From: Ross A. Finlayson (raf@tiki-lounge.com)
Date: Sat Jun 02 2001 - 11:28:30 MDT
Eugene.Leitl@lrz.uni-muenchen.de wrote:
> Lee Corbin wrote:
>
> > Personal identity in philosophy has no easy definition
> > like that. Unlike the important concepts in computation
>
> That's too bad for philosophy, perhaps it shouldn't infringe
> upon the domain of science and technology, at least without
> utilizing similiarly rigorous tools.
>
Philosophy and science are two sides of the coin. Then there is
"philosophical science" and "scientific philosophy". Many philosophers
share parts of their philosophy with others, where its academic rigor
spans the range.
>
> Gedanken as habitually employed by philosophers are
> worse than worthless. You can never get anything unexpected
> from a gedanken. If you think you absolutely have to do a gedanken,
> you have to at least establish a measurement procedure which
> you could have implemented in practice. You're still immune
> from surprises, but at the very least this eliminates fuzz
> from your thinking. If you can't think of a measurement procedure
> the problem will not occur in reality, and can be safely
> disregarded.
>
> > theory, the important ramifications of personal identity
> > determine future courses of action that you may take.
> > Philosophy's proper role is to prescribe action, and
>
> Philosophy's (as religion's) proper role is to
> 1) shut up 2) get out of the way as far as science
> and technology is concerned. I'm overdoing
> it on purpose, but philosophy's mandate has obviously
> expired. Similiar applies to ethicists (thanks, but no
> thanks).
>
> > today's bafflement about
> >
> > * whether to teleport (assuming fictional equipment)
>
> If it's not there, I don't have to consider it. Currently,
> the only way to read out the state of a flesh creature is to shut
> it down and do an abrasive scan, destroying the original in the
> process, or instrument it with ridiculous amounts of medical
> nano (which will take a long time, during which you're absolutely
> immobile (though not necessarily aware of it), and not exactly
> pretty to look at (though not necessarily aware of it)), and construct
> a numerical model of relevant aspects of it. Teleporting a
> bit critter is trivial: it happens all the way in modern
> parallel architectures, including clean shutdown, transfer
> and resume at the other end (not entirely trivial to do in a
> mature environment which was not designed to support such
> functionality).
>
> Either way, I'm baffled to see anything baffleworthy here.
> It's ordinary, boring current technology, and projected
> capabilities of current technology a few decades downstream.
>
> > * whether to upload (assuming its immanence)
>
> You decide. I think it makes a remarable sense,
> considering that 1) you're dead to begin with, so
> the only other alternative is to get you out of the dewar,
> dig a flat grave in the field and toss you inside
> 2) it makes you way fitter than the average monkey,
> so git thine ass onboard while you still can, as the
> train is leaving
>
> Either way round there is nothing remotely waffle-worthy
> here, it's a purely personal decision. There's no "right"
> or "wrong" here.
>
> > * whether to fork (after uploading)
>
> Ditto, see above. Forking might sense if you want to experiment
> with superpersonal aggregation (a cluster of tightly coupled
> persons which were initially identical), or creating hybrid versions
> of self, absorbing a clone previously dispatched to accomplish
> a remote task.
>
> > and so on, demand careful thought. People have to eventually
> > confront extremely numerous and varied possible thought-
> > situations in order to formulate concepts both consistent and
>
> Consistency is a pointless requirement. We're monkeys, why should
> we be consistent? Life is not consistent, it just is.
>
> > satisfactory. The only entirely consistent and (mostly)
>
> Satisfactory is a purely personal metric. There can't be
> any blanket recommendations, valid for every single Jane
> and John Doe out there. Everybody has to think for oneself,
> get acquainted with the issue as far as it is possible, and
> make a purely personal decision on basis of limited data,
> as everybody must who gets out of the bed in the morning.
>
> > satisfactory view that I know of is the "information theory
> > of identity", sometimes called the state theory, explained in
> > most detail in Mike Perry's book "Forever For All". I believe
>
> I don't see any point in reading a book, the problem set does
> either already occur in current practice, or can be extrapolated
> with ease.
>
> > that you, Eugene, are a "statist" like me, but that for some
>
> I don't know what a statist is, actually.
>
Maybe it is like a probabilist, one who considers probability and
statistics.
>
> > reason you think that if even a single bit, (or a single atom
> > in the physical thought experiments) is different, then
> > identity goes from 1 (completely true) to 0 (completely false).
>
> Sure, as that's a definition. Identity is a boolean metric.
>
> If you'd said similiarity, I'd agree. There's a contiguous
> "similiarity" metric over the discrete (well, we're
> talking about bitvectors here) space of persona.
>
> > But how could that be? If an entire hair disappeared from
> > my head, or a whole neuron died (sadly that happens now and
> > then), it matters not a whit to my personal identity. And
> > anyone who thinks that it does isn't trying to understand
> > what we are talking about.
>
> The question is meaningless. You are you, and there can't
> be any diff to you (what is the pattern: singleton?), also
> by definition. If you lost a hair or a neuron died on you
> this all happens to a single instance of you active at the
> time. If you fork, and force the other instance of you go
> through the same changes as you, you're of course forcing the
> other guy to be you. The trajectory forcing rapidly becomes
> nontrivial the longer you wait, because the diff gets larger
> and larger, and the bits are not labeled, so you have to
> look for patterns, and these are pretty dynamic, so the
> longer you wait, the more work you must do.
>
> As soon as you allow the pair to decohere, there are two of
> you. A fork has occured, you've started on your deviating
> trajectories (of course you can fuse a fork by means of
> trajectory constraints, this is much easier if the fork
> is very young still, as you easily see the diff and the
> amplitude of the control signal on the system trajectory).
>
> > Of course, as I explained above, this is asking too much.
> > (Much as someone might ask of a socialist or libertarian,
> > "define the preference metrics you are using".)
>
> Well, then we're talking about ships and sealing wax here,
> and whether bees have stings.
>
Many do.
>
> > >Also, please tell me whether you think that your twin
> > >brother is yourself (basically the same situation has
> > >occured in reality as in simulation).
> >
> > This is an interesting empirical question. Evidently,
> > identical twins learn to distinguish themselves very
> > early in life. First, though, I am not talking about
>
> Of course, because they're different people who forked
> in the womb. Very early stages of embryomorphogenesis are
> surprisingly deterministic, but from a certain stage
> onward intrinsic system noise and different input (you
> can't be in the same time in the same place) made them
> diverge.
>
The human body is the most highly evolved form of life on the planet.
>
> > the animal level "it hurts when they spank me, but it
> > doesn't hurt when they spank him". I'm talking about
> > ---and here I am guessing a little---the way that each
> > twin almost seizes upon tiny differences, and slowly
> > amplifies them over time to create an actual, separate
> > person.
>
> There's no seizing, though some twins may make active
> attempts to introduce extra differences (by deliberately
> hanging out with different people in different places).
>
> They can't not be not different, because they're superficially
> similiar (they're thinking different thoughts, and if you
> look at neuronal ultrastrctures it is entirely different,
> and in relevant ways), but different people.
>
> > The strongest clue: people who fall in love with one
> > twin, but not with the other. But duplicates, however,
> > are totally different: if your wife loves you, she'd
> > love your close duplicate too.
>
> Nevertheless you're different persons, though far more
> similiar than any identical twin (duh, you only forked, like,
> five minutes ago).
>
My siblings have ages years apart from my age. I have met before male and
female fraternal and paternal twins. I think that by being twins that
their identity each as a twin is reinforced. Also, they would have
similar environmental proclivities.
>
> > (Naturally, since many people are reading this, it is
> > necessary to define "close duplicate". A close duplicate
> > is a process running at a separate spacetime location such
> > that neither is a memory superset of the other, and such that
> > the differences correspond to temporal differences of just
> > a few minutes, or at most a few days of a normal human's
> > life.)
>
> Very good. Computer science people might think of two instances
> of the same class, with initially minor differences in internal
> state (animals and people have huge amounts of internal state).
>
> > Lee Corbin
>
> --
> ______________________________________________________________
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I read more of that introductory book about the genetic code, and try to
fathom how many millions of cells are in te human body, and how it relates
to the much smaller atomic level. For example, in terms of
"nanotechnology", it is like considering humans on an almost astronomical
scale, as to that level of structure and pattern identification, with the
biological structures on a machine scale.
Ross
-- Ross Andrew Finlayson Finlayson Consulting Ross at Tiki-Lounge: http://www.tiki-lounge.com/~raf/ "It's always one more." - Internet multi-player computer game player
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