"I suppose, that personal identity cannot be contained within the history of choices that have been made, because for every choice that has been made, if it was truly a 'choice' at all, it was also made the other way in some other tributary of the Great Tao."
This might sound like a nitpick and a pet peeve, but in this case I think it's important and essential: Your decisions do not split you. At least, not in the way one would naively expect.
See Thou Art Physics: To the extent one make choices at all, one does so in a deterministic manner. When one is on a knife's edge, it's natural to feel like one's decision is indeterminate until one actually makes a decision, but that doesn't mean it's not determined by one's decision process. I don't know to what degree typical decisions are deterministic. Reasons can move one to action, but one's true reasons for action are obscured by later rationalization. It may be possible to control the degree to which one's decisions depend on quantum indeterminacy. If there's a lot of indeterminacy, it might be best to think of identity as a probabilistic computation instead of a deterministic one.
One's decisions can also depend on quantum...
"Ah, but then which conscious awareness do you wish her to have? There is no copy; all possible tributaries of the Great Tao contain an original. And each of those originals experience in their own way. You wish me to pluck out a {configuration} and present it to you, and declare "This one! This one is Ah-Chen!". But which one? Or do you leave that choice to me?"
The one where she miraculously recovered from smallpox unscathed, all those years ago.
But which one?
What do you mean? Are you yourself, right now, one person? You are not a fully constrained decision process. An infinitude of possibilities lie before you.
Why, then, do you insist that I pick out one Ah-Chen? She was, like you are, a fuzzy process. Do not limit her possibilities and strip her of her choices! I do not ask for a single point in process-space, I ask for Ah-Chen, as she was before the disease, brimming with opportunity.
I also fail to see why that particular time coordinate is important.
Because I asked you for it? I mean, I'd also be happy with her before she contracted the disease, and any time during which she had the disease (assuming she's brought back sans smallpox), and probably everything up till about a week after she's cured of the disease (assuming she's been in a coma-state since), under reasonable assumptions. But you asked for one, and that's my strongest preference (and an easy one to describe).
How fuzzy is acceptable?
This fuzzy. [points at head] Give or take.
More specifically, the present state of the world determines many histories, but all of them are very similar (from our perch, way up here above physics). I want her within the bounds that are forced by the present.
(I suspect that the present is entangled enough such that the So8res' that hallucinated Ah-Chen are distinguishable from myself, and that in all histories forced by now, she was truly there. If this is not the case, and the variance of history is wider than expected, then you should choose the median Ah-Chen within the boundaries forced by the present.)
...Do you suggests you want to pick the herd of all possible
What is the purpose to making any sort of distinction between the identity of one person, and the identity of another?
On a practical level, it often seems to have something to do with people being more willing to work harder for the benefit of people they identify as 'themselves' than they would work for 'other people', such as being willing to do things that are unpleasant now so their 'future selves' will enjoy less unpleasantness.
Out of the various people in the future who might or might not fall under the category of 'yourself', for which of them would you be willing to avoid eating a marshmallow now, so that those people could enjoy /two/ marshmallows?
When I imagine resurrecting loved ones, what makes me believe that even a perfectly preserved brain state is any more 'resurrection' than an overly sophisticated wind-up toy that happens to behave in ways that fulfill my desire for that loved one's company?
Nothing. It's just a question of definition, and social consensus hasn't set one yet. My answer is that, if the past version of said loved one would have considered this being as themselves, then I too can consider this being as them (at least in part).
When I imagine being resurrected "myself", how different from this 'me' can it be and still count?
Again, that's up to you - this is a question of what you desire, not of what reality is like. My quick answer is that the resurrected being must have all all the first order desires and values of my current self, as well as retention of key knowledge and memories, for me to consider it "myself". Any changes in desires and values must be changes which could potentially be brought about in my current self strictly via non-neurologically damaging experiences, for it to still be "me" (and I'd hesitate to define these mutable sorts of desires and valu...
You say this is adapted from a 16th century story.
I find this story strange and unusual, for that age, but you have adjusted it to fit Lesswrong. Is there a more direct translation available?
Sorry, this part:
[Editor's note: The original story was in 16th century Mandarin, and used peculiar and esoteric terms for concepts that are just now being re-discovered. Where possible, I have translated these terms into their modern mathematical and philosophical equivalents. Such terms are denoted with curly braces, {like so}.]
was Watsonian in nature. The Doylist equivalent would have been to say "This is a story set in 16th century China, but pretend that the speaker is a wise Daoist sage who has independently come up with everything we talk about here on LW, and uses the same terms for them that we do."
"Umm... that... let me think. I suppose, that personal identity cannot be contained within the history of choices that have been made, because for every choice that has been made, if it was truly a 'choice' at all, it was also made the other way in some other tributary of the Great Tao."
I don't like that part at all. As far as I understand those things, just now almost all of your measure/amplitude/whatever went into the version of you that didn't spontaneously stand up and jump out of the window and the difference between that and what would happen in a completely deterministic universe (in which you also wouldn't have jumped) doesn't seem very important.
In fact, I think that the less determined your actions are, the less they are 'choices'. Not jumping out of the window because a quantum coin came up heads may be more 'free' in some sense but if its independent from your past mental states then it's not really something 'you' do.
I think war raged within Shen's heart right at a key point of this.
I think to resolve resurrection, you may first have to resolve mind control. Because in cases like this, the person who is doing the resurrection is given mind control powers over the person who is dead. As a good example of this, I think I can regenerate most of the dilemma without any physical death at all:
Example: Assume that you and a loved one are the only people who can stop a terrible apocalypse. There is a mad scientist in the next room, the final obstacle to saving everyone. He has...
Thank you for the story. It succinctly describes my stance on identity, and similarly describes my frustration with people who do not understand the lessons in the story.
1) Who cares if it's a wind-up toy or not, if it provides indistinguishable outputs for a given set of inputs? Does it really matter if the result of a mathematical calculation is computed on an abacus, a handheld calculator, in neural wetware, or on a supercomputer?
2) Where you draw the line is up to you. If you have a stroke and lose a big chunk of your brain, are you still you? If y...
Where you draw the line is up to you. If you have a stroke and lose a big chunk of your brain, are you still you? If you're reduced to an unthinking blob due to massive brain damage, is that still you?
Personally, I have trouble accepting that I'm still the same "me" that went to bed last night, when I wake up in the morning.
If you want your resurrected self to be "you," then it's up to you to decide if your values are satisfied. A soul is something you made up. You are not barely aware of something simple and fundamental. The heuristic you use is not an approximation for something nicer. It's just what it is. If you value having simple and elegant values, there's not much you can do besides abandoning that one altogether.
If you just want to know what you would consider your resurrected self, because you have never been in that situation so you're not sure what you'd...
"You have indeed learned much. But you still have not described the purpose of your boundary-drawing. Do you wish for Ah-Chen's resurrection for yourself, so that you may feel less lonely and grieved, or do you wish it for Ah-Chen's sake, so that she may see the world anew? For these two purposes will give us very different boundaries for what is an acceptable Ah-Chen."
Poor Shen Chun-lieh should have just said he wanted the {CEV} of Ah-Chen + Shen-Chun-lieh.
I don't think anything less than CEV or equivalent will actually pinpoint individual id...
I've got nothing to contribute, other than that this story really helped resolve some personal crises on identity. This part especially:
"Even now, you are not quite correct. The soul is not a {computational process}, but a {specification of a search space} which describes any number of similar {computational processes}. For example, Shen Chun-lieh, would you still be Shen Chun-lieh if I were to cut off your left arm?"
Thank you for writing this.
I may be kidding myself, but I think of my identity as being at least as much tied up in something about how my experience usually feels as it's tied up with my memory.
I do care a lot about my knowledge of golden age sf, and was upset when I lost access to it after trying welbutrin briefly. (I don't know how often this sort of thing happens, but it damaged my access to long term memory for months. It was bad for my short term memory, too.) However, I think I'd still be me in some important sense if I cared about something else the way I care about sf, and ...
Excellent job on this post! It is very well written with some awesome & very memorable passages. (And it's going to make me think about the nature of identity way too much over next few days... :)
I watched a couple lectures from this course. It really helped me approach the issue of identity (and death) from a new perspective. Specifically, I think memories are the defining characteristic of identity.
From my recall, Kagan gave the example of someone who lived forever, but whose memory was fully erased every X years. Who would they be at any given mome...
Excellent post.
I have pondered the same sort of questions. Here is an excerpt from my 2009 book.
...My father is 88 years old and a devout Christian. Before he became afflicted with Alzheimer’s he expected to have an afterlife where he would be reunited with his deceased daughter and other departed loved ones. He doesn’t talk of this now and would not be able to comprehend the question if asked. He is now almost totally unaware of who he is or what his life was. I sometimes tell him the story of his life, details of what he did in his working life, stories o
"Is it really Ah-Chen?" is a question of value, which is up to Shen Chun-lieh in the first place.
That he, or we, have value algorithms that get confused and contradictory in situations that humans have never faced is hardly surprising .
Values are choices. Identity masquerades as a fact, but it is fundamentally about value, and therefore choice as well.
Both questions seem to boil down to the hard question of continuity-of-consciousness. When I say I want someone resurrected, I mean that I want the do-what-I-mean equivalent of pressing "play" on a paused movie: someone resuming their life as if they had never left it.
Even assuming just one possible past, I wouldn't care to cryonically preserve my 10 years younger self. It's possible that somewhere between that point in time and this present moment lies a sweet spot, but I can't really figure out where it is. Even if cryonics works, it's too likely to work so roughly that it doesn't really matter to present me who was vitrified in the first place.
With perfect altruism and infinite resources, I have a vision how this problem could go away completely. Too bad I was born with a brain heavily predisposed to egoism, and grew out of a relatively poor world.
After considering this for quite some time, I came to a conclusion (imprecise though it is) that my definition of "myself" is something along the lines of:
I've spent quite a bit of time trying to work out how to explain the roots of my confusion. I think, in the great LW tradition, I'll start with a story.
[Editor's note: The original story was in 16th century Mandarin, and used peculiar and esoteric terms for concepts that are just now being re-discovered. Where possible, I have translated these terms into their modern mathematical and philosophical equivalents. Such terms are denoted with curly braces, {like so}.]
Once upon a time there was a man by the name of Shen Chun-lieh, and he had a beautiful young daughter named Ah-Chen. She died.
Shen Chun-lieh was heartbroken, moreso he thought than any man who had lost a daughter, and so he struggled and scraped and misered until he had amassed a great fortune, and brought that fortune before me - for he had heard it told that I was could resurrect the dead.
I frowned when he told me his story, for many things are true after a fashion, but wisdom is in understanding the nature of that truth - and he did not bear the face of a wise man.
"Tell me about your daughter, Ah-Chen.", I commanded.
I frowned, for my suspicions were confirmed.
"You wish for me to give you this back?", I asked.
He nodded and dried his tears. "More than anything in the world."
"Then come back tomorrow, and I will have for you a beautiful daughter who will do all the things you described."
His face showed a sudden flash of understanding. Perhaps, I thought, this one might see after all.
"But", he said, "will it be Ah-Chen?"
I smiled sagely. "What do you mean by that, Shen Chun-lieh?"
"I mean, you said that you would give me 'a' daughter. I wish for MY daughter."
I bowed to his small wisdom. "Indeed I did. If you wish for YOUR daughter, then you must be much, much more precise with me."
He frowned, and I saw in his face that he did not have the words.
"You are wise in the way of the Tao", he said, "surely you can find the words in my heart, so that even such as me could say them?"
I nodded. "I can. But it will take a great amount of time, and much courage from you. Shall we proceed?"
He nodded.
I am wise enough in the way of the Tao. The Tao whispers things that have been discovered and forgotten, and things that have yet to be discovered, and things that may never be discovered. And while Shen Chun-lieh was neither wise nor particularly courageous, his overwhelming desire to see his daughter again propelled him with an intensity seldom seen in my students. And so it was, many years later, that I judged him finally ready to discuss his daughter with me, in earnest.
"Shen", I said, "it is time to talk about your Ah-Chen."
His eyes brightened and he nodded eagerly. "Yes, Teacher."
"Do you understand why I said on that first day, that you must be much, much more precise with me?"
"Yes, Teacher. I had come to you believing that the soul was a thing that could be conjured back to the living, rather than a {computational process}."
"Even now, you are not quite correct. The soul is not a {computational process}, but a {specification of a search space} which describes any number of similar {computational processes}. For example, Shen Chun-lieh, would you still be Shen Chun-lieh if I were to cut off your left arm?"
"Of course, Teacher. My left arm does not define who I am."
"Indeed. And are you still the same Shen Chun-lieh who came to me all those years ago, begging me to give him back his daughter Ah-Chen?"
"I am, Teacher, although I understand much more now than I did then."
"That you do. But tell me - would you be the same Shen Chun-lieh if you had not come to me? If you had continued to save and to save your money, and craft more desperate and eager schemes for amassing more money, until finally you forgot the purpose of your misering altogether, and abandoned your Ah-Chen to the pursuit of gold and jade for its own sake?"
"Teacher, my love for Ah-Chen is all-consuming; such a fate could never befall me."
"Do not be so sure, my student. Remember the tale of the butterfly's wings, and the storm that sank an armada. Ever-shifting is the Tao, and so ever-shifting is our place in it."
Shen Chun-lieh understood, and in a brief moment he glimpsed his life as it could have been, as an old Miser Shen hoarding gold and jade in a great walled city. He shuddered and prostrated himself.
"Teacher, you are correct. And even such a wretch as Miser Shen, that wretch would still be me. But I thank the Buddha and the Eight Immortal Sages that I was spared that fate."
I smiled benevolently and helped him to his feet. "Then suppose that you had died and not your daughter, and one day a young woman named Ah-Chen had burst into my door, flinging gold and jade upon my table, and described the caring and wonderful father that she wished returned to her? What could she say about Shen Chun-lieh that would allow me to find his soul amongst the infinite chaos of the Nine Hells?"
"I..." He looked utterly lost.
"Tell me, Shen Chun-lieh, what is the meaning of the parable of the {Ship of Theseus}?"
"That personal identity cannot be contained within the body, for the flow of the Tao slowly strips away and the flow of the Tao slowly restores, such that no single piece of my body is the same from one year to the next; and within the Tao, even the distinction of 'sameness' is meaningless."
"And what is the relevance of the parable of the {Shroedinger's Cat} to this discussion?"
"Umm... that... let me think. I suppose, that personal identity cannot be contained within the history of choices that have been made, because for every choice that has been made, if it was truly a 'choice' at all, it was also made the other way in some other tributary of the Great Tao."
"And the parable of the tiny {Paramecium}?"
"That neither is the copy; there are two originals."
"So, Shen. Can you yet articulate the dilemma that you present to me?"
"No, Teacher. I fear that yet again, you must point it out to your humble student."
"You ask for Ah-Chen, my student. But which one? Of all the Ah-Chens that could be brought before you, which would satisfy you? Because there is no hard line, between {configurations} that you would recognize as your daughter and {configurations} which you would not. So why did my original offer, to construct you a daughter that would do all the things you described Ah-Chen as doing, not appeal to you?"
Shen looked horrified. "Because she would not BE Ah-Chen! Even if you made her respond perfectly, it would not be HER! I do not simply miss my six-year-old girl; I miss what she could have become! I regret that she never got to see the world, never got to grow up, never got to..."
"In what sense did she never do these things? She died, yes; but even a dead Ah-Chen is still an Ah-Chen. She has since experienced being worms beneath the earth, and flowers, and then bees and birds and foxes and deer and even peasants and noblemen. All these are Ah-Chen, so why is it so important that she appear before you as YOU remember her?"
"Because I miss her, and because she has no conscious awareness of those things."
"Ah, but then which conscious awareness do you wish her to have? There is no copy; all possible tributaries of the Great Tao contain an original. And each of those originals experience in their own way. You wish me to pluck out a {configuration} and present it to you, and declare "This one! This one is Ah-Chen!". But which one? Or do you leave that choice to me?"
"No, Teacher. I know better than to leave that choice to you. But... you have shown me many great wonders, in alchemy and in other works of the Tao. If her brain had been preserved, perhaps frozen as you showed me the frozen koi, I could present that to you and you could reconstruct her {configuration} from that?"
I smiled sadly. "To certain degrees of precision, yes, I could. But the question still remains - you have only narrowed down the possible {configurations}. And what makes you say that the boundary of {configurations} that are achievable from a frozen brain are correct? If I smash that brain with a hammer, melt it, and paint a portrait of Ah-Chen with it, is that not a {configuration} that is achievable from that brain?"
Shen looked disgusted. "You... how can you be so wise and yet not understand such simple things? We are talking about people! Not paintings!"
I continued to smile sadly. "Because these things are not so simple. 'People' are not things, as you said before. 'People' are {sets of configurations}; they are {specifications of search spaces}. And those boundaries are so indistinct that anything that claims to capture them is in error."
Now it was Shen's turn to look animated. "Just because the boundary cannot be drawn perfectly, does not make the boundary meaningless!"
I nodded. "You have indeed learned much. But you still have not described the purpose of your boundary-drawing. Do you wish for Ah-Chen's resurrection for yourself, so that you may feel less lonely and grieved, or do you wish it for Ah-Chen's sake, so that she may see the world anew? For these two purposes will give us very different boundaries for what is an acceptable Ah-Chen."
Shen grimaced, as war raged within his heart. "You are so wise in the Tao; stop these games and do what I mean!"
And so it was that Miser Shen came to live in the walled city of Ch'in, and hoarded gold and jade, and lost all memory and desire for his daughter Ah-Chen, until it was that the Tao swept him up into another tale.
So, there we are. My confusion is in two parts:
1. When I imagine resurrecting loved ones, what makes me believe that even a perfectly preserved brain state is any more 'resurrection' than an overly sophisticated wind-up toy that happens to behave in ways that fulfill my desire for that loved one's company? In a certain sense, avoiding true 'resurrection' should be PREFERABLE - since it is possible that a "wind-up toy" could be constructed that provides a superstimulus version of that loved one's company, while an actual 'resurrection' will only be as good as the real thing.
2. When I imagine being resurrected "myself", how different from this 'me' can it be and still count? How is this fundamentally different from "I will for the future to contain a being like myself", which is really just "I will for the future to contain a being like I imagine myself to be" - in which case, we're back to the superstimulus option (which is perhaps a little weird in this case, since I'm not there to receive the stimulus).
I'd really like to discuss this.