The "me-ness" of being me

[PyramidHead]

To me, it seems like it's a case of 'not being able to tell the difference' rather than there being no difference.

For example, imagine, using one of his thought experiments, that a body is fully connected up simultaneously to two brains, one of which is registering 'yellow' and the other 'blue'. What does the 'I' in that case experience, red? Blue? green? It doesn't matter, even if the 'I' still feels like 'I' is registering...... whatever colour, because it's perspectival. There are in that case two different brains registering two different colours. An 'I' just can't tell the difference.

That's only if you are continuing to think of yourself as a single stream of integrated consciousness. If so, then you don't actually agree with the statement in red from before.

In the scenario where I could have seen a non-blue bead, the inference is reasonable that it is improbable that I have not seen a bead from the blue urn.

But from another perspective, namely that of someone who was guaranteed to be shown a person with a blue bead, your inference would not be the right one to make. Earlier, you said that you disagreed with Zuboff's probability argument because you felt that your personal perspective was fooling you into thinking something was improbable, when an external perspective would be the more 'objective' one. Here, you seem to be saying that your first-person inference is reasonable.

And there is no such thing as an 'objective pov'. All probability depends on perspective and conscious observation filtered through a background of prior knowledge. There are no privileged perspectives in an absolute sense, so the point of hypothesis testing is to find the explanation that relaxes improbability from the most perspectives possible. Otherwise, everything that happens has a 100% chance of occurring from God's perspective so there can be no valid inferences about probability whatsoever. That means no science.

Sure, but I am adopting the 'objective pov' possibility hypothetically, as (I think) he is (or 'objective individuation').

Or, if 'objective pov' is the wrong term, it doesn't seem to matter in any case, because it's not so much about an "objective pov" as it is about there being (we assume) a reality out there that does not depend on a subjective perspective of it. We might call this objective reality. Whether or not there's an objective pov from which to view it is arguably a slightly separate matter.

There is no need to interpret what I am saying as denying an objective reality. The fact is that we simply don't know everything about it, so to test hypotheses we must pit them against each other and pick the one that explains our current observation in the least strained, least improbable way.

I think Zuboff is, essentially, positing some version or other of existence monism, the idea that there is but one 'thing' and every 'thing' which seems distinct is, actually, just a token for (version of) the 'one thing'. This could be taken to apply, objectively, to bananas as much as to (apparently illusory) subjective/perspectival sensations such as 'self'. This, to me (and many others) would be implausible (even before we went as far as Zuboff might have to, and end up saying that one banana is all bananas or even that one banana is all things).

It is also not entirely unplatonic, in the sense that Plato suggested that there is a 'perfect form' (or perfect forms in his slightly different case) of, well, everything, existing in a perfect realm.

Or, less controversially, we could say that Zuboff is putting forward some kind of holism, a 'Gaia' hypothesis for, well, ultimately the universe. Everything.

It's closer to the first suggestion (and definitely not the second), but it's not really a metaphysical statement about all things, just conscious things, and which of them is you. He does not posit any causal relationship between conscious beings anymore than he is positing a causal relationship between the two brain hemispheres in his little thought experiment. The entire point is that causal relationships are irrelevant to determining what is you.

At any rate, in my hypothetical scenario of being connected up to a 'yellow experiencing' brain and a 'blue experiencing' one, my perspective appears to let me down, no matter what colour I experience, because there are, objectively, two distinct, otherwise unconnected (except when temporarily connected to my body) brains, one presumably experiencing yellow and the other blue, and my perspective of the situation is just that, my perspective, what it 'seems' to me (objectively incorrectly).

If you had experienced either blue or yellow in succession, both experiences would have been yours, so separation in time does not seem to disqualify an experience from being yours. Space is just another dimension like time. If you are shown blue and then yellow, while you are seeing yellow you have no connection to the direct experience of blue you just experienced. Your memory tells you it was yours because it had the required immediacy and subjective quality. Yet, if your brain were connected to another one which had just experienced blue, you would be making the same determination; connections are connections. There is nothing special about connections within a single brain that makes them more identity-preserving than hypothetical connections between brains.

Zuboff's alternative scenario, about two halves of a brain experiencing on the one hand working and on the other listening to a concert, does not seem to get around this, because again the assumption is that the two halves are afterwards as simultaneously connected as the blue and yellow brain are to my body in my scenario. There then follows (hypothetically) an integrated subjective (arguably in many ways illusory in any case) experience of 'me-ness' which incorporates both. But that is not enough to say "I am my next door neighbour" who went to the concert while I worked. It just means that if his brain (or a duplicate of it) and mine were subsequently merged, mine would experience a certain (mistaken, subjective and illusory) sensation of some mixed sort, and possibly call it 'me', because that's what my brain likes to try to do, to integrate my experiences, in order to better navigate the world. Or for some other reason that has meant I have developed a self.

So, it is your contention that if you were to temporarily split your brain in the way Zuboff described, you would either experience the concert or the studying, but not both. I have some questions.

1. If one hemisphere were disabled because of e.g. a stroke, you would have still experienced the other hemisphere's corresponding content, and this would be true regardless of which hemisphere were disabled; why, then, would the presence "across the way" of an intact hemisphere, physically isolated in all the relevant ways, now cause you to be present in only one of them?
2. What mechanism could possibly determine what kind of experience you have? In other words: if you had all of the facts about brain biology and neurology, what information would allow you to correctly anticipate hearing the lecture or the concert following the split?
3. You say that the re-connected brain would give you the mistaken impression that both experiences belonged to you, but this is illusory (as would be the case of your neighbor's brain connected to yours). What is the essential difference between the impression you are calling mistaken and the ordinary impression of calling whatever experience you had last week yours? In both cases, does it not depend solely on the recollection that they were immediate and first-person? How could the same reasoning be accurate in the second case and not the first?

I'm all for this, but I think Zuboff's particular route to justifying it is leaky, unfortunately, not least because of (a) his arguments about probability, taken separately from (b) his 'duplicate brain' scenarios, and (c) his distinctions between subjective and objective individuation. I have problems with all three of those.

That's fine, you don't have to agree with them. But it's disingenuous to suggest that Zuboff is positing anything mystical or wants us to be nice to each other just because. He structures his arguments in such a way that to reject their conclusions always seems to imply accepting conclusions that are either contradictory or unsatisfactory at addressing the problem. And it's my opinion that his view is the one that is most grounded in science and modern physics, because (a) it leaves no immaterial selves that have to be assigned to 'haunt' particular conscious beings, (b) it relegates conscious experience to the same perspective-dependent and non-absolute place that Copernicus and Einstein relegated the earth's position and the present moment, respectively, and (c) like all good hypotheses, it relieves an otherwise strained probability from all angles, not just relieving it for some while others remain strained.

 

[ruby sparks]

That's only if you are continuing to think of yourself as a single stream of integrated consciousness. If so, then you don't actually agree with the statement in red from before.

No I think I still agree with the line in red and I don't think I'm contradicting myself?

But from another perspective, namely that of someone who was guaranteed to be shown a person with a blue bead, your inference would not be the right one to make. Earlier, you said that you disagreed with Zuboff's probability argument because you felt that your personal perspective was fooling you into thinking something was improbable, when an external perspective would be the more 'objective' one. Here, you seem to be saying that your first-person inference is reasonable.

Yes, the first person inference is reasonable in the first case (where I could have seen a non-blue bead). As I recall, Zuboff calls it a paradox? Or maybe that was something else. I don't think it is (in that first case). I also don't think that's where I thought I saw a flaw in the probability arguments.

There is no need to interpret what I am saying as denying an objective reality. The fact is that we simply don't know everything about it, so to test hypotheses we must pit them against each other and pick the one that explains our current observation in the least strained, least improbable way.

Sure. I wasn't assuming that you or Zuboff were denying an objective reality.

It's closer to the first suggestion (and definitely not the second), but it's not really a metaphysical statement about all things, just conscious things, and which of them is you. He does not posit any causal relationship between conscious beings anymore than he is positing a causal relationship between the two brain hemispheres in his little thought experiment. The entire point is that causal relationships are irrelevant to determining what is you.

Sure, but I don't see what would stop us, if following his line of thought, from extending the same principles or arguments to non-conscious things. I realise that he does not do that, of course. I'm just saying that that is where it would seem to me to be possibly taken, also. Why stop at consciousness or conscious entities? In fact, he appears not to, when he says 'I am all beings' rather than 'I am all consciousnesses'.

If you had experienced either blue or yellow in succession, both experiences would have been yours, so separation in time does not seem to disqualify an experience from being yours. Space is just another dimension like time. If you are shown blue and then yellow, while you are seeing yellow you have no connection to the direct experience of blue you just experienced. Your memory tells you it was yours because it had the required immediacy and subjective quality. Yet, if your brain were connected to another one which had just experienced blue, you would be making the same determination; connections are connections. There is nothing special about connections within a single brain that makes them more identity-preserving than hypothetical connections between brains.

And yet if two unconnected brains are separately experiencing yellow, and blue, respectively, Zuboff would say they are each other. That's what can't be justified, imo. The fact that they can, possibly, by some means be fully integrated into a unified experience does not mean that they are each other. The fact that there may exist a cowana (mix of cow and banana) does not necessarily mean that a cow is a banana. And that's before we get to the (imo probable) issues with the illusory aspects when it comes to their potential consciousnesses.

So, it is your contention that if you were to temporarily split your brain in the way Zuboff described, you would either experience the concert or the studying, but not both. I have some questions.

No that's not my contention, as far as I'm aware.

1. If one hemisphere were disabled because of e.g. a stroke, you would have still experienced the other hemisphere's corresponding content, and this would be true regardless of which hemisphere were disabled; why, then, would the presence "across the way" of an intact hemisphere, physically isolated in all the relevant ways, now cause you to be present in only one of them?
2. What mechanism could possibly determine what kind of experience you have? In other words: if you had all of the facts about brain biology and neurology, what information would allow you to correctly anticipate hearing the lecture or the concert following the split?
3. You say that the re-connected brain would give you the mistaken impression that both experiences belonged to you, but this is illusory (as would be the case of your neighbor's brain connected to yours). What is the essential difference between the impression you are calling mistaken and the ordinary impression of calling whatever experience you had last week yours? In both cases, does it not depend solely on the recollection that they were immediate and first-person? How could the same reasoning be accurate in the second case and not the first?

I'll have to get back to these questions later. I'm rushing off here. Having clarified that I'm not (I don't think) making the contention you suggest, I'm not sure if the questions are as relevant, but I will nonetheless answer them later.

That's fine, you don't have to agree with them. But it's disingenuous to suggest that Zuboff is positing anything mystical or wants us to be nice to each other just because.

It's not disingenuous at all. And to be fair I never said mystical precisely, but yes I may have alluded to something like that. It's my honest impression, so no disingenuity. Another way of putting it might be that I think I smell a faint whiff of philosophical alchemy. That's closer to what I meant to imply with the word woo.

He structures his arguments in such a way that to reject their conclusions always seems to imply accepting conclusions that are either contradictory or unsatisfactory at addressing the problem. And it's my opinion that his view is the one that is most grounded in science and modern physics, because (a) it leaves no immaterial selves that have to be assigned to 'haunt' particular conscious beings, (b) it relegates conscious experience to the same perspective-dependent and non-absolute place that Copernicus and Einstein relegated the earth's position and the present moment, respectively, and (c) like all good hypotheses, it relieves an otherwise strained probability from all angles, not just relieving it for some while others remain strained.

Again, I'll have to consider that paragraph in detail later.

 

[PyramidHead]

I'll let you get to the other questions, but just to quickly chime in here:

Sure, but I don't see what would stop us, if following his line of thought, from extending the same principles or arguments to non-conscious things.

Central to his thesis is the idea that what makes an experience mine is not the objective individuation of the thing that is having it, but the simple quality of immediacy and internality that accompanies the experience itself. Any experience that has this quality is thus mine (and all experience does), and since anything that has my experience is me, conscious beings capable of having experiences are me. Non-conscious things do not have experience, or at least do not show any indication of having experience.

And yet if two unconnected brains are separately experiencing yellow, and blue, respectively, Zuboff would say they are each other. That's what can't be justified, imo.

No. Zuboff is not saying they are each other. The brains are separate and can be easily traced through space and time, and the difference in their internal states can be precisely mapped. They are different objects undergoing different physical changes. What Zuboff says is that this does not make a difference in terms of who is having the experiences; such is what he means when he says: "Your identity cannot be confined by the particularity of any brain or other token or the detail of any experiential content or other type." He is saying that both the blue and the yellow are being experienced by the same subject. Not as a 'combination-experience' (so, it's not that the subject experiences green), but fully and completely in both experiences simultaneously. The experiences just aren't physically integrated with each other, so the subject is misled into believing each one individually is all that is being experienced. From the perspective of the blue-experiencing brain, experiencing blue in all its fullness, you should thus acknowledge that you are also experiencing yellow in all its fullness in the other brain. The perspective of each brain is isolated from the information content of the other, but that boundary cannot rationally be defended as a boundary of personal identity without creating numerous problems.

No that's not my contention, as far as I'm aware.

Then I'm confused. If you don't think that both halves of the brain are experienced by you, despite them temporarily not being integrated with one another, then what do you think your experience will be like when you split them and listen to the lecture and the music?

 

[ruby sparks]

Central to his thesis is the idea that what makes an experience mine is not the objective individuation of the thing that is having it, but the simple quality of immediacy and internality that accompanies the experience itself. Any experience that has this quality is thus mine (and all experience does), and since anything that has my experience is me, conscious beings capable of having experiences are me.

This, I think, gets to the nub of my current problems with the argument.

I would say instead that, yes, anything (assuming it can have consciousness) that has PyramidHead's experiences would, in theory, call itself PyramidHead (up to a point perhaps, see counter examples which suggests that a sense of 'me-ness' might fragment instead). This, it seems to me, does not necessarily mean that Ruby Sparks (RS) is PyramidHead (PH) or for that matter the lesser claim that RS is an (unexperienced or only partially experienced) aspect of PH or vice versa. At best, it might mean that RS could possibly consider itself to be PH, in certain circumstances.

In short just because I could be something doesn't mean I am that something (added to which the 'something' in this case is arguably illusory, which I think adds complications. I know you have said that it is irrelevant but I'm not sure). Similarly I could be in Moscow but that doesn't mean I am in Moscow, or ever will be (even if I think I am; at some stage, objective reality has to intrude, surely). Similarly, Moscow is not Belfast just because it could be (or could be called that).

Non-conscious things do not have experience, or at least do not show any indication of having experience.

Sure. I was only suggesting that there is no obvious impediment to extending the argument to other areas, other forms of beingness, if you like.

No. Zuboff is not saying they are each other. The brains are separate and can be easily traced through space and time, and the difference in their internal states can be precisely mapped. They are different objects undergoing different physical changes. What Zuboff says is that this does not make a difference in terms of who is having the experiences; such is what he means when he says: "Your identity cannot be confined by the particularity of any brain or other token or the detail of any experiential content or other type." He is saying that both the blue and the yellow are being experienced by the same subject. Not as a 'combination-experience' (so, it's not that the subject experiences green), but fully and completely in both experiences simultaneously. The experiences just aren't physically integrated with each other, so the subject is misled into believing each one individually is all that is being experienced. From the perspective of the blue-experiencing brain, experiencing blue in all its fullness, you should thus acknowledge that you are also experiencing yellow in all its fullness in the other brain. The perspective of each brain is isolated from the information content of the other, but that boundary cannot rationally be defended as a boundary of personal identity without creating numerous problems.

Is it not moot that a brain is capable of fully experiencing yellow and fully experiencing blue at the same time? Zuboff may be positing a brain that is not like any actual brain. A hypothetical brain. If that's the case, then his argument might only work in a hypothetical universe that's not this one.

Then I'm confused. If you don't think that both halves of the brain are experienced by you, despite them temporarily not being integrated with one another, then what do you think your experience will be like when you split them and listen to the lecture and the music?

Well, I don't know what the experience would be like. It could be meshed in some way as to be a mixture (a musical lecture of some sort?) or I might recall both, separately. I don't know. I'm accepting, in principle, with some caveats, that I might call whatever the experience is 'mine'.

 

[ruby sparks]

1. If one hemisphere were disabled because of e.g. a stroke, you would have still experienced the other hemisphere's corresponding content, and this would be true regardless of which hemisphere were disabled; why, then, would the presence "across the way" of an intact hemisphere, physically isolated in all the relevant ways, now cause you to be present in only one of them?

I am not sure I am entirely understanding your 3 questions but I am ok with allowing that this might be my shortcoming and not a shortcoming in the questions.

My experiences if I had the stroke might not be comparable to the experiences if I didn't. I would just 'name them' me in either case.

2. What mechanism could possibly determine what kind of experience you have? In other words: if you had all of the facts about brain biology and neurology, what information would allow you to correctly anticipate hearing the lecture or the concert following the split?

If I had an accurate enough or perfect predictor I could at least describe them in advance. I'm not sure I could fully anticipate them any more than Mary from the Mary's Room thought experiment (The Knowledge Argument) could anticipate a red she could only know every objective thing about but had never experienced.

3. You say that the re-connected brain would give you the mistaken impression that both experiences belonged to you, but this is illusory (as would be the case of your neighbor's brain connected to yours). What is the essential difference between the impression you are calling mistaken and the ordinary impression of calling whatever experience you had last week yours? In both cases, does it not depend solely on the recollection that they were immediate and first-person? How could the same reasoning be accurate in the second case and not the first?

I think it'd be the same in both cases, I'd call them both 'me', but only if I experienced them both. So if one of them was experienced by not-me, then I wouldn't be that not-me being. The fact that I might call myself that not-me being if I experienced a duplicate of their experiences is a slightly different matter.

- - - Updated - - -

He structures his arguments in such a way that to reject their conclusions always seems to imply accepting conclusions that are either contradictory or unsatisfactory at addressing the problem. And it's my opinion that his view is the one that is most grounded in science and modern physics, because (a) it leaves no immaterial selves that have to be assigned to 'haunt' particular conscious beings, (b) it relegates conscious experience to the same perspective-dependent and non-absolute place that Copernicus and Einstein relegated the earth's position and the present moment, respectively, and (c) like all good hypotheses, it relieves an otherwise strained probability from all angles, not just relieving it for some while others remain strained.

I'm going to leave this for now. It's dinner time.


..................

ETA.........Dinner over.

I might just say that if that last quote from your post in any way related to my speculating about Zuboff's motives (which I would not impugn or denigrate in any case, even if my impressions are correct, which they may not be, or my worries unfounded) we don't have to focus on those. I've been trying, generally, to focus on the arguments.

So, sticking to your points and leaving speculations or impressions about motives behind:

(a) I don't see what's unsatisfactory about what we might call the 'normal' explanation(s) including for example, mine (which I may not have articulated as completely as he has but which I hope may be somewhat discernible or at least implicit in my objections). I should really call it my recently amended one, because I do take on board, in principle (with caveats) that my sense of 'me-ness' is not necessarily dependent on the content of my experiences and probably at least less so than I had thought. I have to say 'probably' because we're only doing thought experiments which may not pan out the ways described in real life.

(b) Yes, it leaves conscious experience as perspective-dependent and non-absolute, but....so do other physicalist explanations already. Imo, Zuboff, as I said, might be better to take on board also that there is likely no real I, instead of saying all 'I' am all 'I's' (or I am all beings).

(c) I don't see a strained probability that needs to be relieved.

 

[ruby sparks]

To pick up on just that last point....about improbability, and specifically how it relates to the anthropic principle (which is the subject of one of the appendices in the paper).....

Imagine a vast and immense urn that could hold a trillion blue, irregularly-shaped beads (where, let's say, no two beads are exactly the same shape). Imagine also that there is a spatial location somewhere in the (initially empty) urn which is 'just right' for....something...for whatever reason (could be, let's say that this location is where self-conscious life can occur). When we fill the urn, one bead (which we can then, after the filling of the urn, label B1) will end up in that location, or let's say close enough to it for the 'magic' to happen. From the pov of the bead that ends up there (and becomes self-conscious), it will seem highly improbable that it ended up there, but from a more objective pov, it is not at all surprising that one bead would end up there. So being that bead and thinking it highly improbable that there is a particular 'me' which is alive and self-conscious would be mistaken.

Now imagine that there are at least two places in this vast urn, far, far apart from each other, where conscious life would occur or evolve (there doesn't have to be another urn, just as there don't have to be other universes in the anthropic argument, as I see it) and that in that other location, another blue bead (later labelled by us B2), of a slightly different shape, also becomes alive and self-conscious.

Whether both beads would each, subjectively, call themselves 'me' does not mean that B1 actually is B2, nor does it mean that their conscious experiences aren't (pretty much) entirely separate (whether they could, in certain circumstances, be 'connected up' is a another matter).

Note that the above scenario could be changed to one where there is, among the trillion beads, before they are put into the urn, only one bead pre-labelled B1. This could, incidentally, be comparable to the pre-coloured grain of sand in the 'Tyrant of the Sands' narrative in Zuboff's paper. In that case, it would indeed be highly improbable that B1 ended up in the right place and became self-conscious. But this is not, apparently, what happened in objective reality, ie in the universe where conscious life occurred on earth ('beads' were not pre-labelled at or just after the big bang, for instance, all matter was just the approximate equivalent of an immense number of non-labelled beads). Iow, it is not the blue bead that was 'special' (beforehand) in the case of my scenario, it was the location in the urn that was 'special'. And as to the probability of there being somewhere sufficiently special, well, if you have an immense or better still an infinite universe (urn) the probability will drastically reduce.

Nor would it matter if, say, pre-labelled B1 didn't end up in the right place, because it just wouldn't have become self-conscious (or even alive). Instead, a different blue bead would have, and if that blue bead was merely predisposed to call itself 'me, no matter what' then that particular 'me' is highly probable nonetheless, but it is still not the case that it is the same as a 'me' in another 'right' location, occupied by a different blue bead far, far away in another part of the urn (universe). Me-ness would, in that scenario, just be the 'illusion' of (potentially) any bead taking experiential ownership of whatever (let's say, setting caveats temporarily aside) experiences it has. That's all. Could be any blue bead from the trillion if whichever one it is is simply predisposed to call itself 'me' afterwards, even if it's sense of 'me' is fluid and elusive but tends to subjectively seem to persist, at least up to a point, under varied experiences.

Or at least I'm thinking that the above is a fairly satisfactory hypothetical explanation in simplistic outline which does not require universal consciousness to be added in.

 

[PyramidHead]

This, I think, gets to the nub of my current problems with the argument.

I would say instead that, yes, anything (assuming it can have consciousness) that has PyramidHead's experiences would, in theory, call itself PyramidHead

I'll stop you right there because you're already equivocating. You're already declaring that universalism is false by starting with the assumption that the owner of an experience is a single conscious being and no other. Starting from there, it's no mystery why universalism doesn't make sense. There is no "PyramidHead's experiences" versus RS's experiences; both are happening to the same subject, who is neither PyramidHead nor RS exclusively, but all subjects. You're still in the "tail wagging the dog" view that says an experience is mine if it happens to an objectively individuated conscious being with certain properties. What universalism says is NOT that anything having PyramidHead's experiences is PyramidHead, but that anything that has my experiences is me, regardless of what conscious being the experience occurs in or what the conscious being calls itself. It's not drawing an equivalence between tokens and saying they are the same token, it's saying that the actual identity resides at the level of an abstract type (namely the quality of immediacy inherent in all experience).

 

[ruby sparks]

I'll stop you right there because you're already equivocating.

I'm not sure equivocating is the right word?

You're already declaring that universalism is false by starting with the assumption that the owner of an experience is a single conscious being and no other. Starting from there, it's no mystery why universalism doesn't make sense.

At this stage, after so much discussion, I'm not starting from there. You could say I'm now there (or perhaps still there, except that it isn't exactly where I started out when I joined the thread) after considering the alternative explanations you've presented and I'm not convinced. I'm not even sure I am actually making that precise claim (which doesn't merely involve an assumption of course) but I'm not accepting the arguments I've read. We could put it that way.

There is no "PyramidHead's experiences" versus RS's experiences; both are happening to the same subject, who is neither PyramidHead nor RS exclusively, but all subjects. You're still in the "tail wagging the dog" view that says an experience is mine if it happens to an objectively individuated conscious being with certain properties. What universalism says is NOT that anything having PyramidHead's experiences is PyramidHead, but that anything that has my experiences is me, regardless of what conscious being the experience occurs in or what the conscious being calls itself. It's not drawing an equivalence between tokens and saying they are the same token, it's saying that the actual identity resides at the level of an abstract type (namely the quality of immediacy inherent in all experience).

Sure, but that's a series of declarations (to put alongside 'I am all beings') that universalism is true, which as far as I can see result from an explanation or argument that doesn't seem to me to stack up. Why should I accept that there is such a thing as 'the actual identity', never mind it residing.....anywhere? It sounds a bit like saying that somewhere, possibly on some abstract level, there is an 'actual' peanut butter sandwich, of which all other peanut butter sandwiches are just tokens.

Now you may say that I'm moving away from consciousness to other forms of 'beingness'. But as I said, I can't see what's stopping me, following an equivalent line of thinking. I'm not dousing self-consciousness in any kind of spechul sauce and I hope you aren't either. It's probably just a sensation after all, imo.

 

[PyramidHead]

Imagine a vast and immense urn that could hold a trillion blue, irregularly-shaped beads (where, let's say, no two beads are exactly the same shape). Imagine also that there is a spatial location somewhere in the (initially empty) urn which is 'just right' for....something...for whatever reason (could be, let's say that this location is where self-conscious life can occur). When we fill the urn, one bead (which we can then, after the filling of the urn, label B1) will end up in that location, or let's say close enough to it for the 'magic' to happen. From the pov of the bead that ends up there (and becomes self-conscious), it will seem highly improbable that it ended up there, but from a more objective pov, it is not at all surprising that one bead would end up there. So being that bead and thinking it highly improbable that there is a particular 'me' which is alive and self-conscious would be mistaken.

Why would the bead be mistaken? What is more objective about the view from outside the urn? The actual fact of the matter is that both are correct; the bead is correct that finding itself in the special position in the urn necessary to render it self-conscious is highly improbable, and the external observer is correct that finding any bead in that spot is not improbable.

Now imagine that there are at least two places in this vast urn, far, far apart from each other, where conscious life would occur or evolve (there doesn't have to be another urn, just as there don't have to be other universes in the anthropic argument, as I see it) and that in that other location, another blue bead (later labelled by us B2), of a slightly different shape, also becomes alive and self-conscious.

Whether both beads would each, subjectively, call themselves 'me' does not mean that B1 actually is B2, nor does it mean that their conscious experiences aren't (pretty much) entirely separate (whether they could, in certain circumstances, be 'connected up' is a another matter).

Neither of which are claimed by universalism! So I don't get your point. B1 and B2 are separate beads with separate streams of consciousness, but whatever experiences either of them have are mine (if they are immediate and first-person in nature, which I assume they must be to qualify as an experience). Otherwise, there is no way of resolving, from the perspective of a given bead, why it is that one and not the other one, or why it is any conscious being at all (since if universalism is rejected, it must be entirely possible that no conscious being would be me; finding that one has won the lottery is one thing, but figuring out why one even had a ticket is unanswerable under the ordinary view that ties conscious existence to a token).

Note that the above scenario could be changed to one where there is, among the trillion beads, before they are put into the urn, only one bead pre-labelled B1. This could, incidentally, be comparable to the pre-coloured grain of sand in the 'Tyrant of the Sands' narrative in Zuboff's paper. In that case, it would indeed be highly improbable that B1 ended up in the right place and became self-conscious. But this is not, apparently, what happened in objective reality, ie in the universe where conscious life occurred on earth ('beads' were not pre-labelled at or just after the big bang, for instance, all matter was just the approximate equivalent of an immense number of non-labelled beads).

This is the same error ryan committed. The improbability of some event does not depend in any way on a special designation being made prior to its occurrence. You must assign to the evidence-favourable hypothesis as much more probability of being true as it makes the evidence more probable to have occurred. Whether the events being judged are past, present or future is irrelevant. The probability relations are timeless.

 

[PyramidHead]

Sure, but that's a series of declarations (to put alongside 'I am all beings') that universalism is true, which as far as I can see result from an explanation or argument that doesn't seem to me to stack up. Why should I accept that there is such a thing as 'the actual identity', never mind it residing.....anywhere? It sounds a bit like saying that somewhere, possibly on some abstract level, there is an 'actual' peanut butter sandwich, of which all other peanut butter sandwiches are just tokens.

It's a useful analogy, actually, but you don't need Platonism to defend it. If someone told you that the only true peanut butter sandwich was the one in his refrigerator, what would you say? You might show him other examples of things that are peanut butter sandwiches, and say "see, being a peanut butter sandwich does not depend on being an individual food item with a precise location in space and time, with certain molecules inherent in the ingredients, prepared in exactly the way your sandwich was prepared. All that is needed is for something to have the simple property of two pieces of bread with peanut butter in between them." You would not be suggesting anything like an 'ideal' peanut butter sandwich existing outside of spacetime, you would just be saying that the existence of peanut butter sandwiches per se does not reside at the level of tokens, but types.

Now, taking this analogy further, if this same confused person had instead said that his peanut butter sandwich was the only sandwich that existed, you would apply much the same reasoning, but you would instead say that being a sandwich doesn't depend on (a) being the individual peanut butter sandwich in his fridge with all its objective qualities, OR (b) having a particular set of ingredients or preparation instructions. To be a sandwich is even simpler than being a peanut butter sandwich; you can change the bread, the meat, the veggies, the temperature, whatever you want, and so long as it has the abstract quality of being some kind of edible substance between two slices of bread, it's a sandwich. Again, no need to invoke a mysterious essence of sandwich to make this simple point.

Universalism is saying that this is actually the case with personal identity. For something to be me (me, in the reflexive sense, not "me as PyramidHead"), it does not need to be a specific token or possess a detailed type, it just has to have an experience that is mine.

What you have been saying is akin to the person in my sandwich example saying: "but you can't tell me that this peanut butter sandwich and that steak sandwich are the same thing! They have so many different properties and are in totally different locations!" Which would be missing the point.

 

[ruby sparks]

Why would the bead be mistaken? What is more objective about the view from outside the urn? The actual fact of the matter is that both are correct; the bead is correct that finding itself in the special position in the urn necessary to render it self-conscious is highly improbable, and the external observer is correct that finding any bead in that spot is not improbable.

I don't think it is highly improbable. That a bead will be in the right spot and will end up calling itself 'me' is guaranteed to happen. Remember that there's nothing special beforehand about any particular bead.

I might also add that I'm not sure the probabilities in any way affect the case for or against universalism anyway.

Neither of which are claimed by universalism! So I don't get your point.

Well, consider me confused as to what the claims of this sort of universalism are then, when I read, variously, to quote only a few examples (my bolding in places):

"I am all beings"

"I am saying that being me, really being me, extends equally to all conscious things"

"my self- interest reaches fully into the life of every conscious organism"

'You possess all conscious life. Whenever in all time and wherever in all the universe (or beyond) any conscious being stands, sits, crawls, jumps, lies, rolls, flies or swims, its experience of doing so is yours and is yours now. You are that being. You are fish and fowl. Deer and hunter. You are saints and sinners. You are Germans, Jews and Palestinians."

"stop yourself from hurting yourself because you mistake yourself for another."

B1 and B2 are separate beads with separate streams of consciousness, but whatever experiences either of them have are mine (if they are immediate and first-person in nature, which I assume they must be to qualify as an experience).

Is called 'mine', yes.

Otherwise, there is no way of resolving, from the perspective of a given bead, why it is that one and not the other one, or why it is any conscious being at all (since if universalism is rejected, it must be entirely possible that no conscious being would be me; finding that one has won the lottery is one thing, but figuring out why one even had a ticket is unanswerable under the ordinary view that ties conscious existence to a token).

No. Any bead that happened to be in the 'right' place would call itself 'me'. It's a guaranteed outcome. I'm also not sure why we should adopt the perspective of any bead.

This is the same error ryan committed. The improbability of some event does not depend in any way on a special designation being made prior to its occurrence. You must assign to the evidence-favourable hypothesis as much more probability of being true as it makes the evidence more probable to have occurred. Whether the events being judged are past, present or future is irrelevant. The probability relations are timeless.

But if any previously non-special bead is going to call itself 'me' it's guaranteed that this will happen. That it's sense of me-ness is probably imo very illusory doesn't help.

And in any case, there's a step involved somewhere here to 'me' really being all beings, which has not, as far as I can see, been justified. It must be an odd use of the words 'really' and 'beings', I think.

 

[ruby sparks]

It's a useful analogy, actually, but you don't need Platonism to defend it. If someone told you that the only true peanut butter sandwich was the one in his refrigerator, what would you say? You might show him other examples of things that are peanut butter sandwiches, and say "see, being a peanut butter sandwich does not depend on being an individual food item with a precise location in space and time, with certain molecules inherent in the ingredients, prepared in exactly the way your sandwich was prepared. All that is needed is for something to have the simple property of two pieces of bread with peanut butter in between them." You would not be suggesting anything like an 'ideal' peanut butter sandwich existing outside of spacetime, you would just be saying that the existence of peanut butter sandwiches per se does not reside at the level of tokens, but types.

I am tempted to say, so what? What's 'actual' about that? If it's an entirely abstract concept, it does not get us to 'you are that being' or one peanut butter sandwich in London hurting another one in Sydney. Or even two in London, on the same plate.

Now, taking this analogy further, if this same confused person had instead said that his peanut butter sandwich was the only sandwich that existed, you would apply much the same reasoning, but you would instead say that being a sandwich doesn't depend on (a) being the individual peanut butter sandwich in his fridge with all its objective qualities, OR (b) having a particular set of ingredients or preparation instructions. To be a sandwich is even simpler than being a peanut butter sandwich; you can change the bread, the meat, the veggies, the temperature, whatever you want, and so long as it has the abstract quality of being some kind of edible substance between two slices of bread, it's a sandwich. Again, no need to invoke a mysterious essence of sandwich to make this simple point.

Yes but this does not get you to 'you are that peanut butter sandwich' or one peanut butter sandwich hurting another one.

Universalism is saying that this is actually the case with personal identity. For something to be me (me, in the reflexive sense, not "me as PyramidHead"), it does not need to be a specific token or possess a detailed type, it just has to have an experience that is mine.

Hey if it's all abstract and has no practical import you can have it.....except it does, apparently. How can one peanut butter sandwich falling off a plate and getting trodden on necessarily adversely affect the other peanut butter sandwich still on the same plate? Seriously, even if you respond to nothing else in my last two posts, just clear that one up for me. We can do living things or even conscious beings if you prefer instead. Same principle.

What you have been saying is akin to the person in my sandwich example saying: "but you can't tell me that this peanut butter sandwich and that steak sandwich are the same thing! They have so many different properties and are in totally different locations!" Which would be missing the point.

What point? Have you read his conclusions? Apparently, inflicting pain as retribution for wrongs is a horrible mistake. You hurt yourself because you mistake yourself for another. I really am a fish. I could go on.

 

[PyramidHead]

Well, we're talking about conscious existence here, not being a sandwich. If what it takes to be me is similar to what it takes to be (in Zuboff's example) literature, and not what it takes to be a particular copy of Huckleberry Finn, then just as literature will not cease to exist if a copy of one novel is destroyed, I will not cease to exist if one conscious being is destroyed. The difference is that being literature does not entail consciousness and the capacity to suffer. It's just an analogy.

 

[ruby sparks]

Well, we're talking about conscious existence here, not being a sandwich. If what it takes to be me is similar to what it takes to be (in Zuboff's example) literature, and not what it takes to be a particular copy of Huckleberry Finn, then just as literature will not cease to exist if a copy of one novel is destroyed, I will not cease to exist if one conscious being is destroyed. The difference is that being literature does not entail consciousness and the capacity to suffer. It's just an analogy.

As I've said, I think the same sort of argument could be extended to all forms of beingness, whatever their properties. There's no impediment to it that I can see.

 

[ruby sparks]

We could do daffodils, where each daffodil is a token for an abstract concept we could call 'actual daffodil', and one daffodil getting damaged would always harm another daffodil.

Are you seriously ok with the idea that you really are a fish?

 

[PyramidHead]

We could do daffodils, where each daffodil is a token for an abstract concept we could call 'actual daffodil', and one daffodil getting damaged would always harm another daffodil.

No, because being a daffodil does not entail being conscious and able to feel pain. Being me does. You're reaching here.

Are you seriously ok with the idea that you really are a fish?

It's not that I, PyramidHead, am a fish. It's that I am all conscious beings, including PyramidHead, including you, and including any conscious animals, so long as they have immediate and first-person experiences. The barriers between individual organisms are not absolute metaphysical barriers to personal identity.

 

[ruby sparks]

We could do daffodils, where each daffodil is a token for an abstract concept we could call 'actual daffodil', and one daffodil getting damaged would always harm another daffodil.

No, because being a daffodil does not entail being conscious and able to feel pain. Being me does. You're reaching here.

Nope. I'm only validly extending the argument to other properties of beingness. Why should I not? Please don't just say 'because they're different properties'.

Imo, there is no justification for saying that there is one actual consciousness.

Are you seriously ok with the idea that you really are a fish?

It's not that I, PyramidHead, am a fish. It's that I am all conscious beings, including PyramidHead, including you, and including any conscious animals, so long as they have immediate and first-person experiences. The barriers between individual organisms are not absolute metaphysical barriers to personal identity.

Whatever. I can read all the things he said. Imo, he's the one that's reaching.

I think we're done. I can't see any point in continuing. We've had a good go. I've given it a lot of time and consideration and said my bit and you've said yours. Let's agree to disagree. I'm going away auniversalist. Which by the way is not a claim that it is false, only that I do not see enough good reasons to accept it.

I'm off. You may now have the last word.

 

[Speakpigeon]

Otherwise, there is no way of resolving, from the perspective of a given bead, why it is that one and not the other one, or why it is any conscious being at all (since if universalism is rejected, it must be entirely possible that no conscious being would be me; finding that one has won the lottery is one thing, but figuring out why one even had a ticket is unanswerable under the ordinary view that ties conscious existence to a token).

No. Any bead that happened to be in the 'right' place would call itself 'me'. It's a guaranteed outcome.

Yes. Excellent! That's exactly it.

We all call ourselves "me" and we all experience ourselves from our own unique subjective perspective. So doing this is indeed a "guaranteed outcome".

That you are one particular individual is the direct consequence of the fact, that we can assume and that we seem to all accept here, that all human beings experience themselves subjectively as one particular individual. Guaranteed outcome.
EB

 

[ruby sparks]

Try this next time you're at the beach or somewhere where's there's sand. Fill a bucket of sand and tip it out. You have just done something which, if you look at it a certain way, is so improbable that the probability (of the exact arrangement of grains) may well be almost incalculable (a trillion to the power of a trillion if there were a trillion grains for example). Some would say that it's therefore so improbable that it couldn't realistically be inferred to be true. And yet the pile of sand is there, every time. And you could do it again every minute for hours, days, months or years on end.

 

[PyramidHead]

Otherwise, there is no way of resolving, from the perspective of a given bead, why it is that one and not the other one, or why it is any conscious being at all (since if universalism is rejected, it must be entirely possible that no conscious being would be me; finding that one has won the lottery is one thing, but figuring out why one even had a ticket is unanswerable under the ordinary view that ties conscious existence to a token).

No. Any bead that happened to be in the 'right' place would call itself 'me'. It's a guaranteed outcome.

That's universalism. If there is nothing special about the being that emerges from a set of circumstances with regard to whether or not it's you, you've conceded the point. If you maintain that a bead could have been in the right place, called itself 'me' (as you do), but not been you, then you're stuck again, needing to explain what made that bead you while none of the others would have been, despite them all calling themselves 'me'. And if you were that bead, it would be improbable for you to find yourself in just the spot required to bring you into conscious existence, when there was a much higher chance that another bead would have made it there in your place. If another one did, it would also call itself 'me', but that doesn't help YOUR chances unless you are conceding that YOU WOULD BE THAT BEAD... in which case, like I said, that's universalism.