Similar to an argument I tried (clumsily) to make

[Subsymbolic]

If there is a computationally possible way to do this, given enough processing power and energy, just assume that's what they did in the example. It's a thought experiment!

There isn’t. That’s why it is called the problem of other minds. You could try doing it by trial and error, but it would be NP hard. In other words you wouldn’t be able to make any progress before the heat death of the universe. Of course, that only works if you deny mental events and are just trying for a behaviourist account. If you accept mental events, even if they are reducible to physical events, then you also need to achieve that reduction from personal experience to allow you to correlate the physical events with mental events. Even those Cognitive Scientists who believe this to be logically possible think it is practically impossible. You’d need to do it twice. Of course brains are dynamic systems that are changing all the time while you are trying to do all of this...

I don't see how you could possibly know any of this, but sure. I guess the thought experiment won't convince you.

Well, let’s start with the absolute minimum figure of a hundred trillion unique neural connections. In each brain. Of course content is stored subsymbolically - it's just thresholds, synaptic weightings and so on - nothing means anything at this level.

http://www.ai.rug.nl/~lambert/projects/miami/taxonomy/node99.html

With the additional implication that ‘meaning ain’t in the head’.

https://www.iep.utm.edu/int-ex-ml/

As if the disjunction of content and vehicle wasn’t problematic enough, content is also stored superpositionally - across coalitions of neurons not within them.

https://books.google.co.uk/books?id...Q#v=onepage&q=superpositional storage&f=false

Given this, how do you hope to get at meaningful content in the head without going through the unique user illusion of the individual? Which of course is, itself, instantiated in, or at least supervenient upon, the very same neurons.

 

[The AntiChris]

Then, what would it be like for you if you were born of different parents, with a different genetic makeup, different brain structure, and a different life history? If I understand your agreement, you would just be that different person. You would experience that person's conscious existence.

I wouldn't experience "that person's" consciousness - I would, as you say, be that person.

Well, compare that person to somebody who was born in ancient Rome. Different parents, different genes, different brain, different life. Were you not also that person, experiencing that person's conscious existence?

When you say "compare that person" you mean compare yourself to "somebody who was born in ancient Rome" and no, of course I would not be be that ancient Roman.

 

[ruby sparks]

Then, what would it be like for you if you were born of different parents, with a different genetic makeup, different brain structure, and a different life history? If I understand your agreement, you would just be that different person. You would experience that person's conscious existence. Well, compare that person to somebody who was born in ancient Rome. Different parents, different genes, different brain, different life. Were you not also that person, experiencing that person's conscious existence?

If I was the sunflowers painting I'd call myself (think of myself as) sunflower me. If I was the blue woman painting, I'd again call myself blue woman me. That doesn't seem to get us to saying that if I really am the sunflowers painting, I really am the blue woman painting. So no, I was not also that Roman person, as far as I can see. I could have been, but only in the sense that if I was that Roman, I'd have used the same word ('me') as I do now. That points to an individual user illusion, not something akin to common or universal consciousness.

It seems a bit like saying to an apple, 'were you not also that orange'?

 

[PyramidHead]

Whenever I start a new thread on this topic here, it's always an education for me to hone the way in which I describe what I believe to be true. I assume a lot of commonality in the terms and concepts that clearly is not present, and learn that there are probably blind spots in natural language that make communication difficult for this particular idea.

Then, what would it be like for you if you were born of different parents, with a different genetic makeup, different brain structure, and a different life history? If I understand your agreement, you would just be that different person. You would experience that person's conscious existence.

I wouldn't experience "that person's" consciousness - I would, as you say, be that person.

Well, compare that person to somebody who was born in ancient Rome. Different parents, different genes, different brain, different life. Were you not also that person, experiencing that person's conscious existence?

When you say "compare that person" you mean compare yourself to "somebody who was born in ancient Rome" and no, of course I would not be be that ancient Roman.

What follows will hopefully clear up the muddiness of the situation a bit. I am treating as equivalent the relational properties of "being X" and "X having experiences that happen to me."
The next step is to examine what it would mean for an experience to be happening to me. We already established something quite striking (though I don't believe you have noticed it fully) in our discussion about the parameters of coming into existence. If it could have been the case that my genes, parents, history, and personality were all different from what I consider them to be now, and in that counterfactual scenario I would still exist--the person in question would still be having experiences that happened to me--then an experience happening to me cannot be a matter of it happening to any particular, objectively identified being apart from all others.

What you are still maintaining in your responses is: there is a human that exists in the world that I just am, called The AntiChris, and because I am that organism, all of its experiences are mine. But there is no foundation upon which to base that claim, as apparently ANY human, born under any circumstances, with any characteristics sufficient to enable consciousness, could have existed in your place, and you would be that person, by your own admission. The actual story is surely the other way around: any human whose experiences happen to me, whose experiences are mine, irrespective of his or her empirical qualities, is me.

After all, how do I know that I am having this experience? Do I check to make sure it is happening to PyramidHead by looking down at my body, verifying it as the same one that had previously harbored PyramidHead's experiences, and concluding that indeed, since I am PyramidHead and nobody else, this experience must be happening to me? Of course not; I immediately recognize this experience as mine from the first-person, internal, "live" way that it occurs to me. It is here, now, this. Anything that is experienced in that style is my experience, by virtue of that property alone and nothing else. Yet, all experience, regardless of where and when it happens, has this property (how could an experience that was not felt viscerally and internally even qualify as an experience?).

The inescapable conclusion, then, is that all experience is happening to me. Not me as in PyramidHead, but as anybody who has an experience. "I" am behind your eyes, with the doubts and confusion you are having as you read this, as you, right now. Your "I" is not a distinct first-person perspective assigned only to you; it's the same "I" that arises in every instance of self-awareness, in a brain, a hemisphere of a brain, or in two brains linked together through apparently impossible technology.

You will probably dismiss this as supernatural thinking, but it does not involve any new entities. We all agree about what exists. There are conscious beings with minds. There are experiences physically occurring in the underlying neurological structure of those minds. I say that when there is physical integration across experiences within a single structure, the subject of those experiences is revealed to be the same, not made the same.

What makes an experience mine (and by necessity, the mind that experiences it)? We all agree that in this regard, some attributes are essential and others are dispensable. You concede that basically all of the details of your biological makeup are dispensable, but do not yet realize that this means the identity of a particular biological entity, among all others that have ever lived, is thus also dispensable. Any one will do. All that is essential for an experience to be mine is that it has the accompanying immediacy, this-ness, and now-ness that all experience must have.

So, yes, in the same sense that you exist right now as a conscious subject of experience to whom things happen, you have existed as long as consciousness existed, and will continue to exist as long as consciousness does. There is but one "person" in all of conscious life, albeit with a highly compartmentalized self-image. Thought experiments like the one in the OP article illustrate that the only thing preventing this from being apparent is the lack of technological prowess needed to link brains together in the same way that brain hemispheres are already linked together.

 

[The AntiChris]

What follows will hopefully clear up the muddiness of the situation a bit.

Sadly it hasn't.

I appreciate the effort you've made to explain your views but I'm simply unable to follow the logic you employ to reach your conclusion. At first I thought you might be saying something similar to Derek Parfit's views on personal identity but I think you're saying something radically different. Thanks anyway.

 

[PyramidHead]

What follows will hopefully clear up the muddiness of the situation a bit.

Sadly it hasn't.

I appreciate the effort you've made to explain your views but I'm simply unable to follow the logic you employ to reach your conclusion. At first I thought you might be saying something similar to Derek Parfit's views on personal identity but I think you're saying something radically different. Thanks anyway.

It's nearly the same thing. There is nothing essential connecting any experience to any other, so if any of them are yours, they are all yours.

 

[ruby sparks]

ANY human, born under any circumstances, with any characteristics sufficient to enable consciousness, could have existed in your place, and you would be that person....

Would describe yourself (that person) using the word 'me', is all, surely? Not actually be that person. I think that's still, as it was last time, where I can't agree (yet).

 

[PyramidHead]

ANY human, born under any circumstances, with any characteristics sufficient to enable consciousness, could have existed in your place, and you would be that person....

Would describe yourself (that person) using the word 'me', is all, surely? Not actually be that person. I think that's still, as it was last time, where I can't agree (yet).

What other special quality is missing from the experience of "another" person that prevents you from considering the experiences of that person as your experiences? We have ruled out everything related to genetic makeup, brain chemistry, personality, and history. We have shown that instant access to all the contents of experience is not a requirement. We have committed to the idea that there are no ghosts or Cartesian "drivers" differentiating one person's brain from another. We have established that a given brain can be divided in ways that multiply and fuse apparent conscious subjects. Nothing is left of the original concept of personal identity that stands up to scrutiny! The only quality that can be retained as a bastion of "this is my experience" is just what it feels like from the inside for whatever is having it, so the horse has already bolted out of the gate. Experience is so much simpler than we make it out to be.

The irrational view is on the other end, saying: yes, conscious experience will continue to happen in all kinds of substrates after this one stops harboring it, but none of those experiences will be happening to me because my private stream of consciousness was only ever associated with one particular substrate out of all others, even though there is no conceivable reason why my experience should be restricted to that particular one, or why its specific configuration had the necessary and sufficient properties to enable my experience, when admittedly it could have been very different while still preserving my perspective.

To me, there is something fishy and spiritual about THAT, not the view I am proposing, which basically says: even though I don't have a comprehensive view of everything I experience, whether in the nooks and crannies of an individual brain or across multiple brains, there are no absolute metaphysical barriers between experiences I should regard as my own and those that are not, since all experience has within it the simple quality I already exclusively use to identify it as mine anyway, and without any requirement beyond that, I should regard other brains as different perspectives of my own experience in the same way I regard my younger brain, or would regard half of my brain if it were momentarily disconnected from the other half without abolishing consciousness. That seems altogether the more sensible view, and it makes my 'waking up' seem like less of a baffling coincidence and more like another instance of what has been going on since conscious life began.

 

[ruby sparks]

What other special quality is missing from the experience of "another" person that prevents you from considering the experiences of that person as your experiences?

Not having them?

As such, you are relying only on a hypothetical. If I had them I'd call them mine. That does not make me a Roman or an apple an orange. It only means the apple would, potentially, think itself an orange if it had orange experiences.

Whatever, I don't see this getting us to something akin to universal consciousness, bare or otherwise. It seems to be all about the illusions of what self is. Which is not the same thing as what you appear to be aiming for.

 

[PyramidHead]

What other special quality is missing from the experience of "another" person that prevents you from considering the experiences of that person as your experiences?

Not having them?

Without begging the question against my view, how would you know that you are not having experiences occurring in a substrate that isn't physically connected to the one from whose perspective you are making that assessment?

My claim is that you are having that person's experience, as that person, in the same internal, immediate way that who-you-regard-as-you is having what-you-regard-as-your experiences right now. It does not constitute a refutation of my claim to say "no, that is not correct, because I can only experience the contents of one brain from this perspective"... because that's exactly what my claim predicts.

Feeling as though one is isolated in a single locus of consciousness is consistent with either view; I do not claim there is a causal or informational connection among physically separate substrates. I only claim that such a connection is not necessary to make all of their experiences those of a single subject, and that this view solves all the problems of personal identity without positing new entities.

That does not make me a Roman or an apple an orange. It only means the apple would, potentially, think itself an orange if it had orange experiences.

Okay, and I'm not saying that an apple is an orange, or that you, rubysparks, are a Roman. I'm saying that you, rubysparks, are just one perspective from which sensory input is experienced, and that it makes sense to think of whatever is experiencing all of the sensory inputs across all observers as singular and indivisible rather than multiple.

It appears I have clumsily failed at arguing in favor of universalism yet again. So, I will let the philosopher who originated the idea have the final word (for now).

So what are you? Your identity cannot be confined by the particularity of any brain or other token or the detail of any experiential content or other type. Therefore, all beings that are, were or will be conscious anywhere and anytime must be you. But what could it be that makes this the case?

It would have to be something about experience and something about you that was so abstract that it would be common to all these tokens and detailed types that are yours. Let me explain what this could be.

Well, the first thing to realise is that the ordinary view of personhood makes the tail wag the dog in representing the relationship of you to your experience. According to this ordinary view, inspired as it is by the natural illusion that your identity is confined, an experience is yours because the experience belongs to you, whose identity is defined by complex mental or physical specifications. The truth is rather that you are I merely because this experience already has within it its character of being mine. Whatever possesses such experience would, therein, be I. That is finally the dog wagging the tail.

And it turns out that all experience must have within it this same quality, of being mine. All experience is mine; and I am, therein, everything that possesses it. But what more precisely is that quality of being mine?

Think of something experienced—say the sting of a slap. The experience of that sting is, for the one having it, what I shall call 'immediate' or 'internal'. It is first-personal, had as 'from the inside'. It comes with 'subjective centrality'. (And I might add that it hurts!) Every experience is thus immediate. I claim that when I think of an experience as mine, as now, as here, as this, all I am properly and coherently doing is thinking of it as having that abstract quality, the single quality of immediacy or subjective centrality. That’s all that makes it mine, here, now, this. The identity of the experiencer as I, the time of the experience as present, the place of the experience as here and the identity of the experience as this, all are fixed purely by the single, simple, subjective quality of immediacy that permeates all experience. Hence all experiencers must be I, as well as all experiences mine, now, here and this. With immediacy goes self-interest and urgency, which thus extends to all consciousness. The immediacy of any sting of a slap is enough to make it mine, the victim me and the time now. Let’s call this view 'universalism'.

But why do I so strongly tend wrongly to think otherwise?

Well, there was yet another strange planet I visited. On that planet there had only ever been one object that was red. And the inhabitants of that planet had naturally confused, in their thinking about it, being red with being that object. (Rather like the ones on the other planet who had confused a novel with the single copy of it.)

I am countless conscious organisms, but each of these possesses only one package of experiential content, isolated from that of every other. And within any of these packages only that much of the content of experience is displayed as having the quality of immediacy that makes experience be mine. So being mine is naturally confused in each with being the experience of only that organism. One must be jolted into realising that being mine is instead an abstract quality like being red. And, further, that this is a quality that must pervade all experience. For what could count as experience that didn’t have that quality?

Essentially, this view treats personal identity as something like the present moment. A detailed history of the whole universe, past and future (assuming determinism) would be complete even if it did not specify which time was "now". There is no exclusive "now" centering on one time, nor an exclusive "here" centering on one place, and the same goes for "mine" if we follow the same reasoning. There is in all experience the quality of being mine, here, now, and this, and so any organism capable of experience has everything it takes to be me.

 

[ruby sparks]

Without begging the question against my view, how would you know that you are not having experiences occurring in a substrate that isn't physically connected to the one from whose perspective you are making that assessment?

I wouldn't. You could be right. Equally, there might be elves (or god for that matter). I don't believe in either as an explanation because I don't feel I yet have enough reason to. Ditto here.

So what are you? Your identity cannot be confined by the particularity of any brain or other token or the detail of any experiential content or other type.....

Pretty ok with that, I think.

....Therefore, all beings that are, were or will be conscious anywhere and anytime must be you.

There. That's where I don't think the ladder reaches up to the ledge. For reasons already given.

To try to be precise, one problem I see is with the word 'must'. To say that I'm an orange in Belfast (lets skip the issue of apples and oranges altogether and just stick with oranges) does not mean I am (or must be) an orange in Cape Town. Or if it must be, I'm not seeing it and I've tried hard. And it doesn't matter that my self of self does not depend on the content of my experiences, which I accept (up to a point) or is a user illusion or what have you. Yes, the two oranges could be having the exact same experiences, or different experiences that they both call 'me', or one orange could be alive today and the other could have been alive in Roman times, but that, as I have said, seems to point to sense of self being an individual user illusion and not that there is something akin to common or universal or independent consciousness.

You might be right, but I don't think the argument gets you there. See also: gravity possibly being explained by invisible fairies carrying stuff down.

As such, what you have, imo, is a suggested possibility that you personally tend to favour. And not much more. The alternative explanation, that there is no such thing as immaterial/non-physical/common/universal consciousness, seems at least equally as valid. I don't think you're challenging it as much as you think. How different would things be if that latter option was correct? I'm not seeing anything to significantly counter it. And trust me, I'm not dogmatically wedded to saying it's right. If it's wrong, it would be a fascinating breakthrough in understanding.

 

[ruby sparks]

Essentially, this view treats personal identity as something like the present moment. A detailed history of the whole universe, past and future (assuming determinism) would be complete even if it did not specify which time was "now". There is no exclusive "now" centering on one time, nor an exclusive "here" centering on one place, and the same goes for "mine" if we follow the same reasoning. There is in all experience the quality of being mine, here, now, and this, and so any organism capable of experience has everything it takes to be me.

I think I'm at least somewhat ok with non-exclusivity.

But not this....

Okay, and I'm not saying that an apple is an orange, or that you, rubysparks, are a Roman. I'm saying that you, rubysparks, are just one perspective from which sensory input is experienced, and that it makes sense to think of whatever is experiencing all of the sensory inputs across all observers as singular and indivisible rather than multiple.

You're suggesting there is some thing experiencing all experiences?

 

[PyramidHead]

As such, what you have, imo, is a suggested possibility that you personally tend to favour. And not much more. The alternative explanation, that there is no such thing as immaterial/non-physical/common/universal consciousness, seems at least equally as valid. I don't think you're challenging it as much as you think. How different would things be if that latter option was correct? I'm not seeing anything to significantly counter it. And trust me, I'm not dogmatically wedded to saying it's right. If it's wrong, it would be a fascinating breakthrough in understanding.

Unfortunately for my confidence in my own powers of argumentation, the bolded is actually what I have been saying. There are no ghosts, and no Ghost. I'm not talking about a THING here, like a fairy or a deity, I'm talking about how to understand experience. When I say the subject of experience is the same for me as it is for you, that does not commit me to saying that the subject of experience is an entity like a soul. After all, we can legitimately talk about who is experiencing something without invoking anything like that.

Assuming the ordinary view of personal existence, for example, we could ask, "If I lost all my memories in a coma, would the person who wakes up be me or someone else?" There are two ways of interpreting that question, one with a relatively easy answer and one that is harder. The easy answer is for the question about whether my attributes would be so severely altered that others would be unable to relate their image of who I was to who I would be after the coma. With no memories, my personality might be so different that I would be unrecognizable even to my family. In that sense, it could be as simple as conducting a brain scan to see the extent of the damage to form an educated opinion about whether I would be a different person when I woke up.

The harder question is not about my personality, but my subjectivity. It makes a big difference for me whether or not I will be the subject that experiences waking up from a coma with no memories, as opposed to my consciousness coming to an end along with those lost memories. Do you see the distinction? The ordinary view says, I can appreciate that the person who wakes up from the coma will use the word 'me' to talk about himself, even if he has none of the memories or personality traces of the person who fell into the coma, but would it be me using the word 'me' to talk about myself? In other words, will I be the one feeling those sensations, having those thoughts, from the inside, or does my personal existence depend so closely on my memories that this new state of existence will be indistinguishable from death from my perspective? Do you see how the ordinary view forces us to make a distinction between subject and person in this way?

What I'm saying is that this distinction should be abolished. To exactly the same extent, and for exactly the same reasons, that I regard my experiences prior to the coma as mine, I should regard anything experienced after the coma as mine, even if emerging from the coma leaves my brain in a condition that bears almost no similarity to its previous state. There is no additional question about whether or not I will be "live" in the mind of the amnesiac, because there is nothing physical that could account for that. All I know is that the experience I am having here and now is presented to me with all the vividness and color that confirm it as mine, and in the same way, I can identify no physical contingency to explain why that is so.

Combining these two irrefutable facts (that there is no mechanism to declare which experiences are mine based on brain state, and that at least some experiences are definitely mine) implies, necessarily, that either no experiences are mine or all of them are; no non-arbitrary method exists to resolve anything in between. Even if there is no such thing as a self and "I" persist for just the blink of an eye corresponding to some unique arrangement of psychological states before being replaced in the next instant by another, there is no principle that would tell me why a certain time-slice of consciousness was me, or why any of them were me. If the world of conscious beings is not tethered to islands surrounded by impassable metaphysical oceans, but an array of unconnected moments of subjectivity that bear no solid relationship to one another, then the question of which ones are happening to me becomes meaningless. If anything is happening to me, everything is happening to me.

Even granting that selfhood is just a user-illusion and there is no "me" for anything to happen to, whatever is being tricked by the illusion is nonetheless having the experience of being tricked by it, and that experience sure feels like it's happening to me, so maybe that's all that it means for something to happen to me. With no such thing as a disembodied property of experience-ownership that extends to some brain states and not others, what could possibly justify saying that some instances of the user-illusion are happening to me while others are not? It is here that language starts to get fuzzy, though.

Let me put it this way: when the universal present moment was shown to be a faulty notion, unrepresentative of reality, the proper response to that revelation would not have been "you are positing a strange and non-physical 'nowness' that mysteriously inhabits many points in time that are clearly not simultaneous! How can it be true that the present moment in the Andromeda galaxy is just as much 'now' as a moment two million years in the future on Earth, unless there is some magical 'nowness' that imbues them both?" That would be to completely misunderstand Einstein's discovery. He was not saying that you could make non-simultaneous moments happen absolutely simultaneously if you put them in a certain frame of reference, he was saying there is no absolute sense of simultaneity to begin with. His was the LESS magical view compared to the alternatives, which could not answer 'which now is now' given contradictory reports from moving observers. Do you see the connection yet? Every moment of experience is now, and no instances of somebody calling their experience 'now' are 'more now' than any other. Far from requiring a mystical time-fairy that connects the disparate perspectives of the present moment, relatively showed that none was ever needed!

Perhaps it's no coincidence that many physicists adopt the view of personal existence I have been talking about (notably Freeman Dyson, for example). The question "what is happening right now in the Andromeda galaxy" literally has no answer, even though the commonsense idea of time demands one. Pick any moment within that two million-year window of the expanded present moment generated by the distance between here and there; every one of them might as well be now. In the same way, "will I be the person who wakes up from the coma with no memories" (in the sense of a subject of experience, under the ordinary view) is just as meaningless a question. And if that question is meaningless, then the same question applied to any brain, anywhere, is equally meaningless. In a very real sense, there is nothing else involved in being me than being something that calls itself "me", just like there is nothing that it means to be 'now' beyond some observer identifying it as such.

 

[ruby sparks]

Hoping to reply soon.

 

[ruby sparks]

Sorry. I still can't help thinking that no matter how intellectually interesting this is, that there is a step or steps involved (that the argument is either making, or starting to make) that does/do not follow. To say that something is relative or subjective does not mean that it is universal (depending on what we mean by that) or something it is not. I've said this, in different ways, many times. I don't know exactly what Freeman Dyson says, so I don't know if this could be said about time. As far as I can see, time moves, so one time is not another, ultimately. I am not that Roman. I could be or could have been, would be if.......x, y & z....

Now, if a part of your case (or the argument you are following) could be dialled back, made more modest, not such a strong claim in philosophical terms, then I would have little problem in going along with it. But I have a feeling it wouldn't be enough for you, not universalist enough, because all it would entail would be a version of having more empathy for others, if not entirely or literally self interest (because they are not actually you, they just, easily, could be you, or you them, in different circumstances). So to some extent that could dissolve some of the perceived-to-be rigid delineation of self and thus promote more tolerance and understanding. Though of course this is not much more than saying 'there but for the grace of [insert chosen causal source] go I' or 'don't judge someone until you have walked a mile in their shoes'.

I have a feeling that this might (might) achieve what you might like to achieve (sorry for being presumptuous) in terms of people being less selfish (or at least having a better understanding), but as I say, I'm guessing the justification for it (if it is in fact what you are after*) is weaker than the argument you are following.


* By the way, I fully understand that if this as partly your aim that you could be seeking it purely on grounds on philosophical and intellectual or factual correctness and that you don't necessarily have to have do-gooder intentions for humanity.

 

[PyramidHead]

I have a feeling that this might (might) achieve what you might like to achieve (sorry for being presumptuous) in terms of people being less selfish (or at least having a better understanding), but as I say, I'm guessing the justification for it (if it is in fact what you are after*) is weaker than the argument you are following.


* By the way, I fully understand that if this as partly your aim that you could be seeking it purely on grounds on philosophical and intellectual or factual correctness and that you don't necessarily have to have do-gooder intentions for humanity.

Well you know me, I'm a pessimist. So I don't make any bones about do-gooder intentions for humanity. To put it in terms of what I've been arguing for here:

Almost nobody alive is aware that they are me. The anticipation of an individual person for his future well-being, when you pull apart the assumptions behind it, is no more rational than it would be if he anticipated another individual person's well-being and acted accordingly. But the illusion of confinement to a single individual is so strong that it will always override rationality. I can only experience the world through lenses and perspectives. There is the perspective of the person writing this post now, the perspective of that "same" person ordering coffee this morning, and the perspectives of "others" such as the one reading this post. No one perspective is more primary than any other, but from within each, it falsely appears as though all the others are "someone else". This is equally true of the past experiences of a single individual and the simultaneous experiences of multiple individuals; I know they are mine because they were experienced in the direct way that made them so (and at least in the case of past experiences, I may be able to verify this by remembering them, but the absence of memory recall would not make them any less mine).

To maximize my chances of avoiding suffering, I should try to coordinate the behavior of all my perspectives to include as little pain as possible, but there is no way to do this while the illusion of isolation in a given perspective persists. No matter how I demonstrate to myself that the victim of a crime is the same as the perpetrator, from the perspective of the victim it will always seem like only the harm of victimization is being experienced, with none of the benefit enjoyed from the criminal's perspective, and vice versa. Within a single brain, this problem is neatly solved by integrating many perspectives on a physical level, and the thought experiment proposed by the article in the OP is one way of imagining that happening across brains--this would make it apparent that I am equally "live" in the brains of "others" and should extend genuine self-interested concern to them. Yet, no multi-brain integration short of the entire set of conscious beings would be sufficient to convince myself, from every perspective, that this concern is justified. It would always have to be taken on faith from at least some points of view.

Worse, any time a new point of view is opened up in the universe where none was before, I have to start from scratch in that context and rely on my other perspectives to get me up to speed in the new one, which is always painful and confusing for me. The link between this fact and my stance on procreation is hopefully clearer now. It's not just an ethical problem in the vein of manipulating and disposing of another person, but a problem for me as a subject of experience. Anytime someone is born, I am that someone, and I have to go through the struggle of its life, whether I am aware of it or not from the vantage of a different life. Apart from the general problem of acting according to the preferences of a single perspective to the detriment of another, this specific problem of additional perspectives is probably impossible to solve.

That may sound like science fiction, but I don't think any of it runs afoul of our best understanding of reality.

 

[ruby sparks]

the thought experiment proposed by the article in the OP is one way of imagining that happening across brains--this would make it apparent that I am equally "live" in the brains of "others" and should extend genuine self-interested concern to them.

This still, to me, seems to make the 'step that does not follow'. While it's true that if brains could be linked up in a certain way, there would likely be common or altered experiences of 'me', it's an if, and when it doesn't pertain, then it does not seem to follow that in the absence of that sharedness, that I am someone else, in any meaningful way. It just means I could be (that is to say have the experiences and call them me) in different circumstances?


So.....I don't think I can agree that it doesn't run afoul of our best understanding of reality. I think it does.

The boundaries of self may be fuzzy, or relative, or in some ways illusory, but I don't think that gets us to the sort of universalism where there are no boundaries at all, because everyone's experiences are not actually joined up, they just hypothetically could be, if they were, um, joined up.

 

[PyramidHead]

the thought experiment proposed by the article in the OP is one way of imagining that happening across brains--this would make it apparent that I am equally "live" in the brains of "others" and should extend genuine self-interested concern to them.

This still, to me, seems to make the 'step that does not follow'. While it's true that if brains could be linked up in a certain way, there would likely be common or altered experiences of 'me', it's an if, and when it doesn't pertain, then it does not seem to follow that in the absence of that sharedness, that I am someone else, in any meaningful way. It just means I could be (that is to say have the experiences and call them me) in different circumstances?


So.....I don't think I can agree that it doesn't run afoul of our best understanding of reality. I think it does.

The boundaries of self may be fuzzy, or relative, or in some ways illusory, but I don't think that gets us to the sort of universalism where there are no boundaries at all, because everyone's experiences are not actually joined up, they just hypothetically could be, if they were, um, joined up.

They don't need to be joined up, that's the point. How many of the experiences that you uncontroversially consider your own are joined up, right now?

What makes an experience of yours 'mine', for you? There is no detail of its content and no property of its possessor that could fill that role. All the features of either could be changed without robbing it of that 'mine' character. If you had eaten totally different food for the last year, such that the atoms in your body were numerically distinct from those in your body now, this quality would remain untouched. You call experiences 'mine' even when they are lost in the fog of forgetfulness, and you concede that you would call experiences received from a totally different brain 'mine' if the technology made it happen. Regardless of the substrate that was enabling your experience, it would remain 'mine', 'this one', through all conceivable alterations. Nothing can account for that fact but the first-person, subjective style in which an experience appears in awareness. Your experiences are those that feel internal, not remote like somebody else's. They are at the center of your world, in you. But what could count as an experience, regardless of where and when it occurs, without this same quality? The experiences of 'someone else' are surely felt in the same way, as mine and this.

If I understand what you're saying, you should be in total agreement with me up until this exact point, right?

Now, there are two options, and implications that flow from each one. The option you are sticking with is to conclude from the above that you have first-person experiences that are 'mine' and 'this' for you, while other people have first-person experiences that are 'mine' and 'this' for them. The tough, substantive step is to acknowledge that being 'mine' for somebody else is equivalent in every way to being 'mine' for you, such that you are all the somebody elses. This is not a verbal cheat or a sneaky implication about something mystical. It is simply an inference to the only remaining explanation after all the others have been shown to fail.

1. We dropped the requirement that an experience must happen in a certain objectively identified substrate in order to be yours when we agreed that the substrate could be altered in its material composition and pattern without taking away the 'thisness' of your experience.

2. We dropped the requirement that an experience must be connected or 'joined' to all the others you consider yours when we agreed that even in a single brain, almost none of the experiences you consider 'mine' are connected in such a way, but they remain your experiences because of the inherent first-person way that they occurred.

3. We dropped the requirement that an experience must be happening in a single stream of consciousness in order to be yours, as the only thing that makes the multiple sources of sensory information bombarding a given brain a 'single' stream of consciousness is the kind of physical integration that is, in principle at least, possible across any number of brains.

I mean, what else could possibly be concluded from all this? What vestige of metaphysical confinement remains to restrict the scope of your experience to a ridiculously particular physical specification called ruby sparks?

 

[ruby sparks]

They don't need to be joined up, that's the point.

Ok I'm going to say they do.

How many of the experiences that you uncontroversially consider your own are joined up, right now?

What makes an experience of yours 'mine', for you? There is no detail of its content and no property of its possessor that could fill that role. All the features of either could be changed without robbing it of that 'mine' character. If you had eaten totally different food for the last year, such that the atoms in your body were numerically distinct from those in your body now, this quality would remain untouched. You call experiences 'mine' even when they are lost in the fog of forgetfulness, and you concede that you would call experiences received from a totally different brain 'mine' if the technology made it happen. Regardless of the substrate that was enabling your experience, it would remain 'mine', 'this one', through all conceivable alterations. Nothing can account for that fact but the first-person, subjective style in which an experience appears in awareness. Your experiences are those that feel internal, not remote like somebody else's. They are at the center of your world, in you. But what could count as an experience, regardless of where and when it occurs, without this same quality? The experiences of 'someone else' are surely felt in the same way, as mine and this.

If I understand what you're saying, you should be in total agreement with me up until this exact point, right?

Pretty much, in theory. In practice (we might even call it 'reality') there are quite big caveats being set aside here, largely to do with the fact that experiences which happen to brains are not always labelled as 'me'. I gave examples. But I've been happy to set them aside, for the sake of being hypothetical.

Now, there are two options, and implications that flow from each one. The option you are sticking with is to conclude from the above that you have first-person experiences that are 'mine' and 'this' for you, while other people have first-person experiences that are 'mine' and 'this' for them. The tough, substantive step is to acknowledge that being 'mine' for somebody else is equivalent in every way to being 'mine' for you, such that you are all the somebody elses. This is not a verbal cheat or a sneaky implication about something mystical. It is simply an inference to the only remaining explanation after all the others have been shown to fail.

I and others have 1st person experiences which I/they call me, not are me. I'm wondering which of us, you or I (assuming we are not the same, if you'll pardon the attempted non-malicious wit) is the one stuck on a faulty notion of self. I mean, you may be describing some sort of 'everyday', accepted by Joe Public view of self, but that may not be mine.

I mean, what else could possibly be concluded from all this? What vestige of metaphysical confinement remains to restrict the scope of your experience to a ridiculously particular physical specification called ruby sparks?

'I' by and large (setting exceptions aside) call 'me' what I'm experiencing at any one time (so I can agree that our sense of self is not as content-related as we might think, and I am grateful to you for that insight). So, if at any one moment I'm not remembering the time a pig on my dad's farm ran through my legs (when I was a child) while I was trying to herd it, and it carried me away, then that is not 'me', although if I do have that memory I will say that 'I' am having it and that I am that boy (or was) and that will then be 'me'. But in reality, my sense of self is a fleeting and constantly changing user illusion. This is why I would say at the start of this post that my experiences have to be joined up (experienced) for me to call them 'me'.

 

[PyramidHead]

'I' by and large (setting exceptions aside) call 'me' what I'm experiencing at any one time (so I can agree that our sense of self is not as content-related as we might think, and I am grateful to you for that insight). So, if at any one moment I'm not remembering the time a pig on my dad's farm ran through my legs (when I was a child) while I was trying to herd it, and it carried me away, then that is not 'me', although if I do have that memory I will say that 'I' am having it and that I am that boy (or was) and that will then be 'me'.

Based purely upon whether or not it is in your current awareness, you either were or were not the person who experienced being carried away by the pig as a boy? Think of the implications of that. What you consider your experience (and who you consider yourself to be) is entirely a matter of what is being presented to your conscious mind right now, as this. But why must your experiences be presented in the brain of a certain entity, among all those that ever or will live, in order to qualify as yours? Suppose the neurological pattern of that memory could be exactly replicated by a system of electrodes, such that any individual could experience the same phenomenal sensation by wiring up the electrodes to their brain and running the simulation. When that experience is represented in another brain, and is fully realized in just the way you remembered it, doesn't that satisfy every requirement for it to be yours? The only way you could say otherwise would be to claim there is something special about the brain of ruby sparks, wherein a memory summoned within it would qualify as yours, but the same memory summoned within a different brain would not qualify as yours. Is this an accurate interpretation of your position?