The "me-ness" of being me

[Treedbear]

It's the continuity. Things exist because they survive, which implies that there is a continuity.

We can easily track an individual organism and its survival through time and space, nobody is denying that. The question is how do you determine which organism is you? Do you consult information about their whereabouts and personal biographies to find that special continuity of qualities that only you can have? No; you look inward and determine what experiences are yours based on the quality of immediacy they possess. Universalism is a reminder that all experience has this quality, and although from the perspective of each organism your window of experience appears to be the totality of your experience, this cannot be true if all experience has the requisite quality necessary to make it yours.

Your agrument seems to hinge on the concept of immediacy. The immediacy of all experience. I suppose you mean something like the notion of "now", as in living in the moment or the "now". But Einstein demostrates that there is no absolute now. Simultaneity is relative and now has no common meaning to two masses separated in space. All I have is whatever I know about the continuity of my own existence after the immediacy is long gone.

In other words, continuity has nothing to do with what is you and what is not. Continuity comes and goes, mentally when we sleep, as well as physically in a host of thought experiments that demonstrate swapping any of your physical parts, changing their configuration, or splitting and rejoining the hemispheres of your brain makes no difference in the end to what you call you.

Continuity remains when I sleep even though my thoughts are not directed or are completely absent. Thoughts are produced by the brain and as long as the brain has the potential to generate thoughts I exist.

For all you know, there could be a gap of a billion years between your experience of reading this word and this word, as your brain could be hooked up to electrodes that provide the exact stimulation conditions to represent your sensation of reading, but delivered in pulses separated by eons. You wouldn't know the difference, even if in those intervening billion years your brain was dismantled, replaced with a functionally equivalent computer, or duplicated many times over. It would still just be one continuous experience from your perspective. So we have to abandon notions of physical composition, continuity, and psychological integration as criteria for being an 'object' that is you.

I only have the evidence I retain and the intelligence to deduce where I have been. I might be mistaken. That doesn't mean I can dismiss the need to use the evidence at hand. If I find out otherwise it doesn't mean I don't exist. It means I am not who I thought I was. But the continuity of my existence is unique nevertheless.

All that remains after this purge is a vast sea of experiences, separated from each other in ways no more absolute than the separations that could occur to a single individual, which means they all belong equally to you. You are experiencing reality through all of those perspectives right now, but within each one, only its integrated contents are presented with the immediacy you associate with your experience, so you mistakenly assume that only its isolated packet of experience is yours. That's just an illusion, like going through your whole life only ever seeing one type of car, and thinking that to be a car something must be that exact make, model, and color.

You must understand that there are many good reasons for using continuity as the basis for understanding one's existence. Meaning and purpose come to mind. I assume that by immediacy you mean "now", or "in the moment". But Einstein demonstrated that space and time are relative. There is no absolute time or location. Only when things come together is there a common immediacy, ie simultaneity. Otherwise they are indeed absolutely separate. All we have to go on is continuity.

All of this is made much more probable than the prevailing view by the extreme improbability of you finding yourself here at all, given the number of things that had to go in a specific way to make the exact organism you consider to be you emerge in the universe.

The anthropic principle by any other name. My existence doesn't require teleology.

 

[PyramidHead]

Your agrument seems to hinge on the concept of immediacy. The immediacy of all experience. I suppose you mean something like the notion of "now", as in living in the moment or the "now". But Einstein demostrates that there is no absolute now. Simultaneity is relative and now has no common meaning to two masses separated in space. All I have is whatever I know about the continuity of my own existence after the immediacy is long gone.

That's not what I mean, and in fact this view is congruent with Einstein's conception of time in a way that the ordinary view is not.

The one-directional character of time does not allow us the sort of mobility we have in space. And time, unlike position, also seems not to allow for a distinction between a personal and a general one. The time that is now for me looks to be the same across the world. These factors make the illusion regarding now, that it is the objective centre of time, much harder to shake off than the similar illusion regarding here.

Yet when we imagine, in at least a crude way, travelling in time with some of the freedom of our movements in space, we can easily see that any past or future time would simply be the present to any time-traveler who had arrived in that time. And we can do something similar to help us shake free of the illusion regarding who we are. We can imagine a kind of mobility in this too. That is what we were doing when earlier I asked you to consider all the changed conditions that would still leave your experience being “mine”. If the first-person character, the immediacy of the experience remains (and how could it not in anything that could count as experience?), we can imagine a continuum of hypothetical physical and psychological differences in an experiencer that could in principle take us through all the objective and subjective conditions of all possible consciousness without the slightest change in the experience being mine and the experiencer being me.

[...]

The universalist view of time, as well as space, is already at the heart of physics. Relativity theory depends on letting go of an objective present time. I am arguing here that only an extension of this treatment of space and time to personal identity will allow us to solve the most fundamental problem of physics--discovering what is behind the laws of physics. To do so we must see that being here, being now and being mine are none of them due to exclusive objective conditions, as they seem to be, but rather to the universal subjective impression of immediacy in every experience of a place, time or organism. We must see that all places, times and conscious organisms are equally "this one".

Continuity remains when I sleep even though my thoughts are not directed or are completely absent. Thoughts are produced by the brain and as long as the brain has the potential to generate thoughts I exist.

I agree with your second sentence, but I would replace "the brain" with "any brain". All thoughts are your thoughts.

All of this is made much more probable than the prevailing view by the extreme improbability of you finding yourself here at all, given the number of things that had to go in a specific way to make the exact organism you consider to be you emerge in the universe.

The anthropic principle by any other name. My existence doesn't require teleology.

Teleology has nothing to do with it. If you dismiss teleology, as you rightly should, there is a glaring problem in need of explanation: why, when it would have been immensely more probable for things to go differently than they did, did they in fact go the exact way they did in order to bring you into existence? It's like playing Russian roulette with 5 bullets in each gun, and winning thousands of times in a row. One small change, one instance of a different sperm from one of your ancestors making it to the egg first, and you would not be here at all--assuming the ordinary view is correct. From your perspective, that means something grossly improbable has occurred, and it is improbable for an improbable thing to occur.

From all the foregoing arguments and thought experiments, it should at least strike you as logically possible that you would have been any conscious being that was born in your place, even if conditions were different (and therefore you must be any conscious being right now). So, two explanations are on the table for your begetting: one that makes your existence a ridiculously improbable stroke of luck, and the other that makes it virtually inevitable. If I randomly drew a red bead from an urn containing a million beads, and asked you which of two hypothetical urns it was, one containing all red beads or one containing just one red beads while all the others were blue, you would have to answer that the former hypothesis is a million times more likely than the latter. In the same way, if universalism is possibly true, it must be trillions upon trillions of times more likely than the ordinary view, because there are many more than a million ways that your existence could have been prevented under that view. This statistical inference elevates universalism from merely being a plausible way of solving some thought experiments to a metaphysical near-necessity.

 

[ryan]

That's not what I mean, and in fact this view is congruent with Einstein's conception of time in a way that the ordinary view is not.

The anthropic principle by any other name. My existence doesn't require teleology.

Teleology has nothing to do with it. If you dismiss teleology, as you rightly should, there is a glaring problem in need of explanation: why, when it would have been immensely more probable for things to go differently than they did, did they in fact go the exact way they did in order to bring you into existence? It's like playing Russian roulette with 5 bullets in each gun, and winning thousands of times in a row. One small change, one instance of a different sperm from one of your ancestors making it to the egg first, and you would not be here at all--assuming the ordinary view is correct. From your perspective, that means something grossly improbable has occurred, and it is improbable for an improbable thing to occur.

But why is it so improbable when we ask the question after the fact?

A water molecule just landed in my drink, and that is infinitely unlikely too. But nobody is making a big deal about it.

BUT, if I were tracking that water molecule 5 years ago and asked what the chances were that it lands in my glass in 5 years and then it actually does, then we have a coincidence, or a highly improbable occurence of being conscious to that question.

 

[Treedbear]

...

...
The anthropic principle by any other name. My existence doesn't require teleology.

Teleology has nothing to do with it. If you dismiss teleology, as you rightly should, there is a glaring problem in need of explanation: why, when it would have been immensely more probable for things to go differently than they did, did they in fact go the exact way they did in order to bring you into existence? It's like playing Russian roulette with 5 bullets in each gun, and winning thousands of times in a row. One small change, one instance of a different sperm from one of your ancestors making it to the egg first, and you would not be here at all--assuming the ordinary view is correct. From your perspective, that means something grossly improbable has occurred, and it is improbable for an improbable thing to occur.

From all the foregoing arguments and thought experiments, it should at least strike you as logically possible that you would have been any conscious being that was born in your place, even if conditions were different (and therefore you must be any conscious being right now). So, two explanations are on the table for your begetting: one that makes your existence a ridiculously improbable stroke of luck, and the other that makes it virtually inevitable. If I randomly drew a red bead from an urn containing a million beads, and asked you which of two hypothetical urns it was, one containing all red beads or one containing just one red beads while all the others were blue, you would have to answer that the former hypothesis is a million times more likely than the latter. In the same way, if universalism is possibly true, it must be trillions upon trillions of times more likely than the ordinary view, because there are many more than a million ways that your existence could have been prevented under that view. This statistical inference elevates universalism from merely being a plausible way of solving some thought experiments to a metaphysical near-necessity.

PyramidHead, I think there's a problem with the urn full of colored balls metaphor. It really requires one to assume that my coming into existence was metaphysically necessary in order for the probability of it occurring to have any meaning. I need to be more objective in my approach to philosophy. I do consider it extraordinarily unlikely that I came into existence. I have long taken the view that there is a point during conception where the probability goes from impossibly large to a virtual certainty. But if it didn't happen then I think it's illogical to think I would have been born as someone else. I simply would not have ever existed, and the reason is due to a lack of continuity. At that point it has nothing to do with conscious experience.

- - - Updated - - -

That's not what I mean, and in fact this view is congruent with Einstein's conception of time in a way that the ordinary view is not.

The anthropic principle by any other name. My existence doesn't require teleology.

Teleology has nothing to do with it. If you dismiss teleology, as you rightly should, there is a glaring problem in need of explanation: why, when it would have been immensely more probable for things to go differently than they did, did they in fact go the exact way they did in order to bring you into existence? It's like playing Russian roulette with 5 bullets in each gun, and winning thousands of times in a row. One small change, one instance of a different sperm from one of your ancestors making it to the egg first, and you would not be here at all--assuming the ordinary view is correct. From your perspective, that means something grossly improbable has occurred, and it is improbable for an improbable thing to occur.

But why is it so improbable when we ask the question after the fact?

A water molecule just landed in my drink, and that is infinitely unlikely too. But nobody is making a big deal about it.

BUT, if I were tracking that water molecule 5 years ago and asked what the chances were that it lands in my glass in 5 years and then it actually does, then we have a coincidence, or a highly improbable occurence of being conscious to that question.

Yes, that's the point I'm trying to make too. PyramidHead is saying there's something ontologically special about that particular drop of water. Either that or he's saying that this drop is in some way every other drop that has ever existed because they have all had some common quality. I don't see how that's a useful concept. You can embrace it as true and embrace the idea that I am every other conscious entity that ever existed or will ever exist because we share a common quality of immediacy of experience. But I see no purpose for doing so.

 

[ryan]

But why is it so improbable when we ask the question after the fact?

A water molecule just landed in my drink, and that is infinitely unlikely too. But nobody is making a big deal about it.

BUT, if I were tracking that water molecule 5 years ago and asked what the chances were that it lands in my glass in 5 years and then it actually does, then we have a coincidence, or a highly improbable occurence of being conscious to that question.

Yes, that's the point I'm trying to make too. PyramidHead is saying there's something ontologically special about that particular drop of water. Either that or he's saying that this drop is in some way every other drop that has ever existed because they have all had some common quality. I don't see how that's a useful concept. You can embrace it as true and embrace the idea that I am every other conscious entity that ever existed or will ever exist because we share a common quality of immediacy of experience. But I see no purpose for doing so.

But what is keeping me curious is that I have seen talks from scientists like Lawrence Krauss reject the anthropic principle but didn't really explain why. So there might be an argument against it somehow that makes more sense than just the usual claim that the probabilities are too high.

If you come across a good one, please post it.

 

[PyramidHead]

PyramidHead, I think there's a problem with the urn full of colored balls metaphor. It really requires one to assume that my coming into existence was metaphysically necessary in order for the probability of it occurring to have any meaning. I need to be more objective in my approach to philosophy. I do consider it extraordinarily unlikely that I came into existence. I have long taken the view that there is a point during conception where the probability goes from impossibly large to a virtual certainty. But if it didn't happen then I think it's illogical to think I would have been born as someone else. I simply would not have ever existed, and the reason is due to a lack of continuity. At that point it has nothing to do with conscious experience.

That cannot have been the case, and here is why.

You are imagining your existence as a string of experiences connected by continuity. But there must have been a first experience that was not connected to any prior experiences. What was it that made that first experience yours, so that all of the subsequent experiences would also be yours? It could not have been continuity, because there was nothing to continue.

That's not what I mean, and in fact this view is congruent with Einstein's conception of time in a way that the ordinary view is not.

The anthropic principle by any other name. My existence doesn't require teleology.

Teleology has nothing to do with it. If you dismiss teleology, as you rightly should, there is a glaring problem in need of explanation: why, when it would have been immensely more probable for things to go differently than they did, did they in fact go the exact way they did in order to bring you into existence? It's like playing Russian roulette with 5 bullets in each gun, and winning thousands of times in a row. One small change, one instance of a different sperm from one of your ancestors making it to the egg first, and you would not be here at all--assuming the ordinary view is correct. From your perspective, that means something grossly improbable has occurred, and it is improbable for an improbable thing to occur.

But why is it so improbable when we ask the question after the fact?

A water molecule just landed in my drink, and that is infinitely unlikely too. But nobody is making a big deal about it.

BUT, if I were tracking that water molecule 5 years ago and asked what the chances were that it lands in my glass in 5 years and then it actually does, then we have a coincidence, or a highly improbable occurence of being conscious to that question.

Yes, that's the point I'm trying to make too. PyramidHead is saying there's something ontologically special about that particular drop of water. Either that or he's saying that this drop is in some way every other drop that has ever existed because they have all had some common quality. I don't see how that's a useful concept. You can embrace it as true and embrace the idea that I am every other conscious entity that ever existed or will ever exist because we share a common quality of immediacy of experience. But I see no purpose for doing so.

You are both missing something crucial about the statistical inference that is being made here, namely its perspectival nature.

Nothing is ontologically special about any given drop of water, despite the many ways in which it could have failed to exist, because we are examining it from the perspective of a detached observer. If that water droplet did not exist in the cup of water, another would have existed in its place, and for our purposes there is no distinction between one drop and another in terms of probability.

The situation involving your birth is different because it can be observed from two perspectives. A detached observer would rightly see nothing improbable about your birth, even though it represents a confluence of conditions that easily could have gone otherwise. If they had in fact gone otherwise and you did not exist, someone else would, and they would simply be there in your place; from the third-person perspective, this is the same as the situation with the drops of water.

We can approach the first-person perspective and why it differs by way of a simple analogy.

You are walking to the store one day and decide to take an alternate route. You have your headphones on, blasting your favorite song. You arrive at the store with no trouble, but upon arriving you gain the knowledge that, in fact, your route took you into an active minefield. People who take this route usually never make it to the store because they are blown to bits, but in very rare situations, someone happens by chance to walk along an incredibly narrow set of gaps between the mines. Today happened to be one such situation, so here you are at the store.

Now, think of how the probability of your arrival would look from the perspective of the store clerk. She has been working there a long time, and knows that people make it past the minefield a small percentage of the time. Today would just be another one of those times. Your arrival would not be cause for surprise to her; if you didn't make it through, another person would have eventually.

But from your perspective, something incredibly improbable has happened. It's not just that SOMEONE managed to step in just the right places to avoid destruction, but that someone was YOU. It would have been much more likely for the fortunate person who made it to the store to be someone else--because there are many samples of "someone else" and just one you! Yet, without being aware of it, your feet, and not someone else's, landed on just the right spots to navigate around the mines.

Suppose a rival hypothesis were offered for your arrival at the store. The mines are all there, but they are inactive. Therefore, your making it through unscathed turns out to be easy, relaxed, just what you would expect to happen given the circumstances. With no other information beyond (a) your presence at your destination and (b) these two hypotheses, the second hypothesis must from your perspective be overwhelmingly more likely than the first.

In the same way, all of the contingent events leading up to the your birth are like footsteps in a minefield. One deviation from the genetic and circumstantial path that was actually followed, occurring at any millisecond in the process, would trigger one of them to explode. You would never make it to the store, would never be here now to speculate about your identity. Of course, as I said, from someone else's point of view there is no improbability at all. If you were not born, another person would have been, and a detached observer with no skin in the game would have no reason to consider anyone's birth more or less probable than anyone else's. Yet, this does not resolve the improbability from your perspective. The only view that makes your existence probable from BOTH perspectives is universalism.

--------------------------------------

An additional question that must also be raised is why there is any birth at all that would have brought you into existence. It is logically conceivable that someone exactly like you in every physical way could have been born, in exactly the same manner as you were actually born, and could go on to live the same life as you are currently living now, right down to the smallest detail, in your place. You would just not exist, ever, and this doppelganger of yours would be the one reading this post.

As a matter of fact, this is essentially what happens on a regular basis when a fertilized egg splits in two and only one of them survives. Suppose that was the case for your mother's pregnancy. At some point during gestation, she was expecting quadruplets, but only one of the embryos made it to term, and you are that person. If it had been another embryo, genetically identical to the one that turned into you, would you have existed as that person too? If so, what if more than one, or indeed all four, were carried to term? Which of those quadruplets would you be, if any? And if the appearance of an organism with your exact genetic signature, who went on to live the same life you are now living, could have nonetheless been a different person from you, why was there ANY genetic signature or life story that would have made someone you? Couldn't the universe have unfolded perfectly well without your presence in it? It's one thing to win the lottery, but why do you even have a ticket?

These questions seem like they have answers, but the regular view of personal identity cannot provide any, even in principle. There is no additional nugget of information that would make any answer more likely than any other, but if you take the ordinary view seriously, there must be an answer that excludes all the others. Therefore, there is a contradiction in that view and it must be discarded. Universalism says you won the lottery because you in fact have all the tickets. Anytime a number is drawn and someone is born, it's you (me).

 

[ryan]

That cannot have been the case, and here is why.

You are imagining your existence as a string of experiences connected by continuity. But there must have been a first experience that was not connected to any prior experiences. What was it that made that first experience yours, so that all of the subsequent experiences would also be yours? It could not have been continuity, because there was nothing to continue.

That's not what I mean, and in fact this view is congruent with Einstein's conception of time in a way that the ordinary view is not.

The anthropic principle by any other name. My existence doesn't require teleology.

Teleology has nothing to do with it. If you dismiss teleology, as you rightly should, there is a glaring problem in need of explanation: why, when it would have been immensely more probable for things to go differently than they did, did they in fact go the exact way they did in order to bring you into existence? It's like playing Russian roulette with 5 bullets in each gun, and winning thousands of times in a row. One small change, one instance of a different sperm from one of your ancestors making it to the egg first, and you would not be here at all--assuming the ordinary view is correct. From your perspective, that means something grossly improbable has occurred, and it is improbable for an improbable thing to occur.

But why is it so improbable when we ask the question after the fact?

A water molecule just landed in my drink, and that is infinitely unlikely too. But nobody is making a big deal about it.

BUT, if I were tracking that water molecule 5 years ago and asked what the chances were that it lands in my glass in 5 years and then it actually does, then we have a coincidence, or a highly improbable occurence of being conscious to that question.

Yes, that's the point I'm trying to make too. PyramidHead is saying there's something ontologically special about that particular drop of water. Either that or he's saying that this drop is in some way every other drop that has ever existed because they have all had some common quality. I don't see how that's a useful concept. You can embrace it as true and embrace the idea that I am every other conscious entity that ever existed or will ever exist because we share a common quality of immediacy of experience. But I see no purpose for doing so.

You are both missing something crucial about the statistical inference that is being made here, namely its perspectival nature.

Nothing is ontologically special about any given drop of water, despite the many ways in which it could have failed to exist, because we are examining it from the perspective of a detached observer. If that water droplet did not exist in the cup of water, another would have existed in its place, and for our purposes there is no distinction between one drop and another in terms of probability.

The situation involving your birth is different because it can be observed from two perspectives. A detached observer would rightly see nothing improbable about your birth, even though it represents a confluence of conditions that easily could have gone otherwise. If they had in fact gone otherwise and you did not exist, someone else would, and they would simply be there in your place; from the third-person perspective, this is the same as the situation with the drops of water.

We can approach the first-person perspective and why it differs by way of a simple analogy.

You are walking to the store one day and decide to take an alternate route. You have your headphones on, blasting your favorite song. You arrive at the store with no trouble, but upon arriving you gain the knowledge that, in fact, your route took you into an active minefield. People who take this route usually never make it to the store because they are blown to bits, but in very rare situations, someone happens by chance to walk along an incredibly narrow set of gaps between the mines. Today happened to be one such situation, so here you are at the store.

Now, think of how the probability of your arrival would look from the perspective of the store clerk. She has been working there a long time, and knows that people make it past the minefield a small percentage of the time. Today would just be another one of those times. Your arrival would not be cause for surprise to her; if you didn't make it through, another person would have eventually.

But from your perspective, something incredibly improbable has happened. It's not just that SOMEONE managed to step in just the right places to avoid destruction, but that someone was YOU. It would have been much more likely for the fortunate person who made it to the store to be someone else--because there are many samples of "someone else" and just one you! Yet, without being aware of it, your feet, and not someone else's, landed on just the right spots to navigate around the mines.

Suppose a rival hypothesis were offered for your arrival at the store. The mines are all there, but they are inactive. Therefore, your making it through unscathed turns out to be easy, relaxed, just what you would expect to happen given the circumstances. With no other information beyond (a) your presence at your destination and (b) these two hypotheses, the second hypothesis must from your perspective be overwhelmingly more likely than the first.

In the same way, all of the contingent events leading up to the your birth are like footsteps in a minefield. One deviation from the genetic and circumstantial path that was actually followed, occurring at any millisecond in the process, would trigger one of them to explode. You would never make it to the store, would never be here now to speculate about your identity. Of course, as I said, from someone else's point of view there is no improbability at all. If you were not born, another person would have been, and a detached observer with no skin in the game would have no reason to consider anyone's birth more or less probable than anyone else's. Yet, this does not resolve the improbability from your perspective. The only view that makes your existence probable from BOTH perspectives is universalism.

Pyramid think about what I was saying. If nothing is asking the question, "what are the chances that I exist" then when I do exist, not only is it not improbable, it is not even a probability anymore.

As a sperm cell, I do not have the conscious capacity to wonder if I am going to be born. Somebody, anybody has to ask the question or imagine the probability before it coming to fruition is unlikely. I or anyone else cannot ask the question after the fact.

--------------------------------------

An additional question that must also be raised is why there is any birth at all that would have brought you into existence. It is logically conceivable that someone exactly like you in every physical way could have been born, in exactly the same manner as you were actually born, and could go on to live the same life as you are currently living now, right down to the smallest detail, in your place. You would just not exist, ever, and this doppelganger of yours would be the one reading this post.

As a matter of fact, this is essentially what happens on a regular basis when a fertilized egg splits in two and only one of them survives. Suppose that was the case for your mother's pregnancy. At some point during gestation, she was expecting quadruplets, but only one of the embryos made it to term, and you are that person. If it had been another embryo, genetically identical to the one that turned into you, would you have existed as that person too? If so, what if more than one, or indeed all four, were carried to term? Which of those quadruplets would you be, if any? And if the appearance of an organism with your exact genetic signature, who went on to live the same life you are now living, could have nonetheless been a different person from you, why was there ANY genetic signature or life story that would have made someone you? Couldn't the universe have unfolded perfectly well without your presence in it? It's one thing to win the lottery, but why do you even have a ticket?

These questions seem like they have answers, but the regular view of personal identity cannot provide any, even in principle. There is no additional nugget of information that would make any answer more likely than any other, but if you take the ordinary view seriously, there must be an answer that excludes all the others. Therefore, there is a contradiction in that view and it must be discarded. Universalism says you won the lottery because you in fact have all the tickets. Anytime a number is drawn and someone is born, it's you (me).

Yeah, I have been in agreement with you regarding some aspects of the consciousness being universal. But eventually I become a unique consciousness of integrated experiences/memories and sensations the moment something changes internally or environmentally with my perfect twin.

 

[PyramidHead]

Pyramid think about what I was saying. If nothing is asking the question, "what are the chances that I exist" then when I do exist, not only is it not improbable, it is not even a probability anymore.

As a sperm cell, I do not have the conscious capacity to wonder if I am going to be born. Somebody, anybody has to ask the question or imagine the probability before it coming to fruition is unlikely. I or anyone else cannot ask the question after the fact.

I wonder why you think that? There is no rule that says probability can only be assessed before something occurs. In the example I gave about the minefield, you had no idea that there was any chance of encountering any danger on your way to the store, so the question of how probable your arrival would be never crossed your mind. That doesn't negate the fact that after the fact, your observation of being at your destination would have to be interpreted as a product of very slim odds in your favor. I don't get why you are so fixated on something being predicted one way or another ahead of time.

An additional question that must also be raised is why there is any birth at all that would have brought you into existence. It is logically conceivable that someone exactly like you in every physical way could have been born, in exactly the same manner as you were actually born, and could go on to live the same life as you are currently living now, right down to the smallest detail, in your place. You would just not exist, ever, and this doppelganger of yours would be the one reading this post.

As a matter of fact, this is essentially what happens on a regular basis when a fertilized egg splits in two and only one of them survives. Suppose that was the case for your mother's pregnancy. At some point during gestation, she was expecting quadruplets, but only one of the embryos made it to term, and you are that person. If it had been another embryo, genetically identical to the one that turned into you, would you have existed as that person too? If so, what if more than one, or indeed all four, were carried to term? Which of those quadruplets would you be, if any? And if the appearance of an organism with your exact genetic signature, who went on to live the same life you are now living, could have nonetheless been a different person from you, why was there ANY genetic signature or life story that would have made someone you? Couldn't the universe have unfolded perfectly well without your presence in it? It's one thing to win the lottery, but why do you even have a ticket?

These questions seem like they have answers, but the regular view of personal identity cannot provide any, even in principle. There is no additional nugget of information that would make any answer more likely than any other, but if you take the ordinary view seriously, there must be an answer that excludes all the others. Therefore, there is a contradiction in that view and it must be discarded. Universalism says you won the lottery because you in fact have all the tickets. Anytime a number is drawn and someone is born, it's you (me).

Yeah, I have been in agreement with you regarding some aspects of the consciousness being universal. But eventually I become a unique consciousness of integrated experiences/memories and sensations the moment something changes internally or environmentally with my perfect twin.

That does not answer the question. If your mother originally was going to have quadruplets, but only one of the embryos survived and turned into you, would you still exist if a numerically different embryo had survived instead of the one that actually did?

If so, which one of the embryos would turn into you if BOTH had survived? What if all four had survived?

What if your embryo was actually a chimera, the result of two embryos fusing together during gestation? Were you originally one of the two? Which one? What mechanism could possibly account for the answers to any of these questions?

The moment you start straying into this territory, we end up talking as if there is a "self-substance" or "self-residue" that adheres to bodies and brains like glue, and can only be in one at a time, and then you're basically talking about an immaterial soul. There is no such thing. To resolve these dilemmas without invoking any kind of strange disembodied self, the only possible conclusion is that you would be any of your mother's offspring, and are indeed any offspring of any mother.

 

[Treedbear]

PyramidHead, I think there's a problem with the urn full of colored balls metaphor. It really requires one to assume that my coming into existence was metaphysically necessary in order for the probability of it occurring to have any meaning. I need to be more objective in my approach to philosophy. I do consider it extraordinarily unlikely that I came into existence. I have long taken the view that there is a point during conception where the probability goes from impossibly large to a virtual certainty. But if it didn't happen then I think it's illogical to think I would have been born as someone else. I simply would not have ever existed, and the reason is due to a lack of continuity. At that point it has nothing to do with conscious experience.

That cannot have been the case, and here is why.

You are imagining your existence as a string of experiences connected by continuity. But there must have been a first experience that was not connected to any prior experiences. What was it that made that first experience yours, so that all of the subsequent experiences would also be yours? It could not have been continuity, because there was nothing to continue.
...

My existence is part of the continuity of all existence. It is contingient on what came before. It's merely epistemically convenient to think of the beginning as the point where the probability increases to a virtual inevitability. And life itself is difficult to define, let alone the exact point at which it begins.

 

[PyramidHead]

PyramidHead, I think there's a problem with the urn full of colored balls metaphor. It really requires one to assume that my coming into existence was metaphysically necessary in order for the probability of it occurring to have any meaning. I need to be more objective in my approach to philosophy. I do consider it extraordinarily unlikely that I came into existence. I have long taken the view that there is a point during conception where the probability goes from impossibly large to a virtual certainty. But if it didn't happen then I think it's illogical to think I would have been born as someone else. I simply would not have ever existed, and the reason is due to a lack of continuity. At that point it has nothing to do with conscious experience.

That cannot have been the case, and here is why.

You are imagining your existence as a string of experiences connected by continuity. But there must have been a first experience that was not connected to any prior experiences. What was it that made that first experience yours, so that all of the subsequent experiences would also be yours? It could not have been continuity, because there was nothing to continue.
...

My existence is part of the continuity of all existence. It is contingient on what came before. It's merely epistemically convenient to think of the beginning as the point where the probability increases to a virtual inevitability. And life itself is difficult to define, let alone the exact point at which it begins.

That's a far cry from your original assertion, which was that you are a unique lone consciousness that came to be at a specific time in the history of the universe (though you provide no plausible account of why the emergence of this or any other particular organism should result in your coming to be), but here you're equivocating your existence as a person with simply being an object in reality with preceding causes.

There is no "absolute" probability of any event irrespective of point of view; all probability is tied to an instance of conscious observation. So, I don't know what it means to say that probability increases to virtual inevitability without defining the perspective from which either has been assessed. Obviously the passage of time decreases the number of alternate ways something can turn out, until it happens and that's just what happened. But that doesn't mean no inferences can be made about probability.

Someone's chances of flipping a fair coin and landing on heads 1000 times in a row increases with each subsequent result of heads, but that does not make getting 1000 in a row a probable occurrence!

 

[ryan]

I wonder why you think that? There is no rule that says probability can only be assessed before something occurs. In the example I gave about the minefield, you had no idea that there was any chance of encountering any danger on your way to the store, so the question of how probable your arrival would be never crossed your mind. That doesn't negate the fact that after the fact, your observation of being at your destination would have to be interpreted as a product of very slim odds in your favor. I don't get why you are so fixated on something being predicted one way or another ahead of time.

Okay, so let's say there are a million different possible outcomes from walking through the mine field, and only one of them has me surviving. But they all had equal chances; the one where I survive has the same 1/1000000 as the other ones have. But if an observer or I knew before the fact or before we knew the answer, then it is unlikely.

There is no other way to look at this. In this case probabilities matter only when we don't have all the information.

Yeah, I have been in agreement with you regarding some aspects of the consciousness being universal. But eventually I become a unique consciousness of integrated experiences/memories and sensations the moment something changes internally or environmentally with my perfect twin.

That does not answer the question. If your mother originally was going to have quadruplets, but only one of the embryos survived and turned into you, would you still exist if a numerically different embryo had survived instead of the one that actually did?

If so, which one of the embryos would turn into you if BOTH had survived? What if all four had survived?

What if your embryo was actually a chimera, the result of two embryos fusing together during gestation? Were you originally one of the two? Which one? What mechanism could possibly account for the answers to any of these questions?

The moment you start straying into this territory, we end up talking as if there is a "self-substance" or "self-residue" that adheres to bodies and brains like glue, and can only be in one at a time, and then you're basically talking about an immaterial soul. There is no such thing. To resolve these dilemmas without invoking any kind of strange disembodied self, the only possible conclusion is that you would be any of your mother's offspring, and are indeed any offspring of any mother.

To know what I am, where I came from and what I will be, you must have a point of reference at any point during the existence of my consciousness (sense of self). So when will we say that my consciousness emerges for the purposes of your thought experiment? It doesn't matter how far back you want to go.

 

[PyramidHead]

Here is what you fail to grasp about the probability argument: regardless of how you assign probability before the fact, when you are evaluating potential explanations for how it happened after the fact, you must figure out which explanation is most likely. Given the choice between an explanation that requires a one-in-a-million stroke of luck and an explanation that requires no such luck, you must infer that the second explanation is more likely to be what happened, all else being equal.

In the minefield story, you don't actually know if there was a minefield or not. Two hypotheses are offered for your arrival at your destination: either you happened to walk along a tiny channel of gaps between the mines by accident, or the mines are all inactive and stepping on one wouldn't have made an explosion anyway. Can you tell me with a straight face that you would consider both hypotheses equally likely, based solely on the observation that you are alive right now? If so, I can't help you any further.

 

[ruby sparks]

It's like playing Russian roulette with 5 bullets in each gun, and winning thousands of times in a row. One small change, one instance of a different sperm from one of your ancestors making it to the egg first, and you would not be here at all--assuming the ordinary view is correct. From your perspective, that means something grossly improbable has occurred, and it is improbable for an improbable thing to occur.

Just jumping in without having read the thread through....hope that's ok.

Wouldn't it be better to say (and apologies if I've missed anyone saying it) that you would be right if there was just one gun, but since there's....I dunno....billions of guns, the probability is very high indeed that one of them will fire blank thousands of times in a row?

By all means refer me back to something I've missed.

My bottom line I suppose is, having perused the OP and some of the posts..........what exactly is the 'problem' that you are trying to solve? Open, genuine question. Not being cheeky or assuming there's no problem. No need for you to explain it to one lazy latecomer either unless you are inclined.

 

[PyramidHead]

It's like playing Russian roulette with 5 bullets in each gun, and winning thousands of times in a row. One small change, one instance of a different sperm from one of your ancestors making it to the egg first, and you would not be here at all--assuming the ordinary view is correct. From your perspective, that means something grossly improbable has occurred, and it is improbable for an improbable thing to occur.

Just jumping in without having read the thread through....hope that's ok.

Wouldn't it be better to say (and apologies if I've missed anyone saying it) that you would be right if there was just one gun, but since there's....I dunno....billions of guns, the probability is very high indeed that one of them will fire blank thousands of times in a row?

Russian roulette is played by spinning the drum of a revolver pistol and letting the arbitrary way it lines up with with the barrel dictate whether a bullet is fired or not. It's not the particular quality of any gun that makes a difference, but the effectively random orientation of the drum each time it is spun. In other words, any functional revolver has the same odds of firing a bullet into your head after you spin the drum, so it doesn't matter if you play with one gun or every gun.

My bottom line I suppose is, having perused the OP and some of the posts..........what exactly is the 'problem' that you are trying to solve? Open, genuine question. Not being cheeky or assuming there's no problem. No need for you to explain it to one lazy latecomer either unless you are inclined.

There are several problems with the ordinary view of personal identity.

I would describe the ordinary view as follows: after billions of years of being completely absent from reality, you began to exist when a local region of matter and energy configured itself into a particular pattern, the human being that was born on your birthday. Only the birth of this specific organism could have brought you into existence; if it had been different in any way, no matter how slight, the resulting organism would have been someone else and not you. Your existence was therefore tied in a necessary and sufficient way to a unique physical event that could have gone many other ways than how it actually did. During the period in which your brain is producing electrical activity, you will carry out your life as a conscious individual. When there is no longer any energy left to sustain the electrical activity, you will vanish from reality forever.

Here are the questions raised by this view.

1. Why was that particular configuration of matter and energy sufficient to bring you into existence? It is logically conceivable that the whole universe could have chugged along exactly as it has, with someone matching your exact physical description being born of your mother on your birthday, while you would not be that someone. This is not controversial; in just the same way, if you had an identical twin that died in childbirth, you could imagine what the situation would be like if YOU were the twin that died instead of the one that survived. Assuming there is no substantial difference between the twins as newborns, that twin would now be doing exactly what you are doing, thinking what you are thinking, married to whoever you are married to, but you would not exist at all. So, the fact that something exists and satisfies the genetic/biographical specifications for what you consider to be your body does not really explain why you are that body, when logically you could have been nobody at all.

2. Why was that particular configuration of matter and energy necessary to bring you into existence? Because the ordinary view ties your emergence in the universe to a ridiculously narrow set of contingencies (namely, a certain sperm and no other had to make it from the testis of every single one of your male ancestors to the eggs of all your female ancestors), small changes to the way things happened are not admitted. In other words, if a different sperm, identical in every way to the one that made you except for some junk DNA, had fertilized your mother's egg, the person born 9 months later would be someone else and not you. As before, despite the life of this person probably looking exactly like yours from the outside, their experiences would not be yours, and you would just be blank for all eternity. For some reason that cannot be explained, only the lineage of sperms that actually made it through your maternal lineage could have resulted in you coming to be.

3. If the same physical events that caused your existence were to happen again, would you exist in the result of those events? The ordinary view says your experiences are the ones that happen to the object that is you, the entity with all the physical qualities we have been discussing. Experience is indivisible; either you are having it or not. Yet, physical objects are highly divisible. So, if the configuration of particles that has everything it takes to be you were to be duplicated, which of the duplicates would you be? Both? Neither? These and similar problems have been analyzed by philosophers with thought experiments about Star Trek-style teleportation, brain bisection (it is possible to survive with only one brain hemisphere), and parallel worlds.

Joe Kern has a particularly effective analogy: imagine a huge factory full of exact clones of the gametes that formed your embryo, kept frozen in storage. There could be millions of them. Any one of them, when implanted in a surrogate mother, will cause the birth of someone with your exact DNA. Suppose, in fact, that this is the actual story of how you were born; one of the frozen pairs of gametes was thawed, fused, and implanted in your mother, and here you are. Under the ordinary view, only THAT EXACT PAIR would have brought you into existence. Just one out of the millions of copies of gametes would have made you, and none of the others. For, if several pairs were thawed, fused, and implanted, it would result in the birth of people you would regard as twins. If EVERY pair were implanted and carried to term, you would still regard yourself as just one of the millions of identical bodies. There is no physical fact that could determine which one of these--if any! (see question #1)--would turn out to be you, or why.

4. Why is your future so free to vary if your past had to be so fixed? By now, it should be clear that the regular view of personal identity requires a lot of things to have happened in an astonishingly specific way for you to be born. Yet, after your birth, for some reason there is no limit to the kinds of changes you might undergo, as long as they don't stop the electrical activity of your brain. If you had been kidnapped as a child by a band of pirates and raised on the high seas, your entire personality, body, and life history would be drastically different from what it is today, but it wouldn't be the case that the "original" you had died and been replaced by a different person. You would just be the person who was raised by pirates. If your memory were wiped tomorrow and you woke up in a UFO with total amnesia, it would be a lousy morning, but it would be a lousy morning for you, even if you had no mental continuity with who you are today. As long as you're alive, there seems to be no restriction at all on the types of transformations that could have happened, in each case preserving your subjective identity. There is no way to explain why this is only true now, when before you were born everything had to be molecule-specific.

5. What would your evening be like if you temporarily severed the connection between your brain's hemispheres and listened to classical music through one ear and a boring lecture through the other? This is a specific thought experiment created by Arnold Zuboff. We already know that a single hemisphere of a brain is sufficient to preserve consciousness, as people have lost functionality in large parts of their brain due to e.g. stroke. So, if you had just half of your brain, you would still exist "in" that half, and it wouldn't matter if it was the right half or the left. We also know that the connection between the two hemispheres can be severed in order to treat seizures in people with epilepsy. The result of this operation has been well-documented; when exposed to contrary stimuli, the body parts of the patient corresponding to each hemisphere act independently and answer questions differently.

A sidenote here is that the ordinary view has no way of saying whether such patients are actually two distinct people, and furthermore which half of their brain (if either) is the same person as they were before the operation.

But if, as the thought experiment goes, you could press a button to temporarily anesthetize the connection between your brain hemispheres, and with two earbuds play classical music in one ear (which would be processed by one hemisphere alone) and a boring lecture in the other (processed by the other hemisphere), what kind of experience would you have? You wouldn't hear both clashing simultaneously, because there would be no integration between the hemispheres. Yet, when the anesthesia wore off and the connection was restored, you would remember both experiences equally well. Again, assigning one "self" to a specific brain/body combination admits no strategy to resolving any of the questions that arise: how many persons were there before, during, and after the split? can you track the person that was "you" all the way through, or did it cease to exist somewhere along the way? if you can remember having both experiences as if they were equally yours, doesn't that mean you were in two places at once? and so on.

------------------------------------------------------------------------

To answer any of these or other questions about what you are and which experiences belong to you, the ordinary view gradually but inevitably converges toward invoking Cartesian souls and other such nonsense. It is simply not up to the task of rationally and consistently assigning "selves" to bodies without leading to contradictory or absurd conclusions.

 

[ryan]

Here is what you fail to grasp about the probability argument: regardless of how you assign probability before the fact, when you are evaluating potential explanations for how it happened after the fact, you must figure out which explanation is most likely. Given the choice between an explanation that requires a one-in-a-million stroke of luck and an explanation that requires no such luck, you must infer that the second explanation is more likely to be what happened, all else being equal.

In the minefield story, you don't actually know if there was a minefield or not. Two hypotheses are offered for your arrival at your destination: either you happened to walk along a tiny channel of gaps between the mines by accident, or the mines are all inactive and stepping on one wouldn't have made an explosion anyway. Can you tell me with a straight face that you would consider both hypotheses equally likely, based solely on the observation that you are alive right now? If so, I can't help you any further.

There is no scenario that is most likely since there are a million scenarios. Each possibility was one in a million. There must be an outcome that has an equally unlikely one in a million chance.

You seem to be putting some kind of special objective emphasis on the survival outcome as being the only true 1 in a million chance.

If I didn't survive the landmines, then I wouldn't be around to ask how I got so lucky.

I really don't see the problem here.

 

[ryan]

There are several problems with the ordinary view of personal identity.

I would describe the ordinary view as follows: after billions of years of being completely absent from reality, you began to exist when a local region of matter and energy configured itself into a particular pattern, the human being that was born on your birthday. Only the birth of this specific organism could have brought you into existence; if it had been different in any way, no matter how slight, the resulting organism would have been someone else and not you. Your existence was therefore tied in a necessary and sufficient way to a unique physical event that could have gone many other ways than how it actually did. During the period in which your brain is producing electrical activity, you will carry out your life as a conscious individual. When there is no longer any energy left to sustain the electrical activity, you will vanish from reality forever.

Here are the questions raised by this view.

1. Why was that particular configuration of matter and energy sufficient to bring you into existence? It is logically conceivable that the whole universe could have chugged along exactly as it has, with someone matching your exact physical description being born of your mother on your birthday, while you would not be that someone. This is not controversial; in just the same way, if you had an identical twin that died in childbirth, you could imagine what the situation would be like if YOU were the twin that died instead of the one that survived. Assuming there is no substantial difference between the twins as newborns, that twin would now be doing exactly what you are doing, thinking what you are thinking, married to whoever you are married to, but you would not exist at all. So, the fact that something exists and satisfies the genetic/biographical specifications for what you consider to be your body does not really explain why you are that body, when logically you could have been nobody at all.

The problem with what you are saying here is that you are changing what "you" is. I assume we are defining a "you" as a particular "you" that can only have a unique conscious existence.

Once you split what the "you" is, you are no longer talking about the same "you".

 

[PyramidHead]

Here is what you fail to grasp about the probability argument: regardless of how you assign probability before the fact, when you are evaluating potential explanations for how it happened after the fact, you must figure out which explanation is most likely. Given the choice between an explanation that requires a one-in-a-million stroke of luck and an explanation that requires no such luck, you must infer that the second explanation is more likely to be what happened, all else being equal.

In the minefield story, you don't actually know if there was a minefield or not. Two hypotheses are offered for your arrival at your destination: either you happened to walk along a tiny channel of gaps between the mines by accident, or the mines are all inactive and stepping on one wouldn't have made an explosion anyway. Can you tell me with a straight face that you would consider both hypotheses equally likely, based solely on the observation that you are alive right now? If so, I can't help you any further.

There is no scenario that is most likely since there are a million scenarios.

But... answer my question. Knowing nothing else except that you arrived at your destination, would you consider it more likely that (a) you miraculously avoided all the active landmines by stepping in just the right places, or (b) the landmines were inactive so it didn't make any difference where you stepped?

You seem to be putting some kind of special objective emphasis on the survival outcome as being the only true 1 in a million chance.

If I didn't survive the landmines, then I wouldn't be around to ask how I got so lucky.

Yes, and that would account for 999,999 of the 1,000,000 possible outcomes. Only 1 of those outcomes leaves you alive to ask the question. The fact that you wouldn't be around if the other outcome happened doesn't make it any less likely.

- - - Updated - - -

There are several problems with the ordinary view of personal identity.

I would describe the ordinary view as follows: after billions of years of being completely absent from reality, you began to exist when a local region of matter and energy configured itself into a particular pattern, the human being that was born on your birthday. Only the birth of this specific organism could have brought you into existence; if it had been different in any way, no matter how slight, the resulting organism would have been someone else and not you. Your existence was therefore tied in a necessary and sufficient way to a unique physical event that could have gone many other ways than how it actually did. During the period in which your brain is producing electrical activity, you will carry out your life as a conscious individual. When there is no longer any energy left to sustain the electrical activity, you will vanish from reality forever.

Here are the questions raised by this view.

1. Why was that particular configuration of matter and energy sufficient to bring you into existence? It is logically conceivable that the whole universe could have chugged along exactly as it has, with someone matching your exact physical description being born of your mother on your birthday, while you would not be that someone. This is not controversial; in just the same way, if you had an identical twin that died in childbirth, you could imagine what the situation would be like if YOU were the twin that died instead of the one that survived. Assuming there is no substantial difference between the twins as newborns, that twin would now be doing exactly what you are doing, thinking what you are thinking, married to whoever you are married to, but you would not exist at all. So, the fact that something exists and satisfies the genetic/biographical specifications for what you consider to be your body does not really explain why you are that body, when logically you could have been nobody at all.

The problem with what you are saying here is that you are changing what "you" is. I assume we are defining a "you" as a particular "you" that can only have a unique conscious existence.

Once you split what the "you" is, you are no longer talking about the same "you".

I can no longer make heads or tails of your objections.

 

[ryan]

But... answer my question. Knowing nothing else except that you arrived at your destination, would you consider it more likely that (a) you miraculously avoided all the active landmines by stepping in just the right places, or (b) the landmines were inactive so it didn't make any difference where you stepped?

You seem to be putting some kind of special objective emphasis on the survival outcome as being the only true 1 in a million chance.

If I didn't survive the landmines, then I wouldn't be around to ask how I got so lucky.

Yes, and that would account for 999,999 of the 1,000,000 possible outcomes. Only 1 of those outcomes leaves you alive to ask the question. The fact that you wouldn't be around if the other outcome happened doesn't make it any less likely.

Imagine that in order for a new conscioisness to pop into existence there needs to be a mine exploding. The mine that explodes and creates a new consciousness will feel lucky, but we know that nothing objectively coincidental happened. We knew that a consciousness had to come into existence; we just weren't sure which one.

I can no longer make heads or tails of your objections.

This objection is going to keep coming back with others, so you might as well deal with it now instead of later. I was really clear, and I know you can understand what I meant if you try.

 

[PyramidHead]

Imagine that in order for a new conscioisness to pop into existence there needs to be a mine exploding.

In my example it was the other way around: for you to come into existence (arrive at the store), you would have had to successfully AVOID all the mines.

The mine that explodes and creates a new consciousness will feel lucky, but we know that nothing objectively coincidental happened. We knew that a consciousness had to come into existence; we just weren't sure which one.

That's the third-person perspective. It's like watching someone win the lottery. Someone has to win eventually. It is 100% likely that, eventually, someone will win the lottery. But that doesn't mean it's likely that YOU will be the winner. From YOUR perspective, it is highly unlikely. Do you see how probability depends on perspective? Or do you think you have a 100% chance of winning the lottery because someone eventually must win?

I can no longer make heads or tails of your objections.

This objection is going to keep coming back with others, so you might as well deal with it now instead of later. I was really clear, and I know you can understand what I meant if you try.

This is getting frustrating. "You" is just your personal existence. It's the thing that you've always had, that you have right now, that you want to keep having. It's the thing that you would still have if your hair was a different color, if you had a different job, or if you had a different childhood. It's your presence in the universe as an experiencer of experiences, as a consciousness that persists over time, rather than not being in the universe at all. I have used that definition consistently in all my posts. This thing, this "you", according to universalism, is present in any physical substrate with the capacity for consciousness. The problems with twins dying in childbirth and brains splitting are only problems for the ordinary view; for universalism, you are any of your twins, you are any self-contained segment of any brain, and you are any person generally speaking. The definition hasn't changed, it just applies to more things than was originally thought.

Zuboff's analogy about this is to imagine a culture that has only ever seen one red object. They might mistakenly think that to be red is tied to being that particular object, that nothing else could possibly be red. But their philosophers present them with a wacky idea: what if redness is not just restricted to this object, but can be present in all kinds of objects, so long as they have the right physical properties? Roughly the same thing is true of the ordinary idea of you. Because the illusion of being an alienated self trapped in a single mind is so strong, you naturally think that only the experiences that pass through a particular brain can be yours. Yet, this cannot be the case for the reasons I have laid out, and all the problems that are consequences of that view.

 

[ryan]

In my example it was the other way around: for you to come into existence (arrive at the store), you would have had to successfully AVOID all the mines.



That's the third-person perspective. It's like watching someone win the lottery. Someone has to win eventually. It is 100% likely that, eventually, someone will win the lottery. But that doesn't mean it's likely that YOU will be the winner. From YOUR perspective, it is highly unlikely. Do you see how probability depends on perspective? Or do you think you have a 100% chance of winning the lottery because someone eventually must win?

But I did not have a perspective before winning the lottery because I didn't exist.

And I have been trying to explain to you all along why perspective is important for my argument.

This objection is going to keep coming back with others, so you might as well deal with it now instead of later. I was really clear, and I know you can understand what I meant if you try.

This is getting frustrating. "You" is just your personal existence. It's the thing that you've always had, that you have right now, that you want to keep having. It's the thing that you would still have if your hair was a different color, if you had a different job, or if you had a different childhood.

No, I wouldn't be me if I had a different job or different hair color. Ryan/"I" is a singular existence. This is where I believe you are wrong.

It's your presence in the universe as an experiencer of experiences, as a consciousness that persists over time, rather than not being in the universe at all. I have used that definition consistently in all my posts. This thing, this "you", according to universalism, is present in any physical substrate with the capacity for consciousness. The problems with twins dying in childbirth and brains splitting are only problems for the ordinary view; for universalism, you are any of your twins, you are any self-contained segment of any brain, and you are any person generally speaking. The definition hasn't changed, it just applies to more things than was originally thought.

Zuboff's analogy about this is to imagine a culture that has only ever seen one red object. They might mistakenly think that to be red is tied to being that particular object, that nothing else could possibly be red. But their philosophers present them with a wacky idea: what if redness is not just restricted to this object, but can be present in all kinds of objects, so long as they have the right physical properties? Roughly the same thing is true of the ordinary idea of you. Because the illusion of being an alienated self trapped in a single mind is so strong, you naturally think that only the experiences that pass through a particular brain can be yours. Yet, this cannot be the case for the reasons I have laid out, and all the problems that are consequences of that view.

Yes, there are some universal properties of me that I would share with a ryan with a different job. But the rest is what makes me singular and unique.