the exact atoms I am, therefore you are not me'. There isn't wiggle room. "the exact atoms". It is now incoherent to ask the questions you're asking; and
2. It is 100% true, without any possible discussion, that people lose limbs, multiple limbs etc... and remain exactly the person they were (i.e John Smith, of 134 Arden Street, Baltimore, Maryland (or whatever.. Just making clera I do mean that person before and after the loss of limb/s)).
Therefore I don't know what you're asking me to clarify. The answers are baked in to the position outlined. And again, to be clera (because this doens't seem to be landing) this is not my view of identity. I am answering the questions posed.
Your first response was that it was a silly question. Your second response was that it needs to be your atoms. Neither response addresses why it needs to be your atoms, let alone the question of what if we create a mind using partially your atoms and partially others (I make a brain that is N% of the atoms that made up your brain. What N means you are alive (with brain damage) versus simply not living on at all?)
Quoting AmadeusD
I am asking the question: if the only consideration is that it is the same atoms, what if the transporter does use the same atoms, however, those atoms need to spend T time unconnected. When they get reassembled afterwards, did you survive that? What if T is 1 million years?
Quoting AmadeusD
Which is probably a good point to stop and consider whether you're appreciating all the nuances here. Crucially, can this position be used to answer any of the questions related to the transporter that I have posed? Otherwise, it's a non-explanation. We may as well go with the "mojo" explanation for consciousness and declare no follow-up questions about mojo are permitted.Quoting AmadeusD
What the hell? I am talking about the situation prior to doing anything; the current status quo of our everyday life. It is both true that I am me. And that I am Mijin. As well as, heck, that I am 6'3 tall.
That doesn't instantiate 3 people.Quoting AmadeusD
The whole topic of personal identity, the transporter problem, and this thread, all concern continuity consciousness.
If you don't want to talk about consciousness, then please stop posting in this thread. I am not interested in the trivial question of whether I am still me if I lose a pinkie.
I've addressed this twice. You can either review the exchange, where I noted that numerical identity bakes this aspect in (i.e there isn't a question. It is ridiculous. Why is water wet, mate?). It shouldn't be my responsibility to repeat myself over and over for you to get a point.
Quoting Mijin
A brain isn't a mind, or at least we cannot assume that for the purposes of the discussion., You are making plenty of fundamental assumptions and then getting confused when these are up for debate. This may explain a lot. Please try to notice where you've made an assumption. I will try to b clearer when I think tihs is what's on the table.
Quoting Mijin
This would simply be the same question as "are you the same person when you awake?" Those atoms are still those atoms, and still constitute you (on this account - you still seem to be under the impression this is my position i'm defending. It is not. Please calm down). So, yes, you would, under almost all accounts that aren't further fact accounts.
Quoting Mijin
It answers them all. I've been explicit about this. The only possible "interesting" change is the idea that the transporter literally beams the exact same atoms to Mars. There's questions here about whether or not unity of your atoms create anything of significance, but most people are going to assume only the brain is relevant to that consideration - thus leapfrogging the entire question of what constitutes identity (or whether it obtains at all. I say not, so most of these questions don't make sense to me). To be super, super, un-debatably clear:
If the position is that my atoms make me then there is no version of the transporter in which I survive, without your ad hoc adjustment about taking my atoms and sending them across space (note, this is not the thought experiment, but an interesting adjustment for sure). The TE postulates that a blueprint is sent and 3D-prints another body that supposedly can carry your consciousness. You'll note (and i don't reply to this later, so do take note) that intuitions about consciousness is only one aspect of what this experiment draws out of us. It also draws out intuitions about "selfhood" generally, bodily continuity, time, space and the possiblity of "multiples" given certain theories on might take up. It is certainly not as simple and restricted as you contend.
Quoting Mijin
That is, roughly, what a further fact account will do, unfortunately. But that is canyons from what I've said, and explained. You can reject it, but I have made the position consistent enough that it is logically discreet. Its brute, as noted.
Quoting Mijin
So, hang on mate - you've accepted my premise wholesale. Yet you opened with:
Quoting Mijin
Please have a think before posting these comments. The inconsistency will turn me and others off pretty quick, if they are personal like this. Onward..
Quoting Mijin
You asked me a question under which that is a direct, relevant and telling response. If you do not want to talk about Identity, the transporter and all its implications, you could have said that instead of stringing this exchange along to an end that tells me you are not open to discussions that challenge your presumptions. If my position is that the transporter problem tells us that consciousness is not hte most important aspect of discussions on identity, then that's what it is. You can't just say "nah, not that kind of reply". That is... ridiculous my dude.
Amadeus, you are clearly very confused because, like I say, this whole topic concerns the continuity of the mental self and I was clear about that in the OP.
No-one but you seems to have a problem with this.
It also raises another point. If numerical identity is based purely on the pattern of atoms then it implies a form of immortality. Because, even if our universe terminates at a heat death, that's not really a final end point as particles are still moving, and there is a non-zero chance of a structure of arbitrary size forming.
Even if it takes Graham's Number years before your current brain state is recreated by chance, it seems it will eventually happen.
Any analysis would depend on one's attitude toward essentialism: is there an individual essence? If not, then (it seems to me) that individual identity = strict identity, which means that even a 1 particle difference would render the transported object something non-identical (having a different identity) on each end.
The nature of the transport also seems important. Are the actual particles being moved from place to place, or are a different set of particles being assembled into the same form at the receiving end? If the latter, then arguably - the receiving end is a duplicate, not the "same" individual.
If there's an essence, is it material or immaterial (like a soul)? If it's a soul, it's questionable whether or not the soul is transported.
Really? So if we made the machine then if particle 4ea26363f75 was in position x=71.23 then: welcome to your new life on mars. But had it been at x=71.23000001 then: it was simply a murder box. An infinitesimal difference is life and death?
...and we'll never know for sure. Theres no experiment to perform to ever know if it's a numerically identical person or just qualitatively (nearly) identical.Quoting Relativist
Why? Do the particles contain some essence of you?
There is no objectively correct answer. Any answer depends on metaphysical assumptions about the nature of individual identity. I gave you an answer in terms of strict identity - consistent with identity of indiscernibles. Perdurance theory needs to be added to make sense of individual identity across time.
The other extreme is haeccity- which treats identity as a primitive - thus allowing for 100% of your parts to differ while retaining that identity.
Between the extremes are essentialists. One version entails identity being associated with set of necessary and sufficient properties. I've never encountered anyone who could define what these are.
Quoting Mijin
I don't believe in essence. Either both of them are the identity of the pre-transportee, or neither is. The former implies both copies will perpetually share the same identity - which seems absurd. So IMO, both copies are new identities - each containing memories of the same past life.
The core confusion of all such problems is the nature of identity. Identity is a mental label masquerading as a metaphysical property. When this is realized, just as with the ship of Theseus, you realize there is no strictly correct answer to such questions.
This leads to uncomfortable conclusion that survival in this kind of thought experiment is also a mental label, not an objective property. But I think this must be accepted. something survives. It may or may not think it survived. Observers may or may not think the original survived. That is really all that can be said.
This also leads to awkward conclusions in related thought experiment. Consider a cloner, that produces an identical copy of a person. The copy insists it is the original. According to my claim, the copy has just as much metaphysical claim that it is the true successor.
The fundamental problem is that identity is a concept that arose under conditions where such things couldn't happen. So the concept, not r backed by any metaphysical reality, cannot accommodate these kinds of thought experiment.
Strict identity IS lost with every breath. So this approach uses perdurance to account for individual identity over time.
The problem though is whether I am alive or not is not merely semantics. Right now I am having experiences of the world; those experiences can be at different levels; some are more vivid than others, but we can still say there is a binary between having experiences of any type, and simply no longer having experiences.
And I care about that hugely. I don't care whether some third party is having a ship of theseus moment about whether to consider it the same Mijin. I care if the mind right now that is having experiences will still be having experiences.
There would already be a solution that determines whether you are the target person or not.
I call this concept self-particle. If this particle is in the target person, then you are it, otherwise it is a copy.
These are the facts. Someone steps out of the teleporter. That someone has experiences. That someone has a self-autobiography, that tells it that it is, or is not, the same someone that stepped into the teleporter.
That is where the facts stop. These same facts obtain at every moment of everyone's waking life. There is nothing special about the teleporter. The "fact" that there "is" a person that persists moment to moment, day to day, year to year, into and out of teleporters, is more fiction than fact. It is a concept that unifies experiences, thoughts and feelings over time into a stable "self". But it has no metaphysical reality that underlies it.
This is the underlying fiction that gave rise to the notion of souls.
Generally speaking, we do not walk into or out of teletransporters. Can you perhaps make it a bit more explicit how those facts obtain in that way? And what of sleep?
At every moment, you experience things: sensations from the world, and sensations from yourself. These are facts of experience.
These sensations don't just happen. Sensations from the world are oriented around the pole of the self. They are what the self experiences, from the self's perspective. Sensations from yourself (thoughts, body sensations, emotions) are about the self. Both experiences of the world and experiences of the self point to a self which is never actually disclosed. This gap is filled by the concept of the self, which papers over the hole with a self that experiences and a self that feels. This is the fact of the self-concept.
The self-concept perdures via memory. Through memory, it gains an autobiography, which is the concept of the autobiographical self.
Quoting AmadeusD
I know it. But, I want to make clear, what the facts of the thought experiment are, and aren't. The facts are, when one steps out of the teleporter, one still experiences, still maintains a self concept, and may or may not maintain the concept of the autobiographical self. The comic posted by @wonderer1 illustrates this well. Seemingly everybody except the subject of the comic maintained the concept of the autobiographic self through the teleporter, and through sleep. But the absurdity is, there is no actual fact of the matter, there is no metaphysical self that perdures. The subject totally reconfigured their life because of a concept, not a fact.
You outlined facts about the teletransporter and said they obtained in those terms. If that wasn't the claim, i suggest that was incredibly unclear. But fair enough. I don't argue with the above.
Quoting hypericin
I do not think this is correct, and explains some of what I see as dead-ends in your discussion.
The facts are that you(a) walk into the machine, and someone(b) walks about. Someone experiences. The point is to figure whether you think "still" even applies to (b). Or whether the same "one" applies to (a) and (b).
Within the way the experiment is written, that someone does have the same autobiographical sense as the one who walked into the machine - that's already a given, and not something we are supposed to ascertain. The point is is sort out whether that matters. Parfit says yes. I say no for the same reasons you have outlined: MY mind stops having those experiences, even if a mind doesn't. The fact that someone thinks they are me doesn't mean they are. I gave a possible example of why that could be the case (the atom identity issue) which was unsatisfactory. I agree, it was just to point out that you can solve the issue by saying that person cannot be you for physical reasons, and ignore the mind part. But again, I also find that unsatisfactory.
The point of all this is to say that I think you've slightly misunderstood the thought experiment becuase you're not addressing certain aspects which are written in. Maybe the branch-line case is a better one for your purposes.. seems so to me.
I have just realised I've addressed much of this to Mijin, recalling their posts in kind with yours. Sorry about that - points remain, but you can ignore references to things "you" have said before.
The comic: The answer the Devil gives is not satisfactory and does not answer my potential response, despite my not being satisfied with it myself. Unless we have reason to think that each time we sleep, we are disassembled and reassembled, its a totally misconceived response, changing nothing about the intuitions involved.
The man is utterly perplexingly stupid to me, and is making wild moral miscalculations. More importantly (and demonstrably) the comic seems to ignore the biggest issue people have: "he" is not a given on the other side of the machine. There is no guaranteed "me". There is just someone, and our job in the thought is to decide what we think of that. Not whether we disagree with it. If the psychological relation is enough, that's fine. If it's not, we have work to do. I think this is fundamentally being misunderstood by a lot of people. Parfit just gives an answer I don't like, but runs the same avenues to get there as I have.
Those facts are the premise of the problem though. The actual problem is in figuring out which persistent self(s) exist. All this kind of description does is take the difficult bit off the table so we can pretend the problem is simpleQuoting hypericin
Which self?
I know it might seem I'm being a bit obtuse, but put it like this: we understand a phenomenon when we can make useful predictions or inferences about it.
It's very easy to just say: Mijin that walks out of the transporter truly is Mijin or whatever. In fact, that's a given part of the problem.
But the key thing is: do we have an explanation that allows us to clearly answer questions like "Is quantum immortality possible?" "If a configuration of atoms one day, by chance, is in an arrangement that has my memories right now, am I ressurected? What if that configuration of atoms is only N% the same...what N brings me back from the grave, and why?" etc etc
If at all... It may be that (as with further fact types) there is no perdurance occurring in the machines output.
I think the problem is so much simpler than the chapter illustrates (and it seems most intuitions capture). If there is a 'perfect fake' of lets say Guernica, the only difference we should be able to note between the original and this fake is that it is not the original. It was not painted by Picasso, at time X and is unique In context - it is obviously just as unique as the original in principle).
Someone purchasing Guernica for say $100millionUSD, they aren't buying a painting, per se. They are buying a biography of a painting which was commissioned in 1937, painted that year, displayed in the Pavilion, it's statement against Franco etc.. etc.. etc.. all the wya up it arriving on the auctioneers stage.
It can be made impossible to know this. But it is intuitively almost universal, from what I've seen, that one, if they knew, would be mortified by their purchase. I think the same fits with the Teletransporter. If a repllica knew they were a replica, they would spiral into a crisis. If their friends knew they were a replica, they would likely find it canny, and reject.
And someone paying that much to prolong their life in the same body, they aren't preserving their person, per se?
But then, what's the painting per se, and what's the person per se?
Quoting Mijin
By posing this question you are importing the notion that there is a metaphysical, persistent self that may or may not persist.
By listing the facts that I did, I am claiming that these constitute the exhaustive facts of the matter. There are no additional facts about a metaphysical, persistent self that does or does not persist. The teleported person may or may not believe they persisted. The observers may or may not believe the teleported person persisted. But there are no underlying facts to support these beliefs, since there is no metaphysical, persistent self.
To repeat, these facts are:
* At every moment, we experience.
* These experiences cohere into a concept of a self.
* Via memory, these self-concepts cohere into the concept of a persistent, autobiographical self.
These are the relevant facts, full stop. You may apply them to the teleporter thought experiment, and make conclusions as you like. But you may not import fantastical notions of a metaphysical self. These aren't real, but instead are reifications of the autobiographical self concept we all have.
Yes, again this is alluding to the position of bodily continuity and of course it makes intuitive sense. It's pretty much the paradigm that we all assume in daily life today.
The transporter does present problems for this view though.
If moving my actual atoms is needed for a successful transport...why is that? What's so special about my atoms? What if we partially use my atoms....how do we square the binary nature of me being alive or dead and the apparent continuous nature of n atoms being from the original?
If that was the way the point came across, it wasn't my intention.
I meant: the key problem with the transporter concerns persistence of the self which encompasses all of 1) whether there is any persistence 2) what kind of persistence there is and 3) what governs what kind of persistence there is.
FTR I don't believe in a soul or anything like that. I am purely talking about instances of consciousness. Though, yes, this hypothetical also presents problems for those who do believe in the soul.
Quoting hypericin
Right, and I am disagreeing.
To be more specific, I think this is focusing on third-person, objective facts. The situation is indeed simpler if we reduce our focus to that.
But the problem encompasses -- indeed is primarily concerned with -- the first-person, subjective facts.
I care about whether I -- this instance of consciousness -- will survive this process. Sidestepping this question doesn't answer it.
The facts I listed are as first person and subjective as I can think of a fact being. What"first person facts" am I leaving out? I think it is the kind of fact presupposed by the question "do I survive, or does someone else exit the teleporter?" What is the "I" in the question referring to if not the metaphysical self i am denying? And so there are no additional facts here, other than the fact of the non existence of the metaphysical self.
You believe that in daily life, any time I refer to "I" that I am making a metaphysical claim?
In any case, it's a question, so anyone disputing this depiction of a subjective self can explain why it is in error in the answer. ISTM a reasonable question to ask whether I would survive the transporter as it would be to ask whether I would survive if all my brain activity ceased for n nanoseconds (as I'll address in my below post).
How do you know that? Let's say there was technology that allowed me to separate and reform all your atoms within a nanosecond. Would you survive that process? If you would, what's the difference with any arbitrary duration of separation? If not, why not?
Once again: I'm not asking these questions to be an ass (that comes naturally ).
I am just illustrating that we don't have a good model for personal identity yet. Common sense notions of bodily continuity are only trivial solutions now because we don't have tech to splice / augment / duplicate consciousness.
No, normally not, normally "I" just designates the speaker. In this question, though, it seems to designate not the speaker as such, but an implicit ghost in the machine. Each and every aspect of the speaker that "I" normally designates (body, mind, personality, self-history, relationships) survive without question. So "I" here cannot be referring to any of those.
Quoting Mijin
This makes it even more clear. Everything 'I' normally designates obviously survives. The question therefore implicitly appeals to the universal intuition of a ghost in the machine, and asks if it survives. The question treats a concept as if it were an ontological entity that can be destroyed, and is hardly sensible.
Despite what I said, I sympathize. To me the thought experiment is more real and poignant if it is less abstractly sci-fi.
Suppose you have a serious illness. In the near future, such illnesses are "treated" by creating perfect clones, minus only the defect. Mental state is set to exactly your current state. Once this is completed, the old body is painlessly killed. Would you accept the "treatment"?
Even though intellectually I would say 'yes', in truth I would certainly hesitate.
This is a weird one. I would want this for my loved ones, if they could accept the clone. Otherwise, I wouldn't accept it. Quoting hypericin
Not at all. The answer can, squarely, be "none". Which is my answer, in the event. I see why it looks that way though.
Quoting hypericin
So you say.
In any case, you've ignored hte issue. You listed these 'facts' in a particular context. It seems that was unintended. All good mate :)
These aren't comparable at all, imo.
A piece of art exists under certain descriptions, as a factual object. Guernica, the one painted by Picasso in 1927 is what it is. There is 'criteria'. It is that object. I don't understand any controversy or question here.
Any other Guernica might be indistinguishable, and if one is convinced of the deception, the effect is the same. The object isn't all that important - belief about it is. I merely pointing out there is an objecting "this piece of art by this person" which creates the cache. Not the object itself
But this seems to be taking the position that I alluded to upthread as "Locke's conception"; that the critical thing is the pattern of memories, characteristics etc.
This also has issues; e.g. what if we don't delete the original, does it mean we have multiple "I"s? And how can that be, when the experiences of those I's is separate?
It's also vulnerable to the "imperfect transporter" as described in the OP.
And it also implies immortality. Because, perhaps in a trillion trillion times the universe's current age some particles randomly come together to form a brain like yours. So that's you, you're back...right?
Finally, as I said in the OP, it's fascinating that in this discussion both sides accuse the other of assuming the existence of a soul.
It was your analogy?
Quoting AmadeusD
My point is that a 'self' is not comparable to a piece of art, because there's an absolute limit to what's called the original piece.
Or the other way round?
I do think there's a significant analogy between fake artwork and fake self, and between genuine artwork and genuine self.
Hence my initial remark:
Quoting bongo fury
Although, to be more precise, the analogy is with singular artworks (such as paintings) which are types that are uniquely instantiated (they have a unique token).
The obvious dis-analogy is with multiple artworks such as photographs and prints and texts.
I can't see that your further comments then make sense: I could not point to a 'fake self' and support my pointing. I could do so with a piece of art, given I was actually capable of spotting fakes (or, had some evidence of provenance showing it was not the original). It doesn't seem available to the one claiming 'fake self' to do so.
Quoting Patterner
I find it quite exciting that we actually do not know whether this would obtain.
Quoting Patterner
I certainly agree - but humour me - is your take that there's a set of interlocking criteria (these atoms, at this time, in this configuration) that cause someone to be 'you'? Obviously, I take there is only one shot/possible 'you' in this, just asking in that form to get clear response.
Quoting AmadeusDNot sure you meant to word it the way I'm taking it. Nothing can cause anyone or anything to be me. I'm the only possible me. Even if a duplicate of me was made, nobody could tell us apart, and neither of us could prove that we were the original, there would still be only one original me.
I could even be a duplicate, and not know it. But I'd still be the only me.
Err, I don't ... think ... that's happening. But nevertheless, if I;ve missed that, it's worth noting that what Star Trek does has zero bearing on the discussion as its not one based within the restrictions of that universe.
Quoting Patterner
The entire point is to figure out whether you think the guy walking out on Mars is 'you' and then if so, how that's the case. Your position is quite clear, happily :P
You obviously don't think it is for similar reasons I don't. That's not particularly relevant, I don't think. We have no idea what B would 'think' because this is fiction, speculation and semi-nonsense all rolled into one.
Your response applies to a body well, but not a self as we can't know what that consists in (currently). But that response - It's the one i gave to Mijin in certain terms - covers any argument for bodily continuity well in this TE. Parfit's take is that there is no 'you'. There is no self - simply relation R. That relation is just psychological continuity. There need be no identity (nor could there be, on his and my conceptions). There was no identity to continue. So while intuitively, I think everything you've said makes sense, when you drill into the thought experiment, they largely don't answer much I think.
Is that, like, yes, both? You mean there's an absolute criterion of identity for the artwork, but not for the person... And it's the other way round as well? That would certainly be on a higher level than I'm on.
Quoting AmadeusD
I do appreciate that you're trying to clarify here, but evidently you don't bother read through?
Quoting AmadeusD
Yes. Ok, and you don't think the same is true of personal identity? Whether I'm Napoleon doesn't depend entirely on my (lack of) spatiotemporal continuity with the human being leading the French troops at Waterloo? We have to establish criteria beyond that? I don't follow.
Quoting AmadeusD
Yes, I must be confused.
Quoting AmadeusD
You wouldn't seek to convince me I was deluded by pointing to evidence of provenance contradicting my claim of bodily continuity with Napoleon? By asking me to reconcile that claim with historical evidence of my more recent birth in South London, e.g., etc?
Quoting bongo fury
Does this make sense, now? The painting is a spatiotemporally defined unit just like a person or a ship?
If so, maybe you'll see the point of this?
Quoting bongo fury
How do you know that any separation for any period of time means nonexistence forever?
And note, for all we know, something akin to this happens already; if time is quantum, then at every planck time your particles jump to a new position. So, if that is our universe, do I survive the planck jumps?
Quoting AmadeusDI don't think there's any need for the thread if the person walking out on Mars does NOT think he's me. In Star Trek, he thinks he is. indeed, he could not think otherwise, and is indistinguishable from me. But, as has happened on Star Trek, and could happen in scenarios we devise, the original could remain, joined by the copy, or it could be multiple copies but no original. If the original is not destroyed, then the copy is more obviously not the original, regardless of how these things are defined.
As for a self, we can only all give our opinions, I suppose. Mine is that the self is simply the subjective experience of the entirety on question. My self is the experience of this body, with these senses; this brain, with these memories; etc. The continuity of self is due to the memories.
Of course, in regards to this thread, the self of the original and the self of a copy are going to be indistinguishable. Even the copy wouldn't feel other than the original feels/felt.
Quoting Mijin
How do I know that, if my atoms are separated, I no longer exist?
Why? Because he doesn't have your soul?
Sorry. I just realized you quoted a different post than the one I thought you I'm talking about my post immediately before your previous post.
So if a god steps in and separates all the atoms in your body, and then puts together a bunch of "different" atoms in the exact same arrangement half a meter to your left... who is to say that those aren't "your atoms"? Atoms have no identity, so they have just as much a claim to being your atoms as any other atoms do.
What exactly is the problem with multiple "I"s? If we had metaphysical selves, aka souls, then it would be a problem. Which one would the soul ("I" here) go to? How could the soul be in two places at once? But if we don't, then simply, two entities would have the experience of being you, instead of one. What is the contradiction?
Quoting Mijin
I see zero vulnerability here. There is only a problem, again, if you are secretly importing the notion of metaphysical selves. If not, it is just the problem of damage. If you sustain enough damage, you may not really be "you" any more, in the sense that you won't identify with your previous, undamaged self.
"why would the universe decree that, say, X=12,371 means surviving with brain damage, and X=12,372 means you effectively die from the injury?"
Obviously, the universe is doing no such thing. Adding a teleporter on top of this scenario changes nothing.
I think the fundamental conceptual problem here is the nature of persistence.
The experience of personal persistence is, in the present,
1. To experience a self
2. To mentally project forward in time, to your hypothetical future self.
3. To mentally project backward in time, to your past selves.
4. In the second order, to consider the series of these forward and backward projections that have occurred over a lifetime.
That is all.
The problem comes when these operations are reified into an actual thing I am calling "the metaphysical self" that is actually moving forward in time. Only then does the problem of this thing being interrupted by physical discontinuity arise.
I wouldn't say it is otherwise with a human. Identical copies of me are not the exact same person.
What we identify as "the exact same chair" is our mental bookkeeping we impose on the world. It is not a part of the world itself. The universe does not keep track of which chairs are the "exact same chairs". Only we do.
The same is true of people.
Whoever is keeping track, I would think it would be the same for us as it is for chairs.
Either the chairs are all the same chair and the people are all the same person, or the chairs and the people are identical copies. If the universe isn't keeping track, meaning there is no objective answer, then it's up to each person to judge for themselves.
Not necessarily. People can still be confused, and imagine criteria for "sameness" in certain scenarios that neither they nor anyone else actually apply. For instance, the criterion that "all the molecules have to be the same" is simply imaginary, its not actually a thing.
No. As explained, I am saying that a 'self' and an 'original work of art' are not comparable on a conceptual level, regardless of what might or might not be criteria for each. I then detailed why the criteria aren't related, so they can't be compared (imo). I hope that's clearer..
Quoting bongo fury
No idea what you're referring to. Everything I've said is relevant and seems pertinent at the time I commented it.
Quoting bongo fury
No, and I don't think you do either. There's nothing that contains 'Napoleon' unless we make assumptions as between bodies and minds. The teletransporter shows this clearly, as it isn't 'your' body on the other side, and its obviously not 'your' mind. But it is hte 'mind of you', so we need to figure out where 'Napoleon' the person exists. It is clearly not in the body, and we don't know what a mind is. So... we're a bit stuck. That's not the case with the piece of art. If you're simply stipulating that, for you, a 'self' is, in fact, a confluence of mind and body in a single, recognizable-over-time entity, that's fine. I just don't think, (and it seems the discussion over a century has found this) that will hold up to many counterexamples.
Quoting bongo fury
In what does a 'self' consist? This is the central, clearly-still-in-the-air, crux of this and other considerations. If we already knew, point blank, what a 'self' was, the thought experiment could only possibly tell us whether we were happy a clone was wandering about after we die. But that's not how it runs.
Quoting bongo fury
This leapfrogs the question. This is absurd, if your conception of a self is as above. But that concpetion, generally, isn't satisfying when run through these thought experiments. I highly recommend reading Reasons and Persons if you've not. This position is relatively well deconstructed and made obviously unfulfilling or unhelpful beyond describing a widely-held intuition in clear terms.
Given the above, the answer is no, that makes less sense now, but I understand more why you're saying it :)
Quoting Patterner
The OP vaguely mentions that its 'like star trek'. This thought experiment is from Derek Parfit. Including the problematic versions.
Quoting Patterner
You seem to have crucially missed, or reversed, the key that makes this senseless: It doesn't matter what he thinks. What do you think? You already know the guy is a 'replica' in the colloquial sense. You knew that before you went in. For you, the you who in real-life knows you have no clones running around - is that an acceptable 'you'? For me, there wasn't a 'me' to be continued, so I don't really need to decide. But its key that person B's opinion is irrelevant. They have been given an artificial worldview, basically. Born at 34 (or whatever age).
Quoting Patterner
This isn't quite true, once the person is aware they are on Mars. They now have a different set of memories (though, almost identical) to you. And that will just continue to diverge as time goes on. Even arguments that get a 'self' out of the transporter can only maintain it for a literal instant.
Quoting Patterner
No, not quite. This was run by Parfit and called the branch-line case where identity is considered to be 1:x rather than 1:1. There's no reason, unless you take a soul, to assume this person isn't you. They are exactly the same at the instant they appear (again, beyond this, fail, due to the above). If they have literally the exact same everything, including psychology then there's just two of you. The source and biography are exactly the same. You walked into the machine. They walked into the machine. All is well.
I still reject this, because I think either there are two 'you's, which means one cannot be identical with the other (there are two... its not possible) or there is no self to continue, so 'you' didn't even exist to begin with. It just seems everyone has an underlying assumption about what 'self' is and it exactly this, and in what it consists, that we're trying to drill down on with the thought experiment.
If the idea is this guy, B is 'not you' in the "different atoms" sense, then you must feel it is your bod which continues your self. That is highly unsatisfactory to me. If your mind was in my body, it wouldn't be 'me' in the sense you seem to be getting at (apologies if I'm misunderstanding your version of 'self').
Quoting Patterner
But this would make B obviously and inarguably you, at the instant they appeared?
Quoting Patterner
Based on the above, obviously you don't exist. You have no memory or experience and there's no continuity.
This is a genuine question, are you just working through these intuitions as we go?
Quoting hypericin
I suggest if it were this simple, the answer would be quite obvious: Many people can be you. B is you, and you are you. Does this not seem unsatisfactory to you?
Quoting Patterner
That's true, but this is, I think, about what Identity actually is. My response to this initially was always to move to your 'exact same thing' and reject that B could be me, on any conception other than a Soul being sent through space. I think this sidesteps the question though. Even if exactly me is hte only 'me' in the intuitive sense, there is no reason to think that two people can have that exact same experience. Is that identity? Yeah, shaky to me too, but its worth considering beyond resiling into the 'exact same' version imo. Technically, 'identity' means we can't have two, and they be the same. The issue is that a 'self' may not operate as a object does and could violate that.
It is unintuitive, but not "unsatisfactory". What is unsatisfactory is letting intuitions about persistent selves remain unchallenged.
I have articulated a notion of self already. "Self" is a conceptual integration of sensory experience, mental experience, and memory into a unified idea. According to this notion, there is nothing contradictory about multiple individuals all having the idea of being you, and thus the experience of being you.
And this implies that, as unintuitive as it sounds, you "continue" after entering the teleporter, after being cloned, etc, because "continuance" is just the succession of these experiences of "self" over time.
Because for instance, nobody actually counts molecules or uses molecules as a criteria for identity (and as already established, nor does the universe). It is a made up criteria.
Very clear and precise. Thank you. I don't call that a self, but I think its what matters.
Quoting AmadeusDNo. I first started thinking of it when I read a Star Trek novel called [I]Spock's World[/I]. McCoy didn't like using the transporter, because he was worried that the soul would be lost. Silly, because he had been transported many times, so, if that was a problem, it was already too late.
In a good episode of The Next Generation, they went to an uninhabited planet where Riker and a team had been doing some work many years prior. When they got there, they discovered another Riker. When he transported away those years ago, the beam had both gotten through [I]and[/I] been reflected back to the surface. So two of him. Both were the result of the same transport. Neither could claim to be more the person that dematerialized than the other could.
Of course, the actual original Riker had dematerialized many years before that, when he was transported for the very first time. So, after the unusual transport, these two were identical copies of a copy of a copy of a copy of a copy of a copy of a copy of a copy... And years later, during this episode, the Riker we had known all along was many times removed from that.
I have addressed this. No it isn't. A plain reading shows this. The experiment comes from Parfit, not Star Trek. This is not controversial.
Quoting Patterner
Now this is interesting, and the branch line squarely addresses it. That's not an argument or anything, but more reason to read Parfit's book where this thought experiment stems. No shade at all, but it'll help understanding most of the positions and how/why they work or don't work because Parfit is extremely through. The book took him nearly 14 years.
Yes. A significant problem within personal identity is whether my particles could be separated for T time interval and still preserve my instance of consciousness.
You have given your position of "no", but is there an argument / reasoning behind that?
I thought I already said what the issue is: there might be two entities that could call themselves Mijin, but stick a pin in one, and the other doesn't feel pain. There are two instances of consciousness.
And I don't know why you keep raising souls. As I say, within this topic it seems to only be invoked by people trying to express incredulence about the other position to their own.
I don't think anyone in this thread has taken the position that souls exist, certainly not me.
Quoting hypericin
It does though. Going back to the OP, what if the transporter makes so many errors that (an alive) Abraham Lincoln walks out at the destination? He's alive, but nothing at all like the person that stepped on the source transporter pad. This illiustrates that the line for suriving or not is not the same as whether the original instance of consciousness is preserved or not, as the two are independent.
Wouldn't you think I was referring to the sentence of yours that I had just quoted? This one:
Quoting AmadeusD
Did you read that through when I quoted it, and still make sense of it? Just curious. Presumably you knew what you meant. So maybe it's forgiveable that you failed to notice the syntactic malformation, even when urged to reinspect it. Or maybe it's well formed, and I'll be astonished and humbled.
Quoting AmadeusD
I do, though. As you later on recognise as a possibility:
Quoting AmadeusD
Oh, good. Yes, I was simply stipulating that obvious materialist usage of "self" and declaring it suitable for discussion, and stress-testing. Goodman's discussion of authenticity seems entirely relevant, even if it shows up contrasts as well as parallels. Or contrasts for you, and parallels for me.
From a principled point of view, I think the best solution to the transporter problem is that there is never continuity of consciousness. Every instance of Mijin lives for a millisecond but in that millisecond is convinced that he has lived for years. So I should have no problem using transporters, as it is no different to the death and rebirth that happens at every instance of time.
But in practice of course I am not going to risk my life on my best philosophical guess at the moment. Heck, I'd be wary of using the transporter even if I was convinced it preserved my instance of consciousness. I'd need to see a formal proof to even consider using it.
I suspect nobody would go along with my scenario of being disintegrated after seeing the copy come into being. Much less assuming or being assured a copy has come into being in some distant place. Despite the certain knowledge that their identity, their self, still exists and will continue.
Quoting MijinMake up any formal proof, any scenario you like. What is it that would convince you?
Sure but this is a somewhat different question to the hypothetical. Even most proponents of the "sent" position say that the entities immediately diverge after the process (hypericin might be an exception to this, but we will see how he responds to my last post). So yes of course if you're stood there on the source pad, seeing the duplicate, you've already diverged and nobody on either side of this debate would advocate you take the death.
Quoting Patterner
I don't know. I don't think we have such a model and I don't know what one would look like.
Right now, as I say, the most bulletproof position is to basically say that there's never continuity and personal identity is basically an illusion.
I don't think this is a sensible position: whose illusion? On the contrary, my subjective experience and its continuity are the only certainties in the world.
Regarding transporters: there are two types, the Star Trek transporter (matter transport) and the information transporter (non-matter transporter).
In the first case, the self could be transported, in the second case it could not.
I think you might be conflating two different things here.
I am not saying that subjective experience itself is the illusion. I am talking about persistence of a single entity of consciousness.
We all take it for granted that we are the same entity that was born N years ago -- numerically the same entity, that is, not qualitatively of course. However, when it comes to the transporter problem and similar hypotheticals, this assumption seems to lead to complex questions. The issue of how, concretely, an instance of consciousness is determined turns out to be really problematic to answer. So, as I say, the simplest option right now is to question the assumption itself. If an instance of consciousness is merely an instant of consciousness, with no persistence, just the illusion of being the same person by virtue of inheriting the memories of the last guy, all the problems disappear.
Quoting SolarWind
Why's that? What's special about the atoms?
No, they don't. I'm now going to talk about the Star Trek transporter. The question is whether you would allow yourself to be beamed and whether you would assume that you would be the target person. So the question arises before the beaming.
Quoting Mijin
If all atoms are different, then there is no physical connection between the source person and the target person. The target person only claims to be the source person. Furthermore, they could happen to be created (for example, something like a Boltzmann brain) at a spacelike interval (-> relativity).
You say "no they don't" in response to my point that the problems related to the transporter don't apply to the "no persistence" position. But then fail to say exactly what problem you think remains.
And I don't know why you are trying to clarify that you mean before the beaming.
So let me start over because I think there may be some confusion; I'll name the positions on star trek transporters as follows:
A: Sent -- The Kirk that walks out at Destination is one and the same as the one killed at Source, who in turn was one and the same with the Kirk that was born 30 years before.
B: Killed -- The Kirk at Source is one and the same with the Kirk that was born 30 years prior, but he is simply killed by this process. The Kirk that emerges at Destination is a new human, with a new consciousness, that just happens to be qualitatively the same as the Kirk that died.
C: Perpetual_Death -- The Kirk at Destination is completely new. But so was the Kirk at Source. As was the Kirk 5 minutes ago, and one second ago. Under this position, when consciousness arises in the mind it has the feeling of being one and the same entity due to having access to memories of prior events. But that's all it is. A persistent "instance" of consciousness simply isn't a real thing.
Now, the objections to A and B were not invented by me; this is a well-known philosophical problem and people a lot brighter than me have summarized the issues. I've just invented -- I think -- the "imperfect transporter" objection. The broad summary of the more standard objections are:
The issues with Sent concern why being qualitatively the same should equal being numerically the same, when we never do that with other objects. And what happens if the entity at Source is preserved?
The issues with Killed are what the person at destination lacks in order to be a continuance. If the same atoms are required...why? If the same atoms are used, does momentary separation of atoms matter? If so, why?
And this talk of atoms' history also implies that consciousness, uniquely, leads to facts about the universe that cannot be known even with a perfect knowledge of its current state.
I am not aware of any arguments against Perpetual_Death. Other than it's a very unpleasant option. You would be doing us all a favor if you could find some flaw with it.
From the perspective of the beaming person, there are two possibilities: either (version plus) they see the destination after beaming, or (version minus) they are dead.
The whole thing is indistinguishable from a third-person perspective, but it is distinguishable from a first-person perspective.
Perpetual_Death does not say anything about this, but only that the destination person says they are the source person, which they do in both cases.
Thus, Perpetual_Death is not false, but meaningless.
And what is the problem with that?
Quoting Mijin
Whether or not people explicitly believe in souls, my position is that there is an implicit presumption of souls in the abstract, that is, the mental model whereby we are non-physical entities that inhabit bodies. It is this mental model which gives rise to all the confusion of the teleporter thought experiment. Even the idea that continuity is an illusion, that we really live only in the instant, relies on this, as it fails to imagine continuity in the absence of something like a soul. If you abolish this intuition, I don't think there are any problems with teleportation. Continuity simply is the idea of self over time, over time. As long as this maintains, continuity maintains. Souls were always an illusion.
Quoting Mijin
So by "It does though", you are claiming that this illustrates that the universe does decree that "X=12,371 means surviving with brain damage, and X=12,372 means you effectively die from the injury"?
Quoting SolarWind
Baked into the position is that it is no one's illusion. Our experience, itself, may be illusory. That doesn't mean it doesn't obtain. We experience in the same sense an orange experiences being eaten. It happens to it. The illusion happens to us. 'I' doesn't need to be adequately defined for this. You can just say the experience is being had the body in question. Not to a 'self'. The qualia could be shared - we have no idea, really.
Quoting hypericin
They are not the same person. Obviously. I can't see how that's being missed?? If we're talking identity, you cannot have two people who are the same person. It violates both the law of identity, and all intuitions about the self. Though, I think those are a weak indicator, anyway, as you note - most people intuit some form of soul, which is totally unsupportable and is probably the only way to maintain identity obtains for a 'self'.
I agree with you, although the religious connotations of "soul" leads philosophers to shy away from using that word. There's a good article in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy that discusses various approaches to defining "transworld identities", which seems to cover all the relevant ground. Terms that are used (instead of soul): "bare identity", "thisness", "haeccity". The section on haeccity seems the most relevant.
If we are talking numerical identity, then clearly not. But personal identity is obviously not numerical identity.
This is most clear in death. When someone dies, their body is the same body as (numerically identical with) the body that was alive. But there is no personal continuity between them. Numerical identity is not what we are talking about.
What is relevant is personal continuity, not numerical identity. And it is (logically) possible for two people to be both non-identical with each other and personally continuous with the same ancestor individual.
Quoting hypericin
I think perhaps, like many, this leapfrogs what we want to know: You believe personal identity can be 1:x. That's a big, big concession (not a negative one) in terms of reaching some conclusion. If you take this position, several outcomes of the transporter can be acceptable.
Most do not take this to be the situation. Most take personal identity to be, fundamentally, a 1:1 entity. I don't even think that obtains, but i digress. Whether or not personal identity requires identity is the open question. Once you have an intuition, the TE tests it.
Quoting hypericin
There's a lot to unpack here, but possible. The dead body is not the same body from three months or so prior to death. So, that wont hold. This is how it works - you give an intuition, and we test it against examples and empirical facts. In this case, a dead body is not identical to the body previously known to be the alive person (other than at the moment of death, but clearly this isn't relevant as the change occurs while alive to give us a different body at times t1, t2, t3 etc.. etc.. if we pick sufficient distal times (three-four month increments should do).
We would then discuss whether it actually takes seven years to disclaim identity, as hte skeleton takes longer to be replaced. Which change matters? At what point? To what degree?
In any case, it is not clear at all that the body is self-same across time.
Quoting hypericin
Again, it might be. There is no clear answer. Pretty damn self-evidently.
I'm not following your logic here.
At the moment of death, you agree the body is identical to the body immediately before death.
Yet, personhood is extinguished at the moment of death.
This shows that personhood is not bodily identity.
Moreover, the moment of death is the relevant time. It is the time when personhood drops to zero, while bodily continuity is still intact. What happens months later is of no interest.
Quoting AmadeusD
You might discuss this. I would find it as useless as any other discussion of Ship of Theseus criteria.
Quoting AmadeusD
I believe this, and I have provided a notion of self which supports it, and which avoids the usual metaphysical quandaries of the TE. In real life, personal identity is indeed 1:1, it takes fantastic, futuristic scenarios for it not to be. Given that 1:1 is our actual, default experience, the fact that people also believe that personal identity is intrinsically 1:1, despite the quandaries in the TE this entails, carries vanishingly little weight.
"possible". I certainly give that some air, but I do not think that's right. We lose weight at the moment of death, certain functions cease, capabilities of the body essentially extinguish etc.. etc... and so there is (to my mind) no way to uphold identity of the body through the death process (again, this matters not to my takes here, im just working through things). I think I can see where this was going, but I don't agree with the premise so I'm not sure I need to go further.
You are, again, importing an intuition. Personhood may not be extinguished at death. That "person" remains in the annals of history for all time, once they have existed. For many, that's enough. You need to test these positions rather than assume them, and charge other positions with them as challenges, I think. I'm not even saying you're far off the mark or anything like that - you might be right. But plenty of people will disagree with you, and it is in fact working out which of the possible answers is most reasonable that we're doing.
Quoting hypericin
You will see as clear as day that this is not a workable response in light of the above. It is several of your intuitions presented as an objective timeline. I will comment, thought, that the bold is clearly the wrong answer. If this were true, any changes that happen to the body during life have nothing to do with personal identity, and yet the retention of one singular state of the body at death somehow indicates personhood, and its extinguishment. This is absurd (in the way of being essentially senseless, not that you're being silly or anything). In any case, it is obvious that the body does not remain as it was at the exact moment of death for any time. It is a literal instant. Again, i see where that's going, but in light of the above explications this is either just a description of what you like, in terms of an answer to the personal identity problem, or you are perhaps not quite accounting for some of the empirical facts about the body at death. Either way, your position is fine, but its your position. Not something whic is evident, and usable as reasons for other people to abandon theirs. There answers will simply differ from yours, and then you'll need to test them. I do, roughly, agree that what happens months later isn't of interest - but it is, given its the same processes occurring as in life, as regards 'changes' being relevant to identity.
Quoting hypericin
Then you are refusing to test your intuitions. I can't do much with that...
Quoting hypericin
Its a perception, i can grant that. It is not an 'experience'. If that were the case, we would have clear lines about what constitutes identity. We don't, and your positions don't get us closer. This is why i reject that identity obtains at all. There's no argument under which is survives scrutiny. To illustrate what this means, Parfit's final tome/s was called "On What Matters". This refers to what he calls 'Relation R' which is just the psychological continuity. It could be your mind implanted in another body, but if your wishes, desires, dispositions, goals and ambitions are all continued on, unabated, by someone, then that someone may as well be you. "may as well be" seems the best I can trace up to. Relation R matters, rather than identity. THe problem is this is some pretty damn cold comfort.
The TE shows us that on pretty much any intuitive conception of identity, it is absurd when challenged. I am unsure that anything you're saying changes that.
I was describing the three positions on continuity of consciousness and I don't see what is gained by
pre-emptively taking one off the table.
If you want to say it's important that we reduce it just to the thoughts of the person going into the transporter then sure: the person going into the transporter is me, and I think there are three scenarios to consider.
Because the pronoun "I" refers to this instance of consciousness. In the stick a pin example, I might say "I am in pain". What would two "I"s mean?Quoting hypericin
Not really; it just takes the null position. If you wish to claim there is continuity, then it's on you to say continuity of what, and then, of course, I will come back with hypotheticals about moving atoms around or boltzmann brains or whatever. Because simple intuitions about bodily continuity only work in our world where we don't yet have tech for doing things like splicing brains; at the very least bodily continuity needs to be defined much more concretely / formally to make clear claims about such situations.
It's meaningless just taking a position. What's the argument?
Of course, I'm interested in the first-person perspective; the third-person perspective is well-known and boring.
You go into the transporter. Please describe your three possible experiences.
But I'll try a rephrasing specifically within the "calculating what I'll do" framing:
The three positions are:
1. My consciousness will persist even if I take the transporter; I may as well enjoy a nice holiday on Mars
2. My consciousness will only persist if I *don't* take the transporter. It's a murder box.
3. Nothing I do could possibly make my consciousness persist. Even if I don't take the transporter, consciousness doesn't have persistence, only the illusion of it, because it inherits memories.
I may as well let the next guy holiday on Mars.
That's not something you experience when you get into the transporter.
Incidentally, the illusion is also confusing in the Total Recall scenario. If person X has the memories of person Y implanted, are they then the continuation of person X or person Y?
No-one said it was. I don't follow the point you're making.Quoting SolarWind
If you're asking my opinion specifically on memories, no, I don't consider memories to be the critical factor in determining instances of consciousness.
"I" would mean the individual who was stuck. There are two numerically distinct individuals who claim continuity with the same individual in the past. I see nothing problematic.
The problem is firstly, you brought up the concept of multiple "I"s and now you're conceding that "I" refers to an individual because there is not a shared consciousness.
But secondly, this whole thing has deflected us from talking about the problems. Call whoever you want, whatever you want. Call it the Ship of Theseus or Boaty McBoatface. The critical thing is if we have a model for understanding what happens to instances of consciousness.
Destination Kirk is a duplicate. Destination Kirk doesn't even know he's not the original. But the original's atoms were dispersed, so...
But I'll comment on #3:Quoting MijinInheriring memories is how the persistence of consciousness is accomplished. It's not an illusion. It's just not what people generally think it is if they haven't thought or read/heard much about it. But even after all the thought, reading, and discussion anybody has had, it's still what defines us more than anything else, and it's the last thing anyone would give up. How many body parts would you give up before it's not worth it any longer, and you would give it up? [I]Million Dollar Baby[/I] and [I]Whose Life Is It Anyway?[/I] are both movies about people paralyzed from the neck down who want to die.
Put a delay of five seconds into the scenario. Five seconds after Destination Kirk materializes, Source Kirk dematerializes. Who's going for a ride?
Quoting SolarWindThere's a fun show called Blindspot.
I didn't realize I was conceding anything. When the hell did I say there was a shared consciousness?
Quoting Mijin
I gave a model. You said, but wait, there is a problem, what about two clones, and one sticks itself with a pin? I await a demonstration of any actual problem.
Quoting Patterner
Do you not see how those statements are in conflict? Because this conflict (and related issues) is exactly the point of the transporter problem.
No, I mean you conceded the words before that: that "I" refers to the individual subject of conscious experiences, in conflict with when you earlier claimed that both me and a duplicate would be two "I"s.Quoting hypericin
This is conflating two things. I was speaking there about how, in general, the time to handwave a problem and claim we understand it, is when we can make useful predictions and inferences about it. That's not the case here. No-one's model seems to give a direct answer about the imperfect transporter, or why it matters which atoms are used for example.
In terms of the "stick a pin" point, that is part of my answer to you when you asked "What exactly is the problem with multiple "I"s?"
The problem is that they are separate entities, as you've conceded. There's no reason to call them multiple "I"s, they are just multiple people, as separate as you and I are right now.
Building a replica of me means it has my memories, and everything else. But it's still a replica, and I am gone. The facts that the replica feels exactly like I would feel if I had not been disintegrated, and no conceivable test could tell the difference, don't matter.
I ask again. If you are the Source, and there is a 5 second delay between the duplicate materializing and you being disintegrated, would you do it? If the continuation of your memories and characteristics was all that mattered, you would. But I don't think you would go for it.
I don't understand why you think these statements conflict.
A duplicate means two "I"s. Two people, each referring to themselves as "I", each individual subjects of conscious experience. Each with psychological continuity to the original. I haven't changed on this.
Quoting Mijin
Ah, I see the confusion.
Quoting Mijin
If we don't delete the original, there will be multiple people with psychological continuity to the original. Each with distinct experiences. "I" only ever refers to the one that is speaking. What is wrong with this state of affairs? I still don't see the issue you were referring to originally.
But when I said that memories are irrelevant to determining whether something is the same instance of consciousness, you disagreed with me. And now you're making exactly the same point
Quoting Patterner
And I answered, so I don't know why you're asking again.
Once again: from the principled point of view, from my current best understanding of instances of consciousness, I may as well hop in, because persistence of consciousness does not seem to be a thing regardless of whether I take the trip or not.
Pragmatically, I wouldn't take the trip because I would want near certainty before doing anything life or death.
I don't think the question "What would you do in real life?" tends to be very helpful for these kinds of philosophical questions. In real life, we are cautious, and frequently default to taking no action...I'm sure that in real life most people probably wouldn't redirect a trolley towards killing fewer people, for example.
A "God's eye view" is better for drawing out our best understanding and principles.
By "I" we are referring to an instance of consciousness. Otherwise we could just use normal grammar e.g. there are two people. If you're saying that there are two separate people if we make a duplicate and their experiences diverge...yes, everyone on every side of this debate believes this.
And if by "psychological continuity" you mean they have memories of the person who stepped on to the source pad...again, every side of the debate agrees with this, it's part of the set up of the problem.
Quoting MijinIf you are looking at your duplicate, with a consciousness identical to yours, then there are two consciousness. When you are disintegrated, only one will remain. You will be dead.
If a "God's eye view" tells you otherwise, then perhaps philosophical questions are better answered by combining it with "What would you do in real life?".
But that's what I've been saying. Note that this is what is meant by the term numerical identity versus qualitative identity. I have clarified over and over again that I am interested in numerical identity.
Furthermore, I can't square what you're saying now with your earlier statement "Inheriting memories is how the persistence of consciousness is accomplished". Quoting Patterner
Again, everyone on all three sides of this debate would agree that if there's a state of affairs where there are two people whose experiences have diverged (as they must be if entity 1 is having the experience of looking at entity 2), they are now separate, and one will not jump into the body of the other.
So...it still just seems like you aren't following the transporter problem.
It's like I have a theory of a new allotrope of carbon, but all the responses are questioning the existence of atoms.
I thought it was about the path of the first-person perspective. And that path either leads somewhere or into nothingness (death).
Quoting Mijin
What else?
Perhaps your "new allotrope of carbon" isn't as interesting as you supposed.
No problem. Forums can be like that.
Quoting MijinYou do not survive. The "degree of difference" is not between you at the beginning and you at the end. It is between you at the beginning and the copy of you at the end. Maybe the copy of you will be perfect. Maybe it will be so flawed that it can't be considered a copy. Like if Lincoln appears at destination.
Quoting MijinThe Picard that entered at the source no longer has a perspective, because he no longer exists.
Am I not addressing the original problem?
Somewhat addressing...I think you're still not quite there, but I've also thought of another way to cover this:
In the original, vanilla, transporter problem, I have labelled the two main positions that people tend to take as "Sent" -- a singular instance of consciousness is sent to Mars, and "Killed" -- the original instance of consciousness is destroyed, and a new instance of consciousness is made on Mars.
We could also describe the two positions a bit more precisely as "Psychological continuity" -- what matters is memories, and as long as there is continuity of memories that's the same instance of consciousness, and "Bodily continuity" -- what matters is the seamless continuation of the body itself.
Now: the "imperfect transporter", that I have proposed, is an argument against Sent / Psychological continuity. And what you just outlined in your last post is basically bodily continuity. Ergo, my argument doesn't apply to your position.
However, the couple of wrinkles here are:
1. You have previously said: "The continuity of self is due to the memories" i.e. taking the exact opposite position on the transporter hypothetical. This is a thing that I am struggling to make sense of.
2. It's easy to just assert a position on this. The critical thing is how you arrived at that position, and how you would go about answering follow-up questions e.g. "What if the transporter spits the original particles across space?" "What if I separate your particles for one nanosecond?"
I still don't think this works.
Quoting Mijin
Is it really binary? If you have a major stroke, does all of you survive? If you have a stroke such that you completely assume the identity of Abraham Lincoln, does any of you survive?
We are accustomed to thinking of survival in bodily terms. And in bodily terms the answers would be "yes" in both cases. But this is just a habit, it might be the wrong metric here. If we thought of identity in psychological terms , the answers would be "no".
So I think this is only a problem if you assume bodily continuity from the outset.
Again, this is talking about the distinction that I have explicitly said is not the focus of the imperfect transporter.
Let's start from this: you accept that there is such a thing as death, right? So Aristotle, right now, is simply dead. He's gone. Agreed?
Now, the line that we are interested in, in the imperfect transporter, is whether I will simply die -- be in the same status as Aristotle -- or whether I will arrive on Mars with brain damage.
And it's binary. The proposition, P, is "In the same state as Aristotle -- dead dead". That's either true or false. It doesn't matter if someone has brain damage or not, P is still false for that person.
So it's unlike the easier, and less important, question of whether we as a third party consider the person at Destination to be characteristically the same person, whether P is true is literally life or death.
Given the two perspectives on continuity, Bodily and Psychological:
Aristotle
Bodily: dead
Psychological: dead
Stroke victim
Bodily: alive
Psychological: partial
Massive stroke victim
Bodily: alive
Psychological: dead
Perfect transporter
Bodily: dead
Psychological: alive
Imperfect transporter
Bodily: dead
Psychological: partial
Radically imperfect transporter
Bodily: dead
Psychological: dead
Aristotle is of the same status as a radically imperfect transport: dead. Both perspectives agree. But this doesn't preclude degrees of survival in the imperfect transporter, assuming that psychological continuity is what is relevant. This would not require the universe to set a hard line between what counts as survival or not. Psychological survival is continuous, not binary, and so there is no need for it to do so. Bodily survival is also continuous in the ship of Theseus sense, but binary in the familiar sense that bodies can endure only so much damage before they lose the ability to maintain homeostasis, which is what death is.
The reassembled person, or exact replica, will not feel other than the original. And anybody who knew the original will not know it's not the original. (Assuming they are not aware of what happened.) But, regardless of what happened next, the person ended when their particles were separated.
I really don't know how I can state it more clearly. And I really don't think you don't understand what I'm saying. I think you just disagree.
No; you're either alive or dead, and, if you're alive, we can talk about the level of consciousness that you're enjoying.
ISTM that there are two different things you could be saying here, and I don't think either work:
1. "Bodily" and "Psychological" are attributes. This is making the claim you can by physically fully dead yet psychologically alive in some sense, which is meaningless.
2. (The more correct description IMO) That "bodily" and "Psychological" are two different theories on instances of consciousness and you are just summarizing the two positions.
In which case saying "partial" for psychological is just a dodge: are you alive or not?
OK, so you are retracting the point about memory being the critical thing. That's fine.
Quoting Patterner
I understand what you're saying: it's bodily continuity. What I'm saying is that you don't seem to have much of an argument behind it; it seems an ad hoc opinion and when I ask you hypotheticals, they seem to be coming off-the-cuff. Let me ask you this: if I could freeze all neural activity in your brain and restart it, is that the same instance of consciousness?
I'm asking this to clarify whether it is an active neural connection that matters or just literally the atoms of which I am made.
Also: I wonder if I should just get out of the way at this point. Because it seems that you, @Patterner, are taking the bodily continuity position, while @hypericin is taking the psychological continuity position.
Maybe try putting your points to each other :)
Quoting MijinAre you freezing it by freezing time?
Quoting flannel jesus
Quoting Patterner
Human sense-making arises out of our daily praxis: selective attention and all that. Our terms cluster around that, too. We think in terms of original and copy, because the technology is hypothetical, and we go by our daily praxis. If you want to guess (and guess is the best we can manage, I think) what our intutions would be were to live in a society where duplication technology is possible, you need to radically question your immediate intution.
I see at least two issues:
Social responsibility:
We have the new situation where two people share the same dispostion to act on top of the same memories. Up to the point of the copying event there was only one person. After that event there are two people, both of which share the same personal connection to the same singular past. Under our present original/duplicate concept, only the original really does have that connection, while the duplicate only thinks he has that. Do you think this makes for sustainable social organisation? The thing is that, I think, different events pull in different directions:
A married man duplicates himself. Is the duplicate married?
A murderer murders a man. Is the duplicate responsible for the murder?
A person who owes me a dollar is duplicated. Who owes me a doller, and how many do I get back?
There are a million of these situation that all influence each other. What do rights and duties to you have? Does the original-duplicate distinction remain practically relevant equally across all domains? What sort of social conflict can we expect. Would the "duplicate" status enshrine itself as a new minority, for example?
Note that however this is going to organise, people are going to try to game the system, and that in itself will influence how the system evolves. And at some point the last person who was born into a duplicate-technology-free society will be history, and everyone will take it as unquestioned routine that duplicates exists.
The Relationship between the scanned data, the continuous person, and the assembled person:
If we understand the data well enough to temper with it, there will be potential applications. For example, if the duplication technology scans the space that's the person and reassembles that space one for one, it would often reassemble more than just the person. Relevant here is medical stuff: it would reassemble stuff like food being in the process of being digested, air in the lungs, parasites, pace makers, etc. Everything. Some of those things are part of the person, some not - some (such as oxygen in the air and nutrients in the fodd) will soon be part of the person, and so on.
Now imagine I have cancer; I make a duplicate but edit out the cancer. I can now be jealous of my cancer-free person. There is what is theoretically possible; there is what people would do; and there is what people would then feel about what it is that people will do. There's going to be a new normal at some point, but it's hard to see what that is.
The cancer example from the previous example shows a soical-psychological difference, I think, between the teleporter case and the duplication case, as in the teleporter case only one, the assembled person, remains - thus jealousy is impossible, and data-tampering might be viewed, by some at least, as a less risky procedure than an operation. But if you retain your cancer and the copy doesn't? It gets even weirder, depending on the person: for example, if the duplicated person is altruistically inclined, the copy might feel guilty for not having cancer, while the original might be happy for the person, and they both might have a good laugh at the absurdity of the sitution, since they also share that ironic distance to what they consider real.
We can have what-if relationships to our alters (whether we're the original or the copy doesn't matter) in a way we can have to no-one else, not even identical twins (since they don't share a first-person history up to a duplication event).
***
I was born in the seventies, and as a kid I was naturally drawn to SF. So I've been thinking about this almost all my life. The more prominent source of the transporter question for people is probably Star Trek, and I certainly watched that. But the transporter never seemed very interesting to me; it felt like a convenience device, both on cool-tech aspect and the story beats ("evil Kirk" was more fun that plausible, so I didn't really switch on my brain for that, not even as a kid).
For me, the SF source of the transporter is actually the 1958 version of The Fly. (I'm fairly sure me talking about parasites and half-digested food above comes ultimately from that first impetus: the difference what you think of as yourself, vs what a machine would. This was much more interesting to me than anything Star Trek did. That, and I was also an animal nerd as a kid.)
Not theories of "instances of consciousness" but theories of personal continuity. What is relevant to personal continuity, bodily continuity, or psychological continuity?
"Partial" is not a dodge. I am saying that in the imperfect transporter case, the subject experiences zero bodily continuity and partial psychological continuity. Whether that constitutes (partial) survival depends on whether bodily or psychological is the relevant continuity.
Survival is not binary in the psychological sense. You can lose some of yourself, but not all of yourself, in a brain injury.
Quoting DawnstormI believe Gene said he came up with the transporter because he couldn't figure out how to land the ship.
More so, now that I have the privilege of browsing the renowned book. The suspicion grows that Parfit reifies consciousness, as a substance capable of continuity (relation R) or discontinuity, instead of hanging it ultimately on bodily activity. Styling his theory "reductionist" seems wrong, on that score.
He comes close to examining the analogy with painting, but is keen to dismiss it:
Er, why not? Why aren't they a perfectly fine analogy with gradual personal transformation?
Oh. Why, exactly?
Hmm.
Needless to say, Goodman's book, fairly famous for bringing to bear (on aesthetics) a deal of previous work on identity and structure, isn't referenced in this book.
A subtly related problem is the conception of memory: as an implanted mental picture, with a natural and causal (as opposed to conventional) manner of depicting its object. Not a radical conception, of course; perfectly in line with Locke and Hume. But this results in a view of neuro-psychology as revealing that
Perhaps there were then and still are plenty of neuro-scientists inclined to this view. I'll take correction on this, because I'm out of touch with psychology, but I'm vaguely aware of a tidal drift in psychological theory (since Bartlett in the thirties) completely away from that idea of a trace, analogous to a frame of imprinted vision or sound, and towards the contrary idea of memory (and perception too) as a continual project of constructing and testing and revising little mental performances. A drift which would be in agreement with Goodman's "language theory of pictures". (And probably modern trends like Bayesian predictive coding.) And which makes sense, if you reflect on the simple observation that animals have hardly ever, if ever, evolved a black box recorder. (Parrots a counter-example?)
This point of view makes, on the other hand, nonsense of the kind of thought experiment (however familiar) wherein,
Enable us to have similar thoughts, sure. To rehearse (somewhat) similar mental performances. Not enable us to be confronted with a similar scene, though. Not in reality, obviously, but more crucially not perceptually: we shall not be confronted with a memory-scene, susceptible to forensic examination like a real picture.
Quasi-remembering other people's past experiences deflates to endorsing their autobiographical assertions. (In a word language or picture language.) And, we should add, the same is true for our own remembering. The only forensic authenticity available is the "autographic" identity of the person mentally rehearsing the assertions.
Which might be expected to not count for much. Napoleon's own recollections of (i.e. his dispositions towards verbal or pictorial assertions about) Waterloo we would expect to be as badly biased as my own delusional ones. Still, they have the distinction (even if not necessarily a virtue) of having formed through the cognitive efforts of an embodied brain actually there at the scene.
We've no grounds to discount the possibility that personal continuity defined spatiotemporally will make an important epistemic difference to memory. Just as (as Goodman argues) we can't know that autographic authenticity (defined similarly) won't make an important aesthetic difference to a picture.
Does it matter? What is the rule you're going by for deciding if there's continuity of consciousness?
But your position seems to be that psychological continuity is key, right? So in your view, is that person still alive?
And again for clarity: I can ask two questions about getting into the imperfect transporter: "Did I survive" and, if yes, "In what form did I survive?"
In this context, "partial" could only be mapped to saying: yes, you survive, and that the nature of your consciousness depends on the nature of the damage. The problem is, this is implicitly saying that I am always transported. So, if Abraham Lincoln walks out at Destination, I'm surviving through his eyes, despite the only association between me and him being that some person claimed the transporter would send me.
You raise interesting points, Dawnstorm. I think it's worth remembering though that this isn't really a feasible technology, so we never really need to think about it from a pragmatic point of view (though it of course is a great topic for sci-fi; I enjoyed the movie Anti Matter, for example)
The reason I invoke the transporter, and the imperfect transporter, is to test our ideas of how we define personal identity and what constitutes an instance of consciousness. It's like riding on a photon, or Laplace's demon. It's unlikely to ever happen.
A slightly more feasible scenario might be qualitatively copying the personality and memories of someone into a digital format. But in that scenario we'd probably have already had several massive bombshells for society, like needing to accept the possibility of Strong AI.
Why not expand the thread with cryonics? That's much more feasible than the transporter.
If I have myself frozen, will I wake up in a hundred years, or will it be my copy?
Sure, I can give my opinion on that: I don't claim to know; the information is insufficient right now. But, based on what *is* known right now, it seems the best answer is that there is never continuity of consciousness in any circumstances.
The person that wakes up in a hundred years' time isn't me, but nor is the person that will finish this sentence that I am typing now.
What's your opinion?
Excuse me, but I don't think you understand your own question. That's not an answer.
Cryonics costs many thousands of dollars. You expect to see the world in a hundred years, not a copy of yourself walking around.
You also expect to wake up in the same body after you sleep. And there are two possibilities: waking up or dying in your sleep.
If you freeze time, there is no "one moment to the next". No time during which the brain was dead, alive, or anything else. When you start time again, the very next instant comes without any break in continuity.
No. You are yet again talking from your implicit soul perspective, where "instance of consciousness" is your word for soul. Assuming psychological continuity is key, you survive only to the degree that the new person's psychology resembles the old. Abraham Lincolns would not resemble it at all, so you would be completely extinguished.
Quoting Mijin
I'm not so sure anymore, I'm moving away from that toward the bodily continuity camp. The kind of argument that is swaying me: suppose the original wasn't dematerialized, by accident. The original would have no clue what was going on with the teleported person. From the original's perspective, the copy is a completely separate person that just so happens to resemble them, like a supremely close identical twin. Then, the mistake is realized, and the original is subsequently killed. Why should killing the the original change that the copy is a separate person?
Are you totally sure? I've not read the proceeding conversation, but this seems to be a little bit off the mark to me.
We don't, generally, look at a person suffering from Alzheimer's or similar as lacking consciousness. Is that the take you go for? Not a problem if you say yes - legit position, I just don't see it.
Quoting hypericin
This is, almost exactly, the Branch Line case. The machine malfunctions causing a terminal heart deterioration in you, while beaming your blueprint to be printed on Mars. It gets printed. You2 walks out on Mars with your exact memories up the moment you walked in. You get to live three days while your clone on Mars goes about their business. Which one is you, tends to be the question. I think they are both "you" without need for identity, due to Relation R being what matters. The second part of this is figuring out whether you care that You dies. If someone will continue to be your children's dad, the exceptional lawyer you are, will continue to write that book you're working on etc... You wont be missing from the world. But still - as Mijin noted - You - the exact phenomenal outlet - will cease. That's terrifying to me, fwiw.
Your bold position seems to allow for a transplanted brain, with entirely different biography, to become someone they have literally no concept of in the brain. Is that right? I realise you're not set on it, just exploring things.
Sufferers of Alzheimer's surely have consciousness. But a self? What is such a person's own feeling of self, with no memory of who they are, and no chain to see how they became who they are. Horrifying disease.
I suppose my point was more than, as a third party, we wouldn't say that. We still see the person we know, even if they don't behave the way we know (inconclusive and just banter, really).
I have never looked, but I imagine there are plenty of interviews with people with Alzheimer's, amnesia, and whatever else, as well as their families. I would have to assume that family eventually accepts that it's no longer the same person.
It's as clear an answer as I can give: I don't know, but the best supported theory of consciousness right now is that there is no such thing as continuity of consciousness. I am (numerically) not the same consciousness as went to bed last night, or began this sentence, and I won't be the being that wakes up from cryonics later.
And it was responding to your question, what do you mean by "your own question"?
Quoting SolarWind
I haven't paid for cryonics. You asked my opinion.
It's always a desperate debating tactic to rely on telling other people what they believe. And I even pointed out in the OP that people on both sides of this debate will tend to make their argument by accusing the other side of believing in souls.
For the fourth time, no I don't believe in souls. Not only am I an atheist, not only do I think that dualism is inherently flawed, but my background is in neuroscience; I have a post-grad degree in neuroimaging. So I don't want to have to address this straw man for a fifth time.
Great, so we agree that there is a point at which you're simply dead. But you also believe that there is a point at which you survive with brain damage. This is the line we're interested in in the imperfect transporter. Where is that line: how does the universe decide, and how can we know where it is?
What do you regard as the necessary and sufficient conditions (or properties) for being you? I suggest that this is a central issue in the transporter scenario.
Are you a physicalist, with respect to the mind?
If not strictly a physicalist, do you agree that at least some physical components are necessary to being you?
My position: I'm a physicalist, so I believe I consist of my component, physical parts. These parts change over time, but there is a causal chain that accounts for these changes. As such, at any point of time - I consist of exactly the physical parts that comprise my body at that time (100% are necessary and sufficient for being me at that time). This accounts for the perdurance of my identity over time. AFAIK, no other theory if identity makes as much sense under physicalism. So, if you are a physicalist then I think you should embrace perdurantism (although I'm open to hearing alternative points of view and reconcidering).
We both know there is no line.
You want to say, in the imperfect transporter, if survival is possible at all, there must be a line between survival and death, as death is surely possible given enough imperfection. There is no such line, any such line must be arbitrary. Therefore survival isn't possible.
But this is only true if survival is binary. If we think of survival in terms of a body living or dying, it is binary. If we think in terms of a soul transmigrating or not, it is binary. But if we think in terms of psychological survival (which is the only way anyone can survive a transporter) it is not. Survival in this case is a continuum between 0-1, not a binary on-off.
That is why I keep returning to injury, such as stroke. In a stroke, while your body might survive, in a psychological sense, your mind may only partially survive. You may lose aspects of your cognition, abilities, personality, memory, and feelings, and in a very visceral sense you may feel discontinuous with your prior self. But not necessarily fully discontinuous, the discontinuity lies on a spectrum. And so partial survival is not some abstract construct, it is already part of everyday reality.
I don't think this is right. Either you survive or you don't. How you survive certain seems up for grabs, but there you cannot be 'part there'. You're either an altered, different person, or you are you. That's how the concept of Identity works. Whether there could be two you's is more interesting. If what you mean is that not all of you survives that's quite a different claim and might bear some clarification.
Why is "not all of you survives" "quite a different claim" from "part of you survives"?
Partial survival would mean partly you survive, and partly you don't. That seems plainly absurd. Not that "part of you survives" in the sense outlined below. The way you've worded it seems to indicate you think you can survive, and not survive in parts. "you" is what's in question here, so that seems impossible.
Not all of you surviving might just mean you've lost your legs or some particular aspect of you like the memories which make you confident in x skill you supposedly have. The survival is vouchsafed, and we need only discuss what survived for us to still say "you" (or me, or whatever).
I think the key for my objection (its not really an objection proper) is that the concept of survival is a 1 or 0. The way you survive seems to be the ground of the intuitions we're testing (and this would lead to your claims of an arbitrary point at which someone remains themselves through different processes we're discussing). It could be that you didn't mean to say this at all, and that's fair - I will simply be on the wrong train here in that case.
Yes, it's pretty difficult. I found it extremely hard to conceive of my dementia stricken grandmother as no longer there. There's no where for her to go, and she didn't become a new person. I can't see a way out of hte matrix other than discomfort with the person you know being different.
The difference between ages 15 and 65 might be the same as the difference between 65 and 66 for someone who hit dementia at that time. I don't see any real difference I guess, in those changes and how they might result in a different person.
You are thinking in terms of bodily survival. But the core of this question is which type of survival is relevant for personal continuity: bodily, or psychological?
Survival is only a 1 or 0 if we are talking about bodily survival. Either the heart is still beating, or it has stopped forever.
This is not how psychological survival works. Here the full range from 0 to 1 is possible. Think of someone in a complete vegetative coma. The body is still alive, it survives, this is a 1. But the mind is gone, a 0. Call the healthy state, before whatever illness or accident caused a coma, a 1. Between that there is a full spectrum between psychic wholeness and psychic death. If you have ever witnessed someone's descent into dementia this reality would be painfully apparent. As dementia progresses, bits and pieces are taken away from the victim, until there is nothing left.
Of course, in reality bodily integrity has the same continuity. The body undergoes degrees of degradation, it doesn't just stop working one day. But we are so attuned to the divide between life and death that we think of it as binary. The line between awareness of any kind, and vegetative unconsciousness, just isn't as salient for us, so we don't have an equivalent binary conception of psychological survival.
If you're asking me qualitatively, sure I can list off things like my personality, my memories etc.
In the context of this discussion on continuity of the self? Nothing. What I mean is: the most defensible position on the self is that consciousness is just a momentary phenomenon that comes packaged with the illusion of continuity.
(emphasis added)
This is the critical point right here.
I am exactly talking about that line, except I am talking about persistence of the self, not "the body". Like it or not, whether I survive in any form -- whatever that might be -- versus being as dead as Napoleon, *is* a binary.
Presumably you are happy to say Napoleon is completely dead today, right?
So, to put it in your "continuum" terms, Napoleon's level of alive is 0.0. And, in the imperfect transporter, the proposition that we are interested in, that is binary, is whether the person stepping into the transporter will be 0.0 alive after the process.
And it is very problematic for the position of psychological continuity for the reasons given; the line is arbitrary, yet important, and further yet: unknowable.
Finally, let's stop with the "we both know" -- try to get through a post without asserting someone else's inner beliefs.
The person at destination is a copy of the person that stepped into the transporter. We could make any number of copies, either through other means, or by adjusting the transporter so that it makes multiple copies. All of those copies are copies. They are not all the person who stepped onto the transporter.
I am putting the point to hypericin, because it's an argument against psychological continuity. Perhaps put your point to him?
Apart from that, it seems again you're just asserting bodily continuity. What would take things further is an explanation or further elaboration. A couple of posts ago you suggested that freezing time would not end the self, but even a nanosecond of separation would. Why's that? What's lost in that nanosecond?
Assuming psychological continuity is correct, it is up to you to draw the line. If you believe that any degree of survival counts as survival of the original, then if Napoleon came out of the teleporter, and he had the faintest, most fleeting and occasional memory of the teleportee, well then for you that is full survival. But that is just your personal judgement: you are treating a continuous property as a binary, and you are free to designate any line you wish. But however you draw the line, the reality is that in this case the teleportee survived only to an infinitesimal degree.
Again, I think I personally believe in bodily continuity at this point. But, the imperfect teleporter does not refute psychological continuity. That conclusion relies on treating something that is continuous, psychological survival, as a binary.
I am, quite explicitly, not. On a psychological conception, it doesn't change anything about what i've said. Either you survive or you don't. The intuitions being tested are at what point, and under what criteria does the 1 or 0 obtain. There is no way ot argue for "partial survival" because one cannot be and not be.
To make this clearer, what I'm saying is that if you're wanting to give me a "0-0.1-0.2-0.3...1" spectrum, then you need to say at what exact point survival obtains. It cannot be part here, more there. Either the person survives at point A or not. I do not see there is another way for this to run. You simply cannot survive and not survive.
You think the you that's waking up tomorrow morning isn't really you? That if you go on a bender, you won't have to suffer the hangover? Someone else will? That's so obviously wrong.
I agree.
I think you understand better than the thread starter.
What is your opinion on "cryonic sleep"?
That does not seem right, at all. There is no cessation of consciousness during sleep. There is a dampening. Your pre-and-sub-conscious are all fully intact. It is only normal, waking consciousness which has been stymied. This butters no bread for the discussion. Suspension is not cessation is also worth noting.
I haven't followed the whole thread. I just jumped in at the end. What is the issue with cryonic sleep?
Would you expect to see the world in a hundred years (if cryonics is working well) or would it be just your copy claiming being you?
I have given you ample reasons why you can partially survive, in the psychological sense. You respond by blankly insisting that no, you can't. .
Not at all. I make no claim about how persistence works under psychological continuity, the whole argument is against it working as an explanation.
So, if you're asking me under "my terms" of whether Napoleon has survived, my answer is f-knows, it depends on what determines the difference between surviving in any form versus not surviving at all, and we have no idea what does, or could, determine that.
Again, I don't claim to know, but it's the strongest position to take right now.
Both "bodily continuity" and "psychological continuity" have serious counter-arguments, which "no continuity" does not.
What's your argument against "no continuity"? Upthread, I begged someone, anyone to come up with a counter-argument to it. I don't want it to be true. But before this thread, I never heard an argument against it and that continues to be the case.
? This guy gets it
This is absolutely key to what I am saying with the imperfect transporter.
Quoting hypericin
Partial survival is survival. So, going back to the idea of a continuum, the implication of what you're saying is that 0.0000001 = "partial survive", which is a form of "survive". It implies that if the person walking out of the transporter has a single atom the same as the person at source, then the person at source has survived.
...It's a consistent position I guess, but I don't think most people would bite the bullet and claim that if Obama walks into the transporter, and Reagan walks out, then Obama has survived.
If you had a stroke or a TBI, what determines whether you survive in any form, or whether your old self is gone? There is no hard line. Part of you is gone, that is all. Do you think some metaphysical argument can determine this?
Insisting that there must be a line between survival and extinction, either in the teleporter case or a mundane brain injury, is a mistake.
Quoting Mijin
It implies no such thing. you are the one insisting that survival is a binary.
Once again: you're shifting to a different situation asking a different, qualitative, question.
For people that believe in bodily continuity, for example, any level of brain damage that doesn't kill them results in still the (numerically) same person, even if their characteristic (qualitative) self has changed a great deal.
However, those people would also trivially say that in the transporter scenario it doesn't matter if the person at the destination is qualitatively identical, they still are not the numerically same person.
Now, in the case of your position, of psychological continuity, it seems you are just avoiding the question and trying to answer a far simpler question. We aren't talking about qualitative identity, we are talking about numerical identity. And you have agreed that there's such a thing as simply being dead outright.
So the question is where the line is drawn between being dead outright and still existing in some form.
You're not addressing this question at all.
It is not possible to refute, because you can define it as always true, but it is incomplete. It doesn't answer who you will be after being transported or after cryonics.
It's like answering "grass is green, please refute".
Numerically the same body, not the same person. You can suffer enough brain damage such that your personhood is extinguished, but your body survives. And certainly enough to radically alter your self, in the deepest way possible.
Quoting Mijin
We are talking about numerical identity of the self, which may indeed hinge on qualitative identity. If a teleporter is not a death machine, it must.
This would have been a clearer way to illustrate hte point, thanks Mijin.
Behaviorism used to be the strongest position to take regarding mind and consciousness, but it's gone out of favor, for obvious reasons. Dennett and the Churchlands used to be very influential, but now the energy has shifted from eliminative materialism to computationalism and panpsychism (which also had a heyday 100 years ago).
What's the strongest counter-argument against eliminative materialism? Your own lived experience. How do you know you're not a p-zombie? You can't be wrong about the fact you're conscious. The idea that I'm constantly dying and there's a new me popping into existence all the time (esp. when I go to sleep) used to scare the hell out of me, but I don't take it seriously anymore. As I became more idealistic, non-continuity became increasingly implausible.
No; numerically the same person.
This might be the reason for the confusion here.
You seem to be interpreting "bodily continuity" as meaning something like "Let's only care about the body, and not the self". That's not what it means.
It means that the self is inherently tied to the physical substrate and therefore is also the self. (and further; that in the transporter problem there is no way to transport the self, although opinions tend to be mixed on what happens if you beam across the actual atoms of which the person is made).
No. I don't know what you mean by "define it to always be true".
As I've alluded several times at this point, there are at least 3 positions we can take on the continuity of consciousness: bodily continuity, psychological continuity and no continuity.
We can certainly come up with compelling (IMO) arguments againsts the first two, and I've summarized several of them in this thread.
I don't know what you mean by no continuity being "not possible to refute" other than you cannot think of a refutation. Nor can I, and that's the point.
It's not though. Proponents of psychological continuity take the opposite line. e.g. Here's an article that from beginning to end implicitly assumes that as long as we can perfectly copy the quantum state of the original particles, then it is one and the same person before and after transportation.
Now, psychological continuity isn't my position. But you don't defeat that position by just saying "It's an obvious fact that you're wrong".
Nope.
Quoting Mijin
I interpret it to mean that bodily continuity is a prerequisite of physical continuity. So yes the self is in some sense tied to the physical substrate. But this does not entail a strict identification with the body that you seem to think. The body can still persist in cases where the self is extinguished. Death is the obvious limit case. Followed by brain death, then severe brain damage.
To be sure, the brain is part of the body. But (assuming bodily continuity) identity likely hinges mainly on the functioning of the brain, not the body as a whole.
First, I didn't say "that you are wrong." When quoting me, kindly don't [I]mis[/I]quote me. At least not intentionally.
It is obvious that dispersing someone's particles kills them.
What if the process requires that the original remain alive for x seconds after the duplicate materializes elsewhere, [I]then[/I] their particles disperse? Is it more obvious that the original is dead in that scenario?
If we can do it once, them we can do it multiples times. So we perfectly copy the quantum state of the original particles a hundred times. Do we have a hundred people who are all "one and the same"?
I disagree with the article. Any conclusions about this topic are opinions, not objective facts. Here's a problem right off there bat.
Quoting Zia SteeleYou're [I]not[/I] there. Your particles have been dispersed. Why does the author think you have any sort of feeling at all? Why would anyone think non-existence feels like something?
It wasn't meant to be a quote; quoting someone is *one* use of scare quotes.
But yes since some of those words were used by you, I acknowledge it wasn't that clear I was paraphrasing.Quoting Patterner
Right-- that's a standard argument against psychological continuity that we've discussed upthread. And we've discussed the standard response; that as long as the two entities' experiences have not diverged then they are indeed the continuation of a single consciousness.
You may be incredulous of this explanation, but such incredibility would not disprove psychological continuity, nor tell us that under bodily continuity that even a nanosecond separation means simple death.
And again FTR: my position is neither bodily continuity nor psychological continuity
Quoting MijinHow many nanoseconds are needed to bring about simple death?
But at the moment immediately after B comes into existence, they have diverged. That's crucial, and being missed.
But the point was, I was asking you for an explanation of how we arrive at the position of bodily continuity, and your response was to basically assert that it is obvious that separating our particles -- for any length of time and regardless of what happens afterwards -- results in our (permanent) death.
So I was illustrating to you that, no, you can't use that kind of statement as a premise as plenty of people disagree with it. So we're still missing an explanation, other than it just seems that way.
Quoting Patterner
Again, my contention is that the least flawed position right now is that there's never continuity. So to me it's irrelevant, as at every instant of time we have simple death, followed by a new consciousness that believes it has existed for years.
But under psychological continuity the time interval is irrelevant also. If your brain was formed again in a trillion years' time, then that's you.
It's only really an issue for bodily continuity to consider if I am still alive if my particles are separated for an infinitesimal period of time, and what level of connection is required etc.
Exactly -- they diverge when they diverge, and that is indeed after B comes into existence.
So a proponent of psychological continuity would typically say that there a period of time in which the consciousness truly exists in two places, but as soon as either entity receives stimuli from their new location, they've split into two entities.
Again: please bear in mind that psychological continuity is not my position. It's weird I'm having to defend and explain psychological continuity to proponents of bodily continuity, and vice versa, yet I don't believe in either position myself.
That doesn't seem entirely wrong to me, it just begs the question of how could that possibly matter, if all it obtains in is a single planck-length type moment. I realise it's not your position, I'm just kicking cans about now.
It matters a lot for people taking the PC position, because it means the transporter works.
Until the experiences diverge, Picard exists in two places with neither having greater claim to being the "real" Picard. Then, as soon as their experiences diverge, they are separate individuals, but both are a continuation of the original.
Under PC, it's quite rational to take a transporter trip.
Of course, if, one second after you said "Engage!", you find yourself standing on the source pad, about to be dematerialized, you'll feel rather differently about it. But that person's screwed in all 3 theories of continuity.
I'm not following you.
The psychological continuity position, as I understand it, does require being qualitatively the same. Abraham Lincoln walking out at destination isn't you. So it absolutely does matter whether the transport works or not.
On the subject of divergence; that matters too. If the copy is different to the original on creation, then it wasn't a successful copy, but if it diverges afterwards, that's fine; as our whole life is a kind of "divergence".
Of course we can get into the weeds of how similar is "the same" -- and that's exactly the point of the imperfect transporter.
If I've misunderstood you please elaborate.
I know. I suggest to slow down a little and work through element-by-element - it's hard to keep hold on all the different concepts.
The transporter does not need to result in a you the way you are (relatively strictly) describing it. On a PC position, you can come out, and diverge immediately (becoming "someone else"). And this does not matter. The person, whoever it is, is continuing your psychological aspirations, desires, wants, needs and ambitions - perhaps, finishing a book you were working on.
On this account, it doesn't matter, whatsoever, that the machine failed to send "you" to Mars. The person will be you regardless (in hte sense of 'close enough'). This requires that we accept that "personal identity" does not obtain beyond numerical identity (which is logically secured). I understand from your responses, this isn't good enough. I basically agree.
Quoting Mijin
This is more closely linked to the real issue than the previous question. I hope the above gets us somewhere close to understanding on it. I would add that if, at the moment of inception the person is not exactly the same psychologically, then continuity hasn't quite obtained. This then brings us to, as you say "how similar" one must be secure the line I've bolded above. Is this a little bit clearer?
It does matter though.
Let's, as you say, break it down, because there might be a degree of us talking past each other.
1) We agree that, under PC, there is a continuation of "you" if the person at destination is the same as the person at source (was)
2) We agree that there are hypothetical situations where, under PC, there is no continuation of you -- e.g. Abraham Lincoln walks out at destination. Or a turtle.
Now, what I take you to be saying is that:
A) If the person at destination has diverged a tiny bit, well, that's still a successful translation, the same as (1) above.
...but I am not prepared to grant that.
Because, the only thing we can know for sure about PC, from the transporter problem as it is usually phrased, is that an identical copy is a continuation of the self. Anything more than that is an extrapolation, and it's one that I would want a proponent of PC to give, with an argument, because the arbitrary and unknowable nature of that is the whole point of the imperfect transporter.
If you were to say that there is a period of time in which the source and destination person are indeed identical, even if that is just for a planck time, or even if they are not coexistent (e.g. destination person at t=1 is identical to source person at t=0), then fine.
Being identical and then diverging is answered with vanilla PC. Anything else is not. And that's why the distinction matters.
If you are standing at a fork in the road and I ask you which path you will take, you don't answer A or B.
You say that after you have walked the path, you will look back and see where you came from. That cannot be refuted, but it is also not an answer to the question.
Perhaps I don't fully understand the concept of no continuity.
I think you mean that you only have a relationship with yourself through the memory of who you were, i.e., in retrospect.
But that doesn't say anything about who you will be after the transport.
You should explain exactly what no continuity means in the context of the transporter.
But to summarize the whole thing again:
1. The assumption that most people make in daily life, me included, is that we are a singular, persistent consciousness throughout our lives. Even for people who (incorrectly) believe our brains shut off during sleep, they will generally believe that the consciousness that awakes the next day is still the same singular instance.
2. The question of parfit's transporter problem concerns what happens to that singular instance when transported ala star trek. Is it merely copied, while the original is destroyed? Or can we meaningfully say it has been moved, or at least is now at, the destination?
3. The two positions outlined in (2) basically map to "bodily continuity" and "psychological continuity" respectively. We'll use BC and PC for brevity.
4. Both BC and PC have many well known counter-arguments, and the imperfect transporter is adding to that list. For the sake of us clearing up any misunderstandings first, it doesn't matter if you think all the counter arguments are flawed. They could be complete balls; let's put that to one side.
5. So I have been asked, what my position is. And I have said that the best supported right now is "no continuity" (NC). Under this position, we question the assumption, made all the way back in (1).
If consciousness is never persistent, we just have the illusion of it being so, because we inherit memories from the last guy, then all the arguments in (4) disappear. And indeed, the transporter problem is vanquished in general.
Quoting Mijin
Not really, no. "is the same as" is up for debate, and has been in this thread. 'success' for me does not require this. It requires only relation R (which is why, in actual fact, I don't think there can be success because personal identity does not obtain - but im trying to stick to your terms). Given that the atoms on Mars are not the atoms on Earth, i cannot grant that this is possible through the experiment we have at hand.
Quoting Mijin
I can't quite grasp what you're asking me here. If PC is the theory we're testing, there are ways it can obtain and not obtain. I didn't think tihs was interesting. It was like saying P or not P. Tells us nothing.
Quoting Mijin
To some degree, yes. But again, I don't think PC really can give us a 'successful' translation (as noted above) so its possible I can't answer this adequately. On it's own terms, though, I would say yes. If the idea is that at hte exact moment of the event, 'you1' dies and immediately (instantaneously even) "you2" arises with exactly the same dispositions, desires etc.. then that is as close as we could possibly get on my view, so i call it a success. But strictly speaking, I don't grant it either. Again, I may not be able to adequate engage this point for that reason.
Quoting Mijin
I don't think this is the case. The problem as it's usually phrase is designed to test your intuitions about what constitutes identity. Not whether one or other of those intuitions can actually withstand the experiment. This is why I ended up on PC, but rejecting identity all together. Zero of my intuitions work here, which leads me to believe no version of "identity" can be found in the experiment at "you2". I can only claim to accept that the PC argument gives us "as good as identity" because I don't think identity can be found even in "you1" in some significant sense. Any given moment might be able to be argued that way, but for the same reason this doesn't work for the transporter, it doesn't work for the original either.
Quoting Mijin
I don't thikn either obtain. Perhaps I've already come the same conclusion you have and we've been working backward..
I think this is the critical misunderstanding on your part, and is my response to all of your points in that post.
I was laying out what the personal continuity position is. The "you are transported" position.
No, it is not asking you to question whether an identical copy is you: that's the point of Parfit's transporter problem in the first place. PC is explicitly a response about such problems; it's making an explicit claim about what would happen.
1. You hear the story, and have an intuition about it: Survive, or not. If you choose 'survive'; then
2. You need to justify how it is that you survive, identically, in person2; or
3. Explain why identity fails.
If what you're saying is that the 'response' you're laying all this at the foot of is just 2 and 3 above, I'm unsure that you're being all that serious. That has been what I've been saying all along and is not in any way a misunderstanding.
The substantive objection I'd make is that your position in your self-quote above is (as best I can tell/as far as I know) entirely wrong. Psychological continuity is one way for 2 and 3 to go coupled with the person's explications. The way the story is usually phrased doesn't give us anything to go on, without our own intuitions. We don't 'know' anything. You're free to reject that PC continues any kind of self (which I do, personally). This has now gone in the same circle three times.
I would appreciate if you could actually clarify how any of this is being misunderstood (so far, you have not done so).
What I am saying is that you are confusing the problem itself from the responses to the problem. We can super clarify it by putting it into three sections:
1. The original problem (Parfit's transporter)
A person steps into a transporter.
Their body is scanned and a perfect duplicate is made at some remote location, while, at the same time, the original body/person is killed.
What happens to the consciousness, the self, after this set of events?
2. Philosophical positions on personal identity
Bodily continuity -- continuity of the self depends on continuity of the physical substrate
Psychological continuity -- continuity of the self depends on continuity of the content of the mind -- the memories, the personality etc
No continuity -- there is never continuity of the self. It just feels as if there is because we inherit memories of previous entities
3. Therefore, what should a rational person do in the situation (1)?
BC says stay away; the transporter kills you -- the person at the destination is not you
PC says go ahead; you will arrive at the destination
NC says it doesn't matter what you do; you have 1 second to live either way
Now, there's a fourth section we can go into: counter-arguments; of which the "imperfect transporter" is just one. But I want to check you're on board with 1-3 first.
I think PC and NC are actually the same position.
PC says there is no deep fact of continuity or discontinuity. What matters is the subject's perception of continuity, nothing more. The believing is the reality. I see no divergence here with NC.
And so the imperfect transporter is not an objection to PC. It is not the universe which is supposed to be deciding whether or not continuity happened. It is ultimately up to the subject whether they are a continuation or not. If there is a dividing line, that line is a preference of the subject, nothing more.
If i was less clear than this, as it seems I was, i apologise. But this, it seems, is the case.
PC explicitly states that Identity does not obtain, and it doesn't matter: what matters is PC. That's what the PC position is. I think perhaps there are plenty of misunderstandings floating about this explication...But to be intensely clear, this is why I go with PC: There is no way to get identity to work, so something has to matter and perceptions seems the only option. Person2 thinking they are you is good enough.
They both agree on the same underlying fact: there is no continuity beyond the perception of it. NC adds the additional idea: therefore, we are always dying.
But is this idea coherent? If there is no continuous consciousness, then what is it that is doing the dying? It seems there must be a continuous consciousness in the first place, for it to die. NC can only answer: it is the instance of consciousness that dies.
Consider an analogy with the Ship of Theseus. PC: there is no underlying reality of the identity of the ship, whether it is the same ship or not is up to the observer. NC: there is no underlying reality of the identity of the ship. Therefore, the ship is being destroyed again and again, every instant. What is being destroyed? The exact state of the ship, at the molecular level.
Why is the exact state of the Ship reified into a thing that can be destroyed? If identity is ultimately conceptual, then this exact state is simply the wrong concept, meaning, a useless concept no one uses in practice. The right concept is more like, the functional unity of the ship's parts over time.
It is like NC is saying, identity is conceptual, not actual. And, I am now completely redefining the concept in such a way that everyone is dying millions of times a second.
Moreover, no human behavior is coherent under NC. Even hedonism is irrational. Why reach for that ice cream? Me + 10 seconds will enjoy it, not me. A theory that makes nonsense of the entirely of human action just might be the wrong theory.
Call it "adding on", or call it different. Maybe it's just semantics?
But personally I would maintain it's actually a different position. PC says I am the same person as the Mijin of 10 years ago (numerically the same of course, not qualitatively). NC says I am not, in either sense.
When it comes to the imperfect transporter, PC has the difficult problem of establishing where the line is of numerical identity. It's like "heap" problems where there is the problem of which hair you remove that transitions a person from "full head of hair" to "balding". Except that the classical heap problem is fairly trivial IMHO, being largely a matter of a third person making an arbitrary choice. But the imperfect transporter actually matters, to the first person, because it's whether you are alive or dead.
NC doesn't care about the imperfect transporter; it has no applicability or relevance.Quoting hypericin
Conscious experience. In a sense NC is saying that consciousness does have a lifespan; it's as long as a unified conscious experience, so probably something around 1/10th of a second. Not more than a few seconds anyway. After that, you can call it dying, or ending, it doesn't matter. The point is, it isn't the "three score and ten" of a human body's lifespan.
What would be the point of planning if you only ever live for a heartbeat? I don't think you believe NC yourself, so why would you respond in this thread when you won't even get to see the reaction yourself?
Firstly your point obviously has nothing to do with whether it is true or not.
Lots of things in the universe are either unpleasant or unintuitve, it doesn't make them false.
But secondly, I haven't claimed to know the NC position is correct, I have only said that it is the position that stands up best to the counter-arguments right now. It is not rational based only on that tentative judgement, to give up on life immediately.
But in fact, even if I knew that NC is correct it, doesn't give me any basis to not do anything either, so I may as well continue to play along, for this millisecond that I'm alive.