You’re right. Multiple distinct individuals cannot the the same individual. But all of them have a valid claim to being the same identity. I was thinking about the center of the universe. There isn’t one. Any spot in the universe is as much the center as any other. If there are a hundred replicas of me, they are all me. Any individual replicas is as much me as I am. You can follow and study any individual, and you will be studying me. You’ll see something different for each one you study, just as you’ll see something different when you look out from each spot in the universe.
When I said only psychological elements matter, I meant that in the sense of what is meaningful and valuable to us. The gray matter is relevant and valuable exactly to the extent that it supports our personas. And the areas of the brain that are relevant to BC are just those areas that underwrite PC. In and of itself, the tissue is not what is valuable, it is the psychology the tissue enables.
But this is not to say that only PC matters for continuity. Both BC and PC matter.
Yes, I’m aware of the distinction. And because I believe that both numerical and qualitative identity must be maintained for continuity, I believe that both BC and PC are needed. BC is needed to maintain numerical identity, and PC is needed to maintain qualitative identity.
I’ve come up with a principle I use to help judge these cases:
If there is a situation where it is even logically possible for the original to meet its clone, then continuity is broken.
The moment the original lays eyes on their clone, any pretense of continuity is lost. In the standard teleporter case for instance, the original has to wonder: “I obviously did not continue as this clone/destination person. But if the teleporter had disintegrated me, I’m supposed to somehow now be the clone?”
This means that I do accept the transmitted atoms case as continuity, as there is no logical possibility of the original meeting their clone. This is not as arbitrary as it might first seem. You might conceive of any object, living or otherwise, as a unity of form and substance. Destruction is when that unity is permanently dissolved. When transmitting atoms, there is only a temporary dissociation of form and substance, not a permanent dissolution, as they are later reunited. Whereas in the reconstitutive teleporter, form is ripped from its substance forever, and used later with new substance to build a new object.
I still think you’re describing the BC position. Proponents of BC do not claim it doesn’t matter if you have brain damage or whatever or that your memories, psychological state etc don’t matter.
It’s merely about questions like, say, whether it is possible for human consciousness to be “moved” into digital form so you could “live on”. Proponents of BC would say that it is impossible, and proponents of PC would usually say it’s likely possible (I use less definite language here because being a proponent of PC does not necessarily entail believing strong AI)
Again, we’re concerned with the question of whether, from your own point of view, you persist or not. Not whether a third party considers you to still be characteristically you.
In this context, numerical identity is talking about the persistence of one, singular consciousness, even as it changes, continuously, in a qualitative sense.
I don’t know what both being necessary even means in this context, if you’re saying that qualitative identity must remain the same then, ironically, you’re describing NC.
OK, so I’ll ask again: what’s special about your atoms?
Imagine in this hypothetical, all your brain’s atoms are put in a bucket and then I have a second bucket with the same proportion of carbon, hydrogen etc. And I reconstitute your brain from one of the buckets.
It would seem, in this viewing, that even a being with perfect knowledge of the current state of the universe, and perfect knowledge of the state of your brain prior to disassociation, cannot know whether you have lived on, without knowing from where each bucket’s atoms were sourced. It’s information that is somehow outside of the entire state of the universe.
By transmitting atoms instead of creating a duplicate, meeting your clone is no longer possible. In your procedure, it is logically possible for your brain’s atoms to remain intact, and then encounter the clone brain. The original cannot possibly be continuous with the clone in this case, and continuity cannot depend on the contingent fact that the original brain was destroyed.
This being would need to know not just the current state, but the path by which it was arrived at.
The point of this exercise is not to resolve scifi scenarios. I doubt these are of intrinsic interest to most people. The point of these is to stress test models of personal continuity against extreme scenarios where they seem to break. But for a model to be worth anything it also needs to handle mundane cases. Certainly, examining mundane cases is at least as important.
And so, it is not clear how proponents of BC handle brain damage cases. Either brain damage must be stipulated as not affecting continuity, up right before the death of the brain. Or, they have to say, “if the damage is enough to successfully affect psychology (however sufficiently is defined), continuity is broken”. But then this is just PC thinly disguised. What matters is to what degree personality is affected, not to what degree the organ is affected.
It is to resolve cases like this that I say PC is also needed.
Do you not see how problematic this is?
Qualitative identity of bodies:
observable
Qualitative identity of minds: observable
Quantitative identity of bodies:
observable
Quantitative identity of minds:
not observable
If it isn’t observable, how do you define it? Why should a theory of continuity account for what cannot be observed or defined?
You are making a common presumption, that identity is all or nothing. I reject this. I see identity as a continuum. Such that you are quite similar to your self of the immediate past. And quite distant to your self when you were a small child.
Only by treating identity as a continuum does identity have more than a nominal meaning. Instead of being an arbitrary designation, it corresponds directly to real world features. This view dissolves many seeming paradoxes, including your imperfect teleporter.
You’re appealing to a different hypothetical rather than answering this one. Yes, the case of duplication presents problems for PC. It also presents problems for BC, because for example we could make two brains that each have 50% of the original’s material.
So it’s complex whichever way we do this, that’s why it’s important to focus on one hypothetical at a time.
Exactly. Which is very strange right? It’s information that is relevant to the current state of the universe but is somehow not in the current state.
Yes, what level of damage allows continuity to persist is an interesting question. As mentioned, I’ve written a paper on this specifically, and first raised this issue in this thread in post #18.
I’d say it’s much more of an issue for PC than BC though.
Proponents of BC typically say that as long as you survive brain damage, you’re still a continuation. I’ll say again though – this is not to say that brain damage “doesn’t matter”, BC doesn’t say that. It’s merely saying that your instance of consciousness is continuing.
Meanwhile for PC, there’s clearly a point of damage where it can’t be a continuation. For example, if I walk into a transporter, and barack obama walks out. No-one would claim that my consciousness has now become Obama merely because the intention of the device was to transport me.
But if the transporter supposedly works for some other level of damage (even if that’s zero), that means that a dividing line exists somewhere between success and fail. A dividing line that we can never measure or know about.
The discussion of brain damage in the prior posts reminded me about the phenomenon of split brain syndrome. From a thrird-person perspective, a person whose left hemisphere can no longer communicate with their right hemisphere seems two display two different experiences from the disconnected left and right halves. What is interesting about this case is that no atoms need to be removed or replaced for this to occur, there simply has to be a prevention of signaling from the LH to the RH.
From a first-person perspective, then, there seem to be three possibilities:
(1) The subjective experience that existed pre-split is retained in the right hemisphere
(2) Subjective experience continues through the left hemisphere
(3) The person subjectively “dies” and is succeeded by two new consciousesses
If scenario 3 is the case, what happens if we restore commuication between the two halves? Is it like falling unconcious and “coming to”, in that the person does not experience the time during which their hemispheres were isolated?
This seems to be another case of questions which can only be answered by the person who experiences such a situation.
No, I’m talking about your case. My brain is dissolved in a bucket and reconstituted in another. My principle is, if it is possible, even logically possible, for me to meet my clone, I’m not continuous with my clone. Your case fails continuity by this measure. It is logically possible that my brain was not dissolved, is reconstituted, and meets my cloned brain. An appeal to my continuity in the clone cannot rest on the contingent fact that my brain happened to be dissolved in acid.
It’s only strange if you are thinking about personal identity in the wrong way. If the self is some kind of token you carry with you, or lose, then yes it is strange. But that is just soul thinking. Not souls as a spiritual belief, but souls as a way of thinking, a metaphysical residue left over from a culture dominated by Christian thought, stripped of spiritual content.
But if instead identity is relational, then it is not surprising, it is expected. If identity is a relation between present and past, how could it be found by searching in the present?
One, this faces the problem that it conflicts with our intuition. If my persona is mangled beyond recognition, or I somehow wind up as barak Obama, most would say that my original self is gone. Two, not everyone BC believer or otherwise, subscribes to this notion of an “instance of consciousness”. This is at its core, soul talk. “Continuation” or “identity relation” is preferable as terms which carry less metaphysical baggage.
BC faces this identical problem, it is not just PC. Ship of Theseus etc. There is no dividing line. Either, identify is a nominal convention. Or, identity is a continuum. You keep insisting that whether you survive is a yes or no binary. But this is just not the case. Not for objects, not for people. Some part of the person I was at nine survives. But much is gone.
You aren’t: no-one was talking about cloning. But, if we’re going down the cloning hypothetical, we can talk about entities made with partially some of your brain’s material. I don’t think this refutation of PC holds up.
I don’t believe in souls, and as I previously mentioned, I study neuropathologies. I’m the last person to invoke magic.
Upthread you said you understood the distinction between numerical and qualitative identity, yet here it seems you’re back to asserting one as nonsensical.
I think you still don’t understand the base concepts of philosophical personal identity. And this is why you don’t have a coherent position. It’s not that you’ve found a third way between BC and PC; it’s that you don’t seem to understand what these even mean in the first place.
Either your reading comprehension is poor, or you don’t bother reading at all, and just respond to whatever keywords you happen to skim. Either way it makes for a frustrating conversation.
If a brain is reproduced, and we consider the logical possibility that the original survives, under that consideration that makes the reproduction a clone. Can you understand that much?
(It is not lost on me that you are falsely accusing me of talking about the wrong thought experiment, while simultaneously trying to pivot to yet another yourself.)
I don’t know or care about your spiritual beliefs, and I have no idea why you think your job has any relevance. I will try to explain again, although I feel I’m talking to the wind.
I am not accusing you of “invoking magic”. I’m suggesting that you, like most people, have inherited a culturally predominant way of thinking about consciousness that ultimately derives from belief in souls. It is the reification of consciousness into an object, which consequently might or might not numerically persist like other objects.
The problem is, if the numeric continuity of objects is problematic, the numeric persistence of consciousness is doubly so. At least with objects we can track the material over time, and determine whether or not it is the same material. There is no such thing to track with consciousness.
The suspicion with objects is that numeric identity is arbitrary, that what counts as identity is ultimately up to the speaker. But the suspicion is worse with consciousness: the concept seems empty, unmoored to any possible observation.
I didn’t say it was nonsensical. I did say it was problematic in the case of consciousness, for reasons you didn’t bother to either respond to or read.
I’m not sure if you even know what “coherent” means. What is “incoherent” about both BC and PC being required for personal continuity?
I disagree. I don’t consider myself the same person I was 20 years ago. In fact, I don’t consider myself the same person I was 1 week ago.
The continuity of consciousness is a red herring.
There are billions of people on Earth right now, generally no one cares that your stream of consciousness directly follows from the individual you were 20 years ago. The only person who cares about this deeply, is you. Humans take themselves too seriously.
If a digital clone of my current “me” is recreated 100 years from now, generally no one would care if it’s not exactly “me”. For all intents and purposes it would be good enough. And in fact, for me it would also be good enough, I’m not exactly the same person I will be 1 week from now anyway.
I understand you, but you are the one being obtuse here, so I’ll say for maybe the 5th time: making a duplicate of someone is a different hypothetical.
As I say, if you want to switch topics to the other hypothetical, we can do that, and I’ll summarize some of the problems with BC in that hypothetical.
It’s just frustrating that you’re suggesting that you have solved the transporter hypothetical by answering none of the questions but instead appealing to a different hypothetical.
After all that rant and attacks on me, your position is on numerical identity still remains all over the place.
All I was making clear is that I am not, and never have, appealed to souls as part of my argument. Your suggestion that I am inheriting “a culturally predominant way of thinking about consciousness that ultimately derives from belief in souls” is a particularly bad faith argument. It’s not even a straw man because you cannot even point to a part of my argument that supposedly invoked a soul. All you can do is make spurious claims about what is really behind the argument.
Because they are mutually exclusive by definition. They make competing claims about what is sufficient for numerical continuity.