Similar to an argument I tried (clumsily) to make

[PyramidHead]

Philosophical Sundays - Why We Are All The Same Person

So what does that example tell us about personal identity? It tells us it seems to depend on the quality of communication. Even though we believe we are separate entities, when communication is good enough we become one. So why weren’t we the same before? I will argue that we were, since personal identity is all or nothing. We all have the same first-person perspective. We’re just badly communicated. When communication is good enough, the illusion is dispelled and the underlying reality arises. There are no people. There is only “person.”

I haven't harped on this for a while, but this seemed like an intuitive way to get the point across about consciousness and subjectivity. If with the right technology, connected brains would feel as though they are all being experienced by one individual subject, then it makes more sense to say we are already just one individual subject, without waiting for the technology to prove it to us. The language of subjects can create the false impression that I'm talking about many selves versus one Self, which I'm not. All that can be said is: if you and I integrated the experiential contents of our brains in the way suggested in the article, the ordinary hypothesis of personhood as a disembodied ghost that haunts individual brains would not be able to accommodate the result. There are no ghosts (and no Ghost). For the purposes of this topic there is just subjective experience, scattered across space and time, clustered at varying levels of integration through physical conduits, with no principled way of assigning selves to one or another physical conduit.

 

[Elixir]

Philosophical Sundays - Why We Are All The Same Person

So what does that example tell us about personal identity? It tells us it seems to depend on the quality of communication. Even though we believe we are separate entities, when communication is good enough we become one. So why weren’t we the same before? I will argue that we were, since personal identity is all or nothing. We all have the same first-person perspective. We’re just badly communicated. When communication is good enough, the illusion is dispelled and the underlying reality arises. There are no people. There is only “person.”

I haven't harped on this for a while, but this seemed like an intuitive way to get the point across about consciousness and subjectivity. If with the right technology, connected brains would feel as though they are all being experienced by one individual subject, then it makes more sense to say we are already just one individual subject, without waiting for the technology to prove it to us. The language of subjects can create the false impression that I'm talking about many selves versus one Self, which I'm not. All that can be said is: if you and I integrated the experiential contents of our brains in the way suggested in the article, the ordinary hypothesis of personhood as a disembodied ghost that haunts individual brains would not be able to accommodate the result. There are no ghosts (and no Ghost). For the purposes of this topic there is just subjective experience, scattered across space and time, clustered at varying levels of integration through physical conduits, with no principled way of assigning selves to one or another physical conduit.

Each "physical conduit" is subject to different environmental stimuli. And we often experience sensory overload just trying to process that. I can't see what kind of mind-meld would permit any of us to tolerate a billions-fold higher level of sensory input.
I must be missing the point?

 

[PyramidHead]

Philosophical Sundays - Why We Are All The Same Person

So what does that example tell us about personal identity? It tells us it seems to depend on the quality of communication. Even though we believe we are separate entities, when communication is good enough we become one. So why weren’t we the same before? I will argue that we were, since personal identity is all or nothing. We all have the same first-person perspective. We’re just badly communicated. When communication is good enough, the illusion is dispelled and the underlying reality arises. There are no people. There is only “person.”

I haven't harped on this for a while, but this seemed like an intuitive way to get the point across about consciousness and subjectivity. If with the right technology, connected brains would feel as though they are all being experienced by one individual subject, then it makes more sense to say we are already just one individual subject, without waiting for the technology to prove it to us. The language of subjects can create the false impression that I'm talking about many selves versus one Self, which I'm not. All that can be said is: if you and I integrated the experiential contents of our brains in the way suggested in the article, the ordinary hypothesis of personhood as a disembodied ghost that haunts individual brains would not be able to accommodate the result. There are no ghosts (and no Ghost). For the purposes of this topic there is just subjective experience, scattered across space and time, clustered at varying levels of integration through physical conduits, with no principled way of assigning selves to one or another physical conduit.

Each "physical conduit" is subject to different environmental stimuli. And we often experience sensory overload just trying to process that. I can't see what kind of mind-meld would permit any of us to tolerate a billions-fold higher level of sensory input.
I must be missing the point?

But adding additional brains is like adding additional processing power, right? And the technical feasibility doesn't matter much; if you like, suppose each "Google Mind" came with a CPU upgrade to let each brain handle the simultaneous streams.

What matters is that there is no logical or metaphysical barrier preventing the information represented by multiple brains from being computed in an integrated way, just as the two hemispheres of a singular brain are computed in an integrated way. So, if we regard the bearer of experiences of a single brain as one "subject", despite receiving sensory information that is a composite of several parts (and we would continue to regard him as such if one or the other hemisphere stopped functioning, as is sometimes the case with e.g. stroke), then there is no reason to artificially limit the scope of this concept at the level of hemispheres and not extend it to brains themselves. The same quality that makes the experiences encoded by both hemispheres of my brain "my" experiences, even if one of them goes dark or is separated from the other (as is done to relieve seizures in some epileptics) should apply equally to all experiences, even those that are encoded by other brains. There is simply no non-arbitrary way to insist that what is true of two lumps of interwoven neurons is no longer true when they are located in different skulls, or when there are 7 billion lumps instead of 2.

 

[Treedbear]

If we combined all the money in the world into one bank account they would all be the same bank account. ... But until we do that there are individual bank accounts. Until we are able to communicate perfectly with each other we are each distinct persons, and that remains as a useful concept. Saying we are the same person signifies nothing useful. If we split the two brain hemispheres apart and implant them in two new bodies they are two distinct individual persons. If we brought them together again they would become one individual person. Perhaps it needs to come down to conscious experience and how it is produced (or rather explained).

 

[Jobar]

I don't know what bandwidth would be required to link even two people this way, but I suspect it would be enormous. And I don't know of any even theoretical way we can 'plug in' to individual's brains in order to create such a conduit. Language certainly won't do; telepathy is bogus; maybe some form of MRI could be adapted to transcribe the states of one brain onto another, but AFAIK nothing of the sort is even theorized. So, there seems to be no way to test this IRL.

 

[PyramidHead]

If we combined all the money in the world into one bank account they would all be the same bank account. ... But until we do that there are individual bank accounts. Until we are able to communicate perfectly with each other we are each distinct persons, and that remains as a useful concept. Saying we are the same person signifies nothing useful. If we split the two brain hemispheres apart and implant them in two new bodies they are two distinct individual persons. If we brought them together again they would become one individual person. Perhaps it needs to come down to conscious experience and how it is produced (or rather explained).

First, the bank account analogy is actually useful. I'm not saying there aren't separate bank accounts, I'm saying that there's no difference between the money in one account and another account. If you took all the money from one and stuck it in another, and put the money from the second account into the first one, you would be right back where you started even though the accounts appear to have switched places. Like bank accounts, conscious beings are just tokens of conscious experience. Just as the US dollar will remain in existence as long as there is some quantity of physical currency in circulation, regardless of how it is distributed among individual ledgers, conscious experience is not restricted to the lifespan of any of its tokens.

But there are many problems associated with the multiple persons view you are describing here.

If we split the two brain hemispheres apart and implant them in two new bodies they are two distinct individual persons. If we brought them together again they would become one individual person.

From the third-person perspective it is easy enough to count entities that walk and talk and behave like persons, but what is important to this discussion is the first-person perspective. If you were the owner of the original brain (which, if I'm right, you are by default), and I told you one half of your brain was going into the body of a billionaire and the other into the body of a homeless person, what would you anticipate your experience to be after the operation? There are only a few possible answers, assuming the multiple persons view, and none of them work:

1. You would die; it would be the end of your first-person perspective. This doesn't work, because we know that people can survive just fine with only one functioning hemisphere, why should it make a difference if the other one is walking around in another body?

2. You would "wake up" in the body of the billionaire. But what could possibly account for waking up in his body instead of the homeless person's?

3. You would "wake up" in the body of the homeless person. But what could possibly account for waking up in his body instead of the billionaire's?

Worse, you have to figure out what to make of the situation upon rejoining the hemispheres. From the perspective of the homeless person with half the original brain, should he look forward to sleeping in a warm bed with fond memories of being rich and comfortable? Or should he expect to be annihilated? We rationally value the continuation of our first-person perspective, whatever its contents, and when you combine two of them into one, it stands to reason that one of them has to go. Which one is the unlucky consciousness, and how could that possibly be demonstrated empirically?

In all, treating distinct individuals as immutable persons requires accounting for them in ways that are of literally vital importance to the persons involved while simultaneously being arbitrary. Talking as if there are distinct persons is a useful concept, sure, but it's a false one.

 

[Elixir]

Each "physical conduit" is subject to different environmental stimuli. And we often experience sensory overload just trying to process that. I can't see what kind of mind-meld would permit any of us to tolerate a billions-fold higher level of sensory input.
I must be missing the point?

But adding additional brains is like adding additional processing power, right?

Heh... yeah, if memory is still available. But most "physical conduits" older than a year or so, are already overloaded and the processor is working overtime just to keep up with the input from its discrete portal.

 

[Treedbear]

...
First, the bank account analogy is actually useful. I'm not saying there aren't separate bank accounts, I'm saying that there's no difference between the money in one account and another account. If you took all the money from one and stuck it in another, and put the money from the second account into the first one, you would be right back where you started even though the accounts appear to have switched places. Like bank accounts, conscious beings are just tokens of conscious experience. Just as the US dollar will remain in existence as long as there is some quantity of physical currency in circulation, regardless of how it is distributed among individual ledgers, conscious experience is not restricted to the lifespan of any of its tokens.

Bank accounts have a variety of things that differentiate them, and far fewer things than persons. For one, they tend to be in the some currency. Human thought processes are the currency of the mind. I would even say that except for the fact that there are different types of accounts and they operate independently that the currency would otherwise have no meaning or purpose. Things only acquire meaning (ie, in the epistemological sense) by their inter-relatedness to other things.

...
In all, treating distinct individuals as immutable persons requires accounting for them in ways that are of literally vital importance to the persons involved while simultaneously being arbitrary. Talking as if there are distinct persons is a useful concept, sure, but it's a false one.

My definition of a person or of anything in particular is by how it is related to other things. Concepts are only meaningful if they are useful for explaining those relationships.

 

[braces_for_impact]

Resistance is futile.

 

[steve_bank]

Identity comes from the social environment and language.Raise a kid maliciously as does happen without reinforcement and the kid can lack an individual identity.

 

[PyramidHead]

Identity comes from the social environment and language.Raise a kid maliciously as does happen without reinforcement and the kid can lack an individual identity.

I'm not talking about that kind of identity here.

A quick thought experiment to get you on the same page (I hope):

Imagine that your mom had you through in vitro fertilization. Suppose now that, right before the gametes that made you were implanted in her, they were swapped with another set of gametes with identical genetic content (those of your would-be twin, in other words). After that, everything played out just the way it did. Would you exist in this alternate scenario?

What I'm getting at is that there is something we all think we have, something we have always had and want to keep having, that is independent of the content of our lives, including the kind of identity you are referring to. The thought experiment is just a way of showing that, if you think your existence can be traced back to a specific set of gametes and no other, then it's conceivable that someone with your exact psychological identity, physical makeup, life history, etc. could exist while YOU do not exist, and that's the kind of existence that is being analyzed here (personal identity is just the unfortunate term that has been associated with it since Derek Parfit).

 

[steve_bank]

Identity comes from the social environment and language.Raise a kid maliciously as does happen without reinforcement and the kid can lack an individual identity.

I'm not talking about that kind of identity here.

A quick thought experiment to get you on the same page (I hope):

Imagine that your mom had you through in vitro fertilization. Suppose now that, right before the gametes that made you were implanted in her, they were swapped with another set of gametes with identical genetic content (those of your would-be twin, in other words). After that, everything played out just the way it did. Would you exist in this alternate scenario?

What I'm getting at is that there is something we all think we have, something we have always had and want to keep having, that is independent of the content of our lives, including the kind of identity you are referring to. The thought experiment is just a way of showing that, if you think your existence can be traced back to a specific set of gametes and no other, then it's conceivable that someone with your exact psychological identity, physical makeup, life history, etc. could exist while YOU do not exist, and that's the kind of existence that is being analyzed here (personal identity is just the unfortunate term that has been associated with it since Derek Parfit).

You seem to be referring to some kind of religious longing. What religion provides is both a personal and group identity.

There are cultures that do not have the strong sense of indeopnedent personal identity we have in the USA. When I went throgh training to nentor kids in high school we were told never ti single out a kid from a traditional Native American culture, even in a positive. Elevating above the group ican be bad form.

Someone from Norway told me a similar thing, there it is bad form to elevate yourself above the group.

We all derive identity from the group, and our mental stability as well.

 

[PyramidHead]

Identity comes from the social environment and language.Raise a kid maliciously as does happen without reinforcement and the kid can lack an individual identity.

I'm not talking about that kind of identity here.

A quick thought experiment to get you on the same page (I hope):

Imagine that your mom had you through in vitro fertilization. Suppose now that, right before the gametes that made you were implanted in her, they were swapped with another set of gametes with identical genetic content (those of your would-be twin, in other words). After that, everything played out just the way it did. Would you exist in this alternate scenario?

What I'm getting at is that there is something we all think we have, something we have always had and want to keep having, that is independent of the content of our lives, including the kind of identity you are referring to. The thought experiment is just a way of showing that, if you think your existence can be traced back to a specific set of gametes and no other, then it's conceivable that someone with your exact psychological identity, physical makeup, life history, etc. could exist while YOU do not exist, and that's the kind of existence that is being analyzed here (personal identity is just the unfortunate term that has been associated with it since Derek Parfit).

You seem to be referring to some kind of religious longing. What religion provides is both a personal and group identity.

There are cultures that do not have the strong sense of indeopnedent personal identity we have in the USA. When I went throgh training to nentor kids in high school we were told never ti single out a kid from a traditional Native American culture, even in a positive. Elevating above the group ican be bad form.

Someone from Norway told me a similar thing, there it is bad form to elevate yourself above the group.

We all derive identity from the group, and our mental stability as well.

 

[The AntiChris]

What I'm getting at is that there is something we all think we have, something we have always had and want to keep having, that is independent of the content of our lives...

I've no idea what you're getting at (it's certainly not something I think I have). This "something" sounds suspiciously like a soul.

 

[PyramidHead]

What I'm getting at is that there is something we all think we have, something we have always had and want to keep having, that is independent of the content of our lives...

I've no idea what you're getting at (it's certainly not something I think I have). This "something" sounds suspiciously like a soul.

I don't mean it literally, like a disembodied consciousness. I just mean it's an object of analysis that can be considered apart from whatever happens during my life.

For instance, I know that if I decided to have steak for lunch just now instead of a cheeseburger, the person who ate that lunch would have still been me. That's not up for debate as far as I know. I would take it even further, though, and suggest that if something drastic about my past had changed, like if I had majored in engineering instead of philosophy, the person that graduated college with that engineering degree would have still been me; in other words, I would now be that person, living that different life, looking out through the same eyes albeit with a different biographical background. This thing that is apparently preserved in spite of rearranging the details of my diet or my education is what I'm trying to focus on, even if it's just an idea and not a literal substance.

It's what people wonder about when they ask if they would survive being duplicated in a computer, being reduced to atoms and then reconstructed perfectly, and all the other classical examples. What matters is not if the person who emerges at the tail end of these fictional operations has the same mental life as me, but rather if I will be the one who experiences that mental life, from the inside, as my own.

Out of curiosity, do you have an answer to the thought experiment I posed to Steve?

Imagine that your mom had you through in vitro fertilization. Suppose now that, right before the gametes that made you were implanted in her, they were swapped with another set of gametes with identical genetic content (those of your would-be twin, in other words). After that, everything played out just the way it did. Would you exist in this alternate scenario?

 

[steve_bank]

You seem to be referring to some kind of religious longing. What religion provides is both a personal and group identity.

There are cultures that do not have the strong sense of indeopnedent personal identity we have in the USA. When I went throgh training to nentor kids in high school we were told never ti single out a kid from a traditional Native American culture, even in a positive. Elevating above the group ican be bad form.

Someone from Norway told me a similar thing, there it is bad form to elevate yourself above the group.

We all derive identity from the group, and our mental stability as well.

Likewise.

 

[The AntiChris]

Out of curiosity, do you have an answer to the thought experiment I posed to Steve?

Imagine that your mom had you through in vitro fertilization. Suppose now that, right before the gametes that made you were implanted in her, they were swapped with another set of gametes with identical genetic content (those of your would-be twin, in other words). After that, everything played out just the way it did. Would you exist in this alternate scenario?

Assuming you're stipulating identical initial genetics and identical (I'm assuming exactly the same) subsequent environmental conditions then how could your 'swapped gametes' scenario result in anything other than the same 'you'?

 

[PyramidHead]

Out of curiosity, do you have an answer to the thought experiment I posed to Steve?

Imagine that your mom had you through in vitro fertilization. Suppose now that, right before the gametes that made you were implanted in her, they were swapped with another set of gametes with identical genetic content (those of your would-be twin, in other words). After that, everything played out just the way it did. Would you exist in this alternate scenario?

Assuming you're stipulating identical initial genetics and identical (I'm assuming exactly the same) subsequent environmental conditions then how could your 'swapped gametes' scenario result in anything other than the same 'you'?

I don't think it would, but many people do. The reasoning is pretty simple: trace your body's existence back far enough and you'll arrive at a pair of gametes. If there was another pair somewhere in this grand universe, exactly identical to the ones that actually gave rise to you, that's fine and dandy, but they are numerically distinct from yours. In fact, if they were fused and implanted, the resulting person would be someone you'd regard as a twin sibling, and not you. Even if they were implanted in someone exactly like your mother, and the person encountered all the same things in his life as you did in yours, it would at best amount to a highly accurate reenactment of your existence by a genetic clone of you. The most common view of coming into existence, which I do not hold, is that you would not have existed if a physically separate (but perhaps genetically equivalent) set of gametes were gestated in your mother's womb instead of the ones that formed you. If you can at least understand the perspective of people who believe this, then the difference between the actual universe and the one where your genetic doppelganger exists in your stead is the thing I am referring to in this discussion.

 

[The AntiChris]

Please bear with me because I'm struggling to understand what you're trying to get at.

Assuming you're stipulating identical initial genetics and identical (I'm assuming exactly the same) subsequent environmental conditions then how could your 'swapped gametes' scenario result in anything other than the same 'you'?

I don't think it would, but many people do. The reasoning is pretty simple: trace your body's existence back far enough and you'll arrive at a pair of gametes. If there was another pair somewhere in this grand universe, exactly identical to the ones that actually gave rise to you, that's fine and dandy, but they are numerically distinct from yours. In fact, if they were fused and implanted, the resulting person would be someone you'd regard as a twin sibling, and not you.

I can imagine that someone who believed that there was some unique non-physical essence/soul associated with every gamete pair (including physically [qualitatively] identical gamete pairs) might have the intuitions you describe here. However if you you don't accept the existence of a non-physical essence or soul, logic surely dictates that identical genetics and environment can only result in the same 'you'.

 

[ruby sparks]

I find this all very interesting and have long been open to the idea that self is merely an experience, a user illusion and as such not what we might think of it as. As an externalist, I'm even fairly happy that it 'bleeds out' (in a functionalist sense) beyond the confines of our brains and bodies, that to some extent it's shared with other brains and indeed with the rest on the (non-brain) world. I'm also happy with the idea that (up to a reasonable point) I'd still call myself me no matter what the content of my experiences were. I'm just not sure where the OP is 'going'. And I say that without meaning to suggest I think it is going awry.

For instance, there are many paintings in a variety of colours. That suggests that there is such a (common) 'thing' as 'colour'. But there isn't 'really'. It's 'just a concept', surely. Colour can't exist without an instance of it. Perhaps the example of money is better, given that what colour is is complicated. But I'm fine with the idea that we can think of self a bit like colour or money.

Or what about this. There are two identical bank accounts. Identical in every possible conceivable way. So, are they unique? Perhaps not. If not, then......what's the upshot? That it's wrong to think of each of them as unique and individual? Ok. But....then what are the implications? In reality, away from a hypothetical twinning, two different bank accounts are different, just as two different paintings are different. And if we extend this to selves, then surely they are different from other different selves too.