The "me-ness" of being me

[Treedbear]

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.

I'm simply equating my existence as a person with being a conscious, material life-form which originated from non-conscious, lifeless material. Whether there is an exact point at which this happens (unlikely) or some combination of events occurring over a narrow segment of time (more than likely) doesn't really matter. Eventually this matter organizes itself to become a sentient, reasoning, conscious being. Due to the wonder of genetics that process is practically inevitable once life begins. Therefore it's logical to assign the emergence of this life I have learned to call "me" as taking place at about conception. It's logical because we need a consistent epistological system in order to make sense of the world. We need to recognize objects and processes as distinct in some way. As such the need just doesn't arise for a radically new etiology.

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.

It's an observation about the course generally taken by which conception occurs. Simplistically, it comes down to one sperm cell out of millions combining with the egg. It's a generic definition of what constitutes a beginning and can be used as a template for virtually any thing or process. It's part of a useful way of understanding the world.

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!

But why limit the game to landing only heads? Why not any of a hundred or more different combinations and patterns? There is nothing inherently special about all heads. That example seems to confirm that your perspective assumes that "me/you" was inevitable. (I think it's understood we're leaving aside anyone's views on determinism here).

 

[ruby sparks]

I'm still not understanding what the essential problem is.

There seem to be two things going on. One has to do with probability and the other with identity. The first seems at least related to the anthropic principle and the latter in some ways to The Ship of Theseus thought experiment.

Pyramidhead, I'm going to pick out a few things you said in your post to me and comment on them, to see if that helps clarify things.

 

[ruby sparks]

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.

I think that if everything was identical, that person would be me. I'd have a doppleganger.

Tangentally, to 'me', my 'me-ness' is, ultimately, a sensation. The idea that there is a constant, stable 'me' is probably imo an illusion. There's just flux, and 'I' hang on to a robust sense of self by clinging on to similarities.

Also, my 'me-ness' is imo interoperable, that is to say it is not substrate-dependent. Hypothetically, I think I accept that 'me' could be formed of a different substrate as long as all the information was arranged identically. Also, the hypothetical that there are parallel identical universes with an infinite number of 'me's in them seems possible too. And if I had an identical twin, there'd be two of me. It could not, it seems, be otherwise. A=A.

Does that get towards what you are wrestling with?

It might be another question to ask if 'absolutely identical' is possible. But as I understand it, for now we're being hypothetical.

 

[PyramidHead]

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

I remain befuddled as to why you feel that makes any difference. Probabilities are assigned based on what is known, not based on time. Even if something has already happened, its probability can be evaluated afterwards in the same way as beforehand if the degree of knowledge is the same. To make this clearer, I'll modify my lottery example a bit. Here I will assume the ordinary view of things.

Your embryo was actually the product of in vitro fertilization. The individual gametes involved were collected and kept frozen before being thawed, fused, and implanted in your mother. However, there was one stipulation. Your mother had to win the lottery in order for your embryo to be thawed. She could only play once, just one ticket, and if it was a losing ticket you would never have existed. It just so happened that she won the lottery with her first and only ticket, and as a result you are here.

That's one hypothesis.

The other hypothesis is almost the same, except all your mother had to do was play the lottery. She didn't have to win. She just had to buy a ticket. Any ticket, no matter what the number was, was sufficient to allow the gametes to be thawed, fused, and implanted, and for you to exist.

These are the only two options, and your only piece of information is that you now exist and are experiencing this moment. You didn't exist before the lottery ticket was bought. Yet, I can't see how you could possibly argue that these two outcomes should be considered equally likely from your perspective. By simply running the math, it's obvious that the second hypothesis is much more likely to be the explanation for your birth than the first.

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.

Oh, come on now. When you dye your hair, are you ending your subjective existence? When you change jobs, do you vanish and another subjective identity takes your place? If you ate a muffin this morning for breakfast instead of cereal, would your ability to experience the world as Ryan be obliterated? No, no, and no. You would be just fine; the inner life of the person with dyed hair, a different job, or a muffin in his stomach would still be experienced by your consciousness. This is all common sense, still keeping with the regular notion of personal identity. What you're talking about is more like personality or biography.

To get at it more directly, recall the possibility that you had a twin that died in childbirth. Now, imagine the a parallel world where you were the twin that died instead of the one that survived. There would be no difference between the twin's life and yours, and he would be reading these words right now instead of you. What I am talking about, the "I" of personal existence, is no more and no less than the difference between these two worlds, the thing that is in the first one (where you are the surviving twin) but not the second one (where you are the twin that died).

 

[ryan]

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

I remain befuddled as to why you feel that makes any difference. Probabilities are assigned based on what is known, not based on time. Even if something has already happened, its probability can be evaluated afterwards in the same way as beforehand if the degree of knowledge is the same. To make this clearer, I'll modify my lottery example a bit. Here I will assume the ordinary view of things.

Your embryo was actually the product of in vitro fertilization. The individual gametes involved were collected and kept frozen before being thawed, fused, and implanted in your mother. However, there was one stipulation. Your mother had to win the lottery in order for your embryo to be thawed. She could only play once, just one ticket, and if it was a losing ticket you would never have existed. It just so happened that she won the lottery with her first and only ticket, and as a result you are here.

Wait, you are forgetting that even with a losing ticket she may still have a child. Maybe it would be a child named bryan (or out of n possible different offspring) that you may end up arguing with about how unlikely it is for him to exist.

That's one hypothesis.

The other hypothesis is almost the same, except all your mother had to do was play the lottery. She didn't have to win. She just had to buy a ticket. Any ticket, no matter what the number was, was sufficient to allow the gametes to be thawed, fused, and implanted, and for you to exist.

These are the only two options, and your only piece of information is that you now exist and are experiencing this moment. You didn't exist before the lottery ticket was bought. Yet, I can't see how you could possibly argue that these two outcomes should be considered equally likely from your perspective. By simply running the math, it's obvious that the second hypothesis is much more likely to be the explanation for your birth than the first.

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.

Oh, come on now. When you dye your hair, are you ending your subjective existence? When you change jobs, do you vanish and another subjective identity takes your place? If you ate a muffin this morning for breakfast instead of cereal, would your ability to experience the world as Ryan be obliterated?

No, not if dyeing my hair was part of my one unique and single existence. But as soon as you dye my hair to the ryan at a point in time that the original ryan didn't have dyed hair, you have split the universe, or at least split ryan all that will ever change due to the new color of ryan's hair.

No, no, and no. You would be just fine; the inner life of the person with dyed hair, a different job, or a muffin in his stomach would still be experienced by your consciousness. This is all common sense, still keeping with the regular notion of personal identity. What you're talking about is more like personality or biography.

To get at it more directly, recall the possibility that you had a twin that died in childbirth. Now, imagine the a parallel world where you were the twin that died instead of the one that survived. There would be no difference between the twin's life and yours, and he would be reading these words right now instead of you. What I am talking about, the "I" of personal existence, is no more and no less than the difference between these two worlds, the thing that is in the first one (where you are the surviving twin) but not the second one (where you are the twin that died).

Now this is a little different, but I still think that if it makes sense to say "I am ryan(1)" and "I am not ryan(2)", then the death of ryan(1) may still cause me to no longer have a consciousness. But if universalism is true, ryan(1) is also ryan(2) and nothing changes for "me". But if universalism is false, then ryan(1) blacks out of existence. I don't have a consciousness anymore.

This isn't to say that universalism isn't true; it's just not necessary.

 

[fromderinside]

I'm taking commercials to be representations of reality. I'm using Skittles as the template. Yes they are delicious, but, to find that fact to be so is disgusting.

 

[PyramidHead]

Wait, you are forgetting that even with a losing ticket she may still have a child. Maybe it would be a child named bryan (or out of n possible different offspring) that you may end up arguing with about how unlikely it is for him to exist.

So? That wouldn't make it any less improbable for you! That an outcome does not appear unlikely from one perspective does not change the fact that it appears unlikely from another. Rationality demands that we select the hypothesis that resolves as much improbability as possible from all perspectives.

No, not if dyeing my hair was part of my one unique and single existence. But as soon as you dye my hair to the ryan at a point in time that the original ryan didn't have dyed hair, you have split the universe, or at least split ryan all that will ever change due to the new color of ryan's hair.

I'm not talking about many-worlds stuff here. It is true that if you had a different job, your personality and memories would change as a result of the different circumstances. But you would still be the person with those memories and that personality. Otherwise, when considering if you should accept a job offer, you would be thinking, "If this job is not part of my one unique and single existence, then I will cease to exist by accepting it, and be replaced by someone else." You don't think that, unless you're on hard drugs.

To get at it more directly, recall the possibility that you had a twin that died in childbirth. Now, imagine the a parallel world where you were the twin that died instead of the one that survived. There would be no difference between the twin's life and yours, and he would be reading these words right now instead of you. What I am talking about, the "I" of personal existence, is no more and no less than the difference between these two worlds, the thing that is in the first one (where you are the surviving twin) but not the second one (where you are the twin that died).

Now this is a little different, but I still think that if it makes sense to say "I am ryan(1)" and "I am not ryan(2)", then the death of ryan(1) may still cause me to no longer have a consciousness. But if universalism is true, ryan(1) is also ryan(2) and nothing changes for "me". But if universalism is false, then ryan(1) blacks out of existence. I don't have a consciousness anymore.

That's what the regular view says, yes. But my point was to highlight what I mean by "you". It is obviously not your DNA, your job, your hair color, or your string of life experiences, because if you had died in the womb and ryan(2) took your place, he would have had identical DNA, job, hair, and life experience to yours, but he would not be you. That "you", the thing that is absent in this scenario under the ordinary view, is what I have been talking about in this thread.

Here is why the ordinary view about twins in utero is false.

If your existence is tied to a specific embryo in the womb, and not any other, even if it's genetically identical and would produce a person whose life would be exactly like yours (if born in your stead), there must be some account of what gives 'your' embryo the special property of being able to bring you into existence. There would have to be something about it, not in its DNA, but in the very atoms that comprise it. Recall that it could not be anything else, because your twin's embryo is the same as yours except it is THAT one and you are THIS one. The difference would therefore have to come down to the atoms and their position... can you see how absurd that sounds? It means that, not only did all your ancestors have to have exactly the offspring they had, but if even one atom had been jostled out of its place from this unique 'ryan(1) embryo' it would have meant no you, no consciousness. If, at some point in gestation, your embryo had slipped a millimeter to the left when your One Unique Singular Existence depended on it staying in place, no you, no consciousness.

It's simply nonsensical, and can't be justified by appealing to any known fact about the universe. It's also highly unparsimonious and ad hoc, because once again, you do not live in mortal terror every moment, wondering if you will cease to exist if you wiggle your toe. Your view implies a razor-thin margin of error for a given subjective identity before it exists, but a vast and free ocean of possibilities after, with no governing principle as to why that should be.

 

[PyramidHead]

I'm simply equating my existence as a person with being a conscious, material life-form which originated from non-conscious, lifeless material. Whether there is an exact point at which this happens (unlikely) or some combination of events occurring over a narrow segment of time (more than likely) doesn't really matter. Eventually this matter organizes itself to become a sentient, reasoning, conscious being. Due to the wonder of genetics that process is practically inevitable once life begins. Therefore it's logical to assign the emergence of this life I have learned to call "me" as taking place at about conception. It's logical because we need a consistent epistological system in order to make sense of the world. We need to recognize objects and processes as distinct in some way. As such the need just doesn't arise for a radically new etiology.

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.

It's an observation about the course generally taken by which conception occurs. Simplistically, it comes down to one sperm cell out of millions combining with the egg. It's a generic definition of what constitutes a beginning and can be used as a template for virtually any thing or process. It's part of a useful way of understanding the world.

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!

But why limit the game to landing only heads? Why not any of a hundred or more different combinations and patterns? There is nothing inherently special about all heads. That example seems to confirm that your perspective assumes that "me/you" was inevitable. (I think it's understood we're leaving aside anyone's views on determinism here).

In my example, landing on heads 1000 times in a row is a stand-in for whatever specific course of events history had to take in order to bring you into existence. The only thing inherently special about it is that, according to the usual belief about personal identity, it could not have been otherwise without preventing you from being born. From your perspective, that course of events is indeed special, because unlike all of the other combinations, it was required so that you could be reading this sentence right now. I'm not sure you're grasping the perspective-dependent nature of probability. As I said to ryan, something can be improbable from one perspective and not improbable from another, but whenever possible we should prefer a hypothesis that resolves improbability from any perspective, not just the third-person perspective for instance.

 

[ryan]

So? That wouldn't make it any less improbable for you! That an outcome does not appear unlikely from one perspective does not change the fact that it appears unlikely from another. Rationality demands that we select the hypothesis that resolves as much improbability as possible from all perspectives.

My point was that you would be saying this anyways to the millions of people in place of ryan.

Why isn't it unacceptably unlikely that you just breathed in a particle that had roughly the same degree of improbable probability when traced back a billion years ago? You must give me a good answer to this for me to rationally accept your argument.

I'm not talking about many-worlds stuff here. It is true that if you had a different job, your personality and memories would change as a result of the different circumstances. But you would still be the person with those memories and that personality. Otherwise, when considering if you should accept a job offer, you would be thinking, "If this job is not part of my one unique and single existence, then I will cease to exist by accepting it, and be replaced by someone else." You don't think that, unless you're on hard drugs.

Okay, maybe if there is absolutely no difference between the twins, a universal consciousness between the 2 ryan's is reasonable. Then by definition ryan(1) is not only equal to ryan(2) but is ryan(2).

To get at it more directly, recall the possibility that you had a twin that died in childbirth. Now, imagine the a parallel world where you were the twin that died instead of the one that survived. There would be no difference between the twin's life and yours, and he would be reading these words right now instead of you. What I am talking about, the "I" of personal existence, is no more and no less than the difference between these two worlds, the thing that is in the first one (where you are the surviving twin) but not the second one (where you are the twin that died).

Now this is a little different, but I still think that if it makes sense to say "I am ryan(1)" and "I am not ryan(2)", then the death of ryan(1) may still cause me to no longer have a consciousness. But if universalism is true, ryan(1) is also ryan(2) and nothing changes for "me". But if universalism is false, then ryan(1) blacks out of existence. I don't have a consciousness anymore.

That's what the regular view says, yes. But my point was to highlight what I mean by "you". It is obviously not your DNA, your job, your hair color, or your string of life experiences, because if you had died in the womb and ryan(2) took your place, he would have had identical DNA, job, hair, and life experience to yours, but he would not be you. That "you", the thing that is absent in this scenario under the ordinary view, is what I have been talking about in this thread.

Here is why the ordinary view about twins in utero is false.

If your existence is tied to a specific embryo in the womb, and not any other, even if it's genetically identical and would produce a person whose life would be exactly like yours (if born in your stead), there must be some account of what gives 'your' embryo the special property of being able to bring you into existence. There would have to be something about it, not in its DNA, but in the very atoms that comprise it. Recall that it could not be anything else, because your twin's embryo is the same as yours except it is THAT one and you are THIS one. The difference would therefore have to come down to the atoms and their position... can you see how absurd that sounds? It means that, not only did all your ancestors have to have exactly the offspring they had, but if even one atom had been jostled out of its place from this unique 'ryan(1) embryo' it would have meant no you, no consciousness. If, at some point in gestation, your embryo had slipped a millimeter to the left when your One Unique Singular Existence depended on it staying in place, no you, no consciousness.

Changes in particles from "conscious inception" might kill off pieces of the "whole"/"unique" ryan just a little while leaving much of the whole ryan. We know that when we are unconscious, there may as well be a different ryan existing for the time that the "stream of ryan's fundamental consciousness" is discontinuous. This may be the "deaths" that we would expect, but somehow we get back "in line" with our whole and unique consciousness. And of course we see how late-staged ageing causes the whole to be chipped away rapidly until death where all pieces of the whole are gone.

It's simply nonsensical, and can't be justified by appealing to any known fact about the universe. It's also highly unparsimonious and ad hoc, because once again, you do not live in mortal terror every moment, wondering if you will cease to exist if you wiggle your toe.

Like I said in the last paragraph, maybe we are constantly "dying" but being quickly "revived" by random processes actually working in our favor.

Your view implies a razor-thin margin of error for a given subjective identity before it exists, but a vast and free ocean of possibilities after, with no governing principle as to why that should be.

But this is the fine-tuning problem. Statistically speaking, there should only be one brain (the Boltzmann brain), and it should only last for a very brief amount of time. Everything is fine-tuned to be exactly this way and universalism doesn't seem to really help. The anthropic principle isn't totally settling, but it seems like a better option than total conscious universalism, in my opinion.

 

[PyramidHead]

My point was that you would be saying this anyways to the millions of people in place of ryan.

Why isn't it unacceptably unlikely that you just breathed in a particle that had roughly the same degree of improbable probability when traced back a billion years ago? You must give me a good answer to this for me to rationally accept your argument.

Because that particle has not been independently designated apart from the observation that I have just breathed it. Had I breathed another one instead, my experience would not be any different. This cannot be said about your birth. Your presence as the result of a long chain of events that could have gone otherwise is the independent determinant of your experience; if someone else had existed instead of you, your experience would indeed be different (in that it would be completely absent). Unless universalism is true, in which case you would have whatever experience emerged as a result of whoever was born; in that case, it would be just like the particle example.

Okay, maybe if there is absolutely no difference between the twins, a universal consciousness between the 2 ryan's is reasonable. Then by definition ryan(1) is not only equal to ryan(2) but is ryan(2).

Now you've fallen into an interesting dilemma. In the example I have been using, we are supposing that one of the two identical embryos dies in childbirth. However, this need not be the case. If both were brought to term, the ordinary view you are defending would not permit you to say that ryan(1) is ryan(2). In this counterfactual scenario, nothing about the embryos' objectively distinguishable characteristics (their origin, their physical makeup, their DNA) would be different, but simply by virtue of the other one also existing, it would no longer be possible for the same person to emerge from either one. To resolve this, you have to make some strange and incoherent justifications. You might say they were the same subjective identity up until one of them 'diverged' from the other, but this would not establish which of them was you and which was your twin, because as you just admitted, either one would have been you if it was the only one that survived. Why should your subjective experience of being one of them depend on whether or not you have a surviving twin?

Changes in particles from "conscious inception" might kill off pieces of the "whole"/"unique" ryan just a little while leaving much of the whole ryan. We know that when we are unconscious, there may as well be a different ryan existing for the time that the "stream of ryan's fundamental consciousness" is discontinuous. This may be the "deaths" that we would expect, but somehow we get back "in line" with our whole and unique consciousness. And of course we see how late-staged ageing causes the whole to be chipped away rapidly until death where all pieces of the whole are gone.

You're talking about psychology. I'm talking about subjective existence. Subjective existence is indivisible; it's all-or-nothing; either some experience is happening to you or it's not. But the substrates of subjective existence, upon which the ordinary view places all importance for individuating one subject from another, can be divided, fused, and scattered in embarrassing ways that have no solution without universalism.

 

[ryan]

Because that particle has not been independently designated apart from the observation that I have just breathed it. Had I breathed another one instead, my experience would not be any different. This cannot be said about your birth. Your presence as the result of a long chain of events that could have gone otherwise is the independent determinant of your experience; if someone else had existed instead of you, your experience would indeed be different (in that it would be completely absent). Unless universalism is true, in which case you would have whatever experience emerged as a result of whoever was born; in that case, it would be just like the particle example.

Now you've fallen into an interesting dilemma. In the example I have been using, we are supposing that one of the two identical embryos dies in childbirth. However, this need not be the case. If both were brought to term, the ordinary view you are defending would not permit you to say that ryan(1) is ryan(2). In this counterfactual scenario, nothing about the embryos' objectively distinguishable characteristics (their origin, their physical makeup, their DNA) would be different, but simply by virtue of the other one also existing, it would no longer be possible for the same person to emerge from either one. To resolve this, you have to make some strange and incoherent justifications. You might say they were the same subjective identity up until one of them 'diverged' from the other, but this would not establish which of them was you and which was your twin, because as you just admitted, either one would have been you if it was the only one that survived. Why should your subjective experience of being one of them depend on whether or not you have a surviving twin?

Changes in particles from "conscious inception" might kill off pieces of the "whole"/"unique" ryan just a little while leaving much of the whole ryan. We know that when we are unconscious, there may as well be a different ryan existing for the time that the "stream of ryan's fundamental consciousness" is discontinuous. This may be the "deaths" that we would expect, but somehow we get back "in line" with our whole and unique consciousness. And of course we see how late-staged ageing causes the whole to be chipped away rapidly until death where all pieces of the whole are gone.

You're talking about psychology. I'm talking about subjective existence. Subjective existence is indivisible; it's all-or-nothing; either some experience is happening to you or it's not. But the substrates of subjective existence, upon which the ordinary view places all importance for individuating one subject from another, can be divided, fused, and scattered in embarrassing ways that have no solution without universalism.

Okay, but each individual is more than just a general subjective existence. The subjective existence I still agree may be universal.

If this whole time you have been defining "you" as just a general subjective experience, then I agree with you. But then I believe that there is a more specific "you", one that is unique.

 

[PyramidHead]

Okay, but each individual is more than just a general subjective existence. The subjective existence I still agree may be universal.

I don't think you're grasping what that means, otherwise you wouldn't say the first part. By "universal" you seem to be meaning "everyone has this in common," a la Speakpigeon, but that's not it at all, and is no different from the ordinary view. The improbability of your existence from your perspective is not resolved by that interpretation, because it cannot explain why you are THIS subjective existence and not another person's.

If this whole time you have been defining "you" as just a general subjective experience, then I agree with you. But then I believe that there is a more specific "you", one that is unique.

There are obviously unique individual organisms with their own minds and bodies. But none of them is uniquely you in a special way that elevates it above all the others in terms of self-interest. You are there in all of them equally, not as a universal consciousness or a mental substance smeared across multiple brains, but in just the same way that you are present in all of the experiences of the organism you consider to be uniquely you (although it is not).

Imagine that all the pattern of brain structure and activity on which my memories and intentions depended could be recorded and then imposed on the brain of another in place of his own, while his pattern was similarly recorded and imposed on my brain. Where would I be at the end of the operation? Would I still be in my original body, but with a strange new way of thinking? Or would I be finding myself in what had been his body, the body that now contains my memories? If bodily continuity is the crucial condition of personal identity, this was a memory exchange, and I’m in my original position with another person’s memory. If psychological continuity is the crucial condition, this was a body exchange, and I’ve moved with full awareness to the other person’s body. The ordinary view is as ill-equipped to settle this as it was to settle the paradox of fission down the middle in brain bisection.

[...]

In favor of both psychological and bodily continuity is that in all the experience associated with either, there is that same quality of immediacy, the quality that makes experience mine. The mistake of either view is to take this immediacy to be crucially for an otherwise individuated subject of experience, one whose identity is defined by a narrow condition like the origin and continuity of his memory or his body. But when we ask for whom the experience is immediate, we have put the question the wrong way around. The immediacy of experience for whatever is having it is all that makes it mine. All experience has this immediacy, including experience of changed bodies and experience of changed minds. If we just put together the two supposedly conflicting insights, that a person’s identity is independent of bodily specifications and that a person’s identity is independent of mental specifications, we get universalism.

[...]

Consider that brain bisection becomes comprehensible and my own existence becomes probable for me only if the experience on both sides of the brain bisection and the experience belonging to all potential products of lines of begettings is seen as equally mine in the surprisingly full sense, the sense that supports self-interest--which is not a matter of linguistic choice. Just calling these “I”, if I had not changed the substantive view regarding the boundaries of that in which self-interest lay, would never solve the puzzle of brain bisection or do away with the improbability in the existence of the subject of self-interest, whatever we care to call it. Universalism, right or wrong, is not a verbal cheat. It’s not a thesis about language. I’m not all that concerned, for example, about the word “person”. Call the distinct organisms “persons” so long as you realize that all of them are you. Or call them “I”, “you” and “they” so long as you realize they are all the same person.

I think I have gotten to the point where I'm merely repeating myself over and over, and if readers have not understood my admittedly feeble attempts at explaining why universalism is true, I suggest reading Zuboff's own writing on the topic.

This paper is as meticulous and step-by-step as could possibly be demanded of a defense of his view, but is also gentle and humorous, so if you are still interested in any of this I suggest reading through it at least once. It's longish, but can be digested over a few sittings. Of course, I can still answer any questions to the best of my ability in this thread, but it seems that we are at an impasse so I don't want to waste our time if it can be avoided.

 

[ruby sparks]

This paper[/URL] is as meticulous and step-by-step as could possibly be demanded of a defense of his view, but is also gentle and humorous, so if you are still interested in any of this I suggest reading through it at least once. It's longish, but can be digested over a few sittings. Of course, I can still answer any questions to the best of my ability in this thread, but it seems that we are at an impasse so I don't want to waste our time if it can be avoided.

Thanks. Speaking for myself, I will look forward to reading that when I get a chance.

 

[ruby sparks]

This paper[/URL] is as meticulous and step-by-step as could possibly be demanded of a defense of his view, but is also gentle and humorous, so if you are still interested in any of this I suggest reading through it at least once. It's longish, but can be digested over a few sittings. Of course, I can still answer any questions to the best of my ability in this thread, but it seems that we are at an impasse so I don't want to waste our time if it can be avoided.

Still reading......

Quick question.

What if 'I' am talking with someone and 'they' tell 'me' that 'they' are in pain, but 'I' am not experiencing that pain. How does the statement, "the fact that all experience actually is mine" cope with that?

I have a sneaking suspicion that even if (if) he has made a case for the non-uniqueness of 'me' (and I think he may only have gotten as far as making it a possibility) the step to saying "everyone and everything is me" might not have been adequately justified.

 

[Speakpigeon]

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.

If we are to use an abstract model to represent this problem, I would put it like this. Suppose there is something I will call "bare consciousness" (or empty consciousness, i.e. consciousness without any content), and that this consciousness is instantiated by "actors" in search of a role to enact. So there are actors and there is something like the material world but with zombie humans in it. Zombie people would be things physically identical to the kind of beings we are but without consciousness. They have working brains, but nothing is having the subjective experience of being them. They're zombies. And then, actors randomly choose one of those humans to "haunt" them and thereby subjectively experience what it is like to being the human they have picked out. So, each actors is allowed to experience whatever is going on in a particular brain. At that's all the actor is able to experience. There's nothing else for the actor to experience. All the actor can remember is whatever this one particular human happens to remember. I don't see therefore how the actor wouldn't take whatever biographical data, perception data, memory data etc. he is made to experience, and take this set of data to entirely define its me-ness.

Accessorily, I don't see in this model where there would be any "probability" problem. Each actor picks out one human at random and that's it. The actor itself is identical to all other actors. Whatever is specific to his experience of haunting a human being comes from this human being. There's a one hundred percent probability of each actor picking out one human and this human is whatever it happens to be. And of course, each human can only produce the biographical data and thoughts that go with what it is. There's no lottery. Each drop of water is whatever it is. Fat chance. Well, 100% certainty.

Where we disagree here may be that you may still want to call each actor "me". As I seen it, each actor experiencing a human being will not think of himself as a me because actors don't think for themselves in this model. Instead, each actor will subjectively experience one human being thinking of himself as a "me". What matters here is not the actor subjectively experiencing the me-ness data created by the brain of the human being he is haunting, but it is the data itself in that it is specific to that human being and it is the mechanism giving rise to that sense of being me, mechanism which is probably best understood as a survival mechanism produced by evolution. So, all humans will have it and all actors haunting a human will subjectively experience the me-ness of the particular human they're haunting. Actors can even hop from one human to another every now and then, every millisecond if you wish, without any difference in the model.

In that model, I wouldn't see why it would be better to talk of "me" like you propose to do. It's completely irrelevant that we can conceive a thought -experiment where there would be strictly identical humans with identical biographical data and possibly identical perception and impressions etc. They will both create a sense of being me and these would be identical. So what? Each would still have the sense of being themselves without confusion and with the potential to diverge as soon as something different would come into the relative experience as it will always be possible.
EB

 

[Treedbear]

...
But why limit the game to landing only heads? Why not any of a hundred or more different combinations and patterns? There is nothing inherently special about all heads. That example seems to confirm that your perspective assumes that "me/you" was inevitable. (I think it's understood we're leaving aside anyone's views on determinism here).

In my example, landing on heads 1000 times in a row is a stand-in for whatever specific course of events history had to take in order to bring you into existence. The only thing inherently special about it is that, according to the usual belief about personal identity, it could not have been otherwise without preventing you from being born. From your perspective, that course of events is indeed special, because unlike all of the other combinations, it was required so that you could be reading this sentence right now. I'm not sure you're grasping the perspective-dependent nature of probability. As I said to ryan, something can be improbable from one perspective and not improbable from another, but whenever possible we should prefer a hypothesis that resolves improbability from any perspective, not just the third-person perspective for instance.

I don't have much time to answer right now and I won't have internet access for about the next 4 days, but I wanted to respond briefly. I admit I'm having trouble "grasping the perspective-dependent nature of probability [of "me"]". But refering back to what you said earlier it must be an essential component of universalism and how every experience that exists is essentially mine. You say here you think it important that probability for my existence (and I guess probability of any other event too) as seen from my local perspective must agree with probabilities from all other perspectives. You add "whenever possible" which seems like equivocation to me. At any rate my only criticism at the moment is that science and philosophy share one outstanding characteristic which is to seek to realize the broader, more objective perspective. I guess in a way your universalism may be attempting this. But the former disciplines admit that new paradigms overturn the more limited versions of truth. Just as relativity overturned Newtonian dynamics. So I don't see the necessity of accomodating everyone's experience as somehow true. Subjective experience (including my own) is practically synonomous with illusion.

 

[Speakpigeon]

So I don't see the necessity of accomodating everyone's experience as somehow true. Subjective experience (including my own) is practically synonomous with illusion.

I certainly don't need to accommodate your view here. It's so parochial!

Clearly, our subjective experience can only be true and that's because we know our qualia in themselves.

It wouldn't be true of something like the material world out there, I would grant you that, and I suspect that's really what you mean. We should expect that there could be any red flower out there.

But you seem to ignore that qualia are true of themselves. We know our qualia as they are. The red I experience is really red as I experience it. The pain I feel is really like I experience it, which is painful. There's no other possibility. And no science will ever prove anything different.

Unfortunately, I also suspect that qualia and subjective experience are beyond the reach of science. If not, I don't expect a breakthrough any time soon. So sad. It will leave open the possibility for many hardcore materialists to make fools of themselves for a very long time if not for ever.
EB

 

[PyramidHead]

This paper[/URL] is as meticulous and step-by-step as could possibly be demanded of a defense of his view, but is also gentle and humorous, so if you are still interested in any of this I suggest reading through it at least once. It's longish, but can be digested over a few sittings. Of course, I can still answer any questions to the best of my ability in this thread, but it seems that we are at an impasse so I don't want to waste our time if it can be avoided.

Still reading......

Quick question.

What if 'I' am talking with someone and 'they' tell 'me' that 'they' are in pain, but 'I' am not experiencing that pain. How does the statement, "the fact that all experience actually is mine" cope with that?

I have a sneaking suspicion that even if (if) he has made a case for the non-uniqueness of 'me' (and I think he may only have gotten as far as making it a possibility) the step to saying "everyone and everything is me" might not have been adequately justified.

Keep reading. You ARE experiencing that pain. Due to physiological constraints (that are not absolute metaphysical barriers), it falsely appears from each perspective that its contents comprise the entirety of your experience. The situation is exactly the same as someone who experiences the hemispheres of his own brain separately due to aphasia or surgery, in that it appears to him that the contents of what is experienced by each half is the totality of what he is experiencing, even though he is experiencing both simultaneously (though they are no longer physiologically integrated).

 

[ruby sparks]

Keep reading. You ARE experiencing that pain. Due to physiological constraints (that are not absolute metaphysical barriers), it falsely appears from each perspective that its contents comprise the entirety of your experience. The situation is exactly the same as someone who experiences the hemispheres of his own brain separately due to aphasia or surgery, in that it appears to him that the contents of what is experienced by each half is the totality of what he is experiencing, even though he is experiencing both simultaneously (though they are no longer physiologically integrated).

That's very debatable, imo. It may not be entirely like a two hemisphere situation. It could be not me (as in being one of the hemispheres in your skull and not one in my skull). You are suggesting that part of me is experiencing a view of the room you are in.

Great article by the way. Writer is very rigorous.

 

[ruby sparks]

I sometimes like reading stuff that makes my brain hurt, and he writes well, imo.

I'm not even saying I am sure yet if I disagree.