From: Lee Corbin (lcorbin@ricochet.net)
Date: Sat Jun 02 2001 - 13:30:03 MDT
Eugene Leitl writes
>> "Personal identity in philosophy has no easy definition..."
>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.
>
>> 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 are
concerned. I'm overdoing it on purpose, but philosophy's
mandate has obviously expired. Similiar applies to ethicists
(thanks, but no thanks).
I agreed with what you are saying back in the seventies,
but only because (J.J.C. Smart and one or two others
excepted) philosophers appeared to be totally clueless.
I spent a whole afternoon in 1967 (at the age of 19)
arguing with a verifiably brilliant philosopher named
Philip J. Wheelwright. We finally came to loggerheads
when he refused to admit that memories depended upon
physical constructions in the brain. He simply wasn't
a materialist; even at that tender age, I knew that he
was, in a word, nuts, despite his tremendously keen
intellect.
But philosophers have an extremely important role to
play. There are tremendous implications stemming from
evolution, materialism, and various sciences. These
implications can and should affect our daily lives.
Daniel Dennett I regard as the greatest philosopher who
has ever lived, if instead of going by talent (okay, so
he's probably not up to DesCartes or Kant), we go by
understanding.
>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.
Hmm. Ever wonder why there is so much disagreement, then?
Even among people that you respect highly?
Now, some questions, e.g. whether to upload, whether to teleport,
whether to buy memories instead of getting them by experience,
may bore you. Or maybe in one flash of instinct and intuition,
you seize upon an answer that makes perfect sense to you.
Moreover, you may not enjoy debating those answers with people
whose intuitions led them to different answers. As you say,
each to his own.
>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.
Well, some of us like to imagine what we'd do if tomorrow it was
nnounced that Arthur C. Clarke had been wrong, and that someone
had found a way, that with a few more years' work, teleportation
could be achieved. We can imagine this occurring, and can also
foresee that we'd be very uncertain about what to do in that case.
First (especially those of us who've been pondering this for
more than thirty years) we wonder what this implies about who
and what we are. We think of this thought-experiement as a
way to get a handle on ancient questions. I can understand
if these questions don't interest you.
Second, incredibly enough, with uploading, some of these
ancient questions devolve into real choices that many people
reading this will one day be faced with! So one can "be
prepared" by engaging in thought-experiments, sometimes
even about the wildest things.
>> that you, Eugene, are a "statist" like me, but that for some
>I don't know what a statist is, actually.
It's believing that everything about you is contained in
the physically running instance; that is, that the current
state contains all the information there is about you.
(Relevant to your identity, anyway. To be sure, there
are important things about you---or who you once were---
that no longer reside in your current state. But they're
pretty minor.) It's perhaps so obvious to you that you
have a hard time conceiving otherwise.
But many people don't believe in "path independence". They
think your entire current state isn't enough to specify you.
It depends, they say, on how you got here. If a small frog
was slowly changed until it was in the same state that
Eugene Leitl is in, then it would still be the frog, but
just looking funny---er, sorry, looking much better.
"Statists" or adherants of the information theory of identity
believe that the path is irrelevant. There are no souls.
You are what you are at any instant.
>> 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.
In philosophy, the term "identity" is used to mean personal
identity; that is, you are the same person that you were
yesterday. It's identity in this sense.
>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.
Quite so. That is what is meant.
>> (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).
But this is philosophy. Careful, or you'll get sucked in :-)
Lee Corbin
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