A Problem With Patternism

Patternism is the belief that the thing that makes 'you' 'you' can be described as a simple pattern.

What information is "simple" conveying in this description? Is it still patternism if I believe it's a very complicated and not-currently-measurable pattern that defines different ... things (which I think are _also_ just a bigger category of patterns of quantum states in areas of spacetime) which call themselves and each other "me"?

When there is a second being with the same mental pattern as you, that being is also you.

Sure, and you've already accepted a HUGE amount of complexity in the definition of "being".

Note that identity is _not_ binary. It's a question of continuity and overlap of patterns. There will (I hope) be an agent that exists tomorrow, which is more similar and connected to today's "me" than the agent which (again, I hope) exists 25 years from now and remembers (or not) writing this post.

As you say, the distance function between two encodings is currently unknown - it's almost certainly not strictly pythagorean - some dimensions/bit-clusters are more important than others, and some will have nonlinear impact on identity. I don't see why that makes the concept unworkable.

Let's start by setting aside the whole mind-uploading problem, and look at something more prosaic: what makes "me" at noon today the same as "me" at 3:00 am one year ago? In fact, let's set aside what makes this true from my perspective; what makes you think these two bags of chemicals are the "same person"? When you see your mother, and then see her again later on, why do you think of her as the same person?

This is basically the same problem as Pointing to a Flower [LW · GW], except we've dragged in a bunch of new intuitions by making it about humans instead of flowers. (It's also the same question Yudkowsky uses in his post on cryonics in the sequences, although I can't find a link at the moment.)

The answer from the flower post does a fine job of saying what makes me the same organism as before: draw a boundary around my body in spacetime, it's a local minimum in terms of summary data required to make predictions far away. Nontrivial, but quantifiable.

But for things like mind uploading, we want to go further than that. Sure, we could simulate my entire body, but it seems like what makes "me" doesn't require all that. After all, I'm still me if I lose all my limbs and torso and get attached to some sci-fi life support machine. "Me" apparently does not just mean my body. In practice, I think humans use "me", "you", etc with several different referents depending on context, and the body is one of them. The referent relevant for mind-uploading purposes is, presumably, the mind - whatever that means.

There's a few more steps before I'm ready to tackle the referent of "my mind", but I'm pretty confident that the first step is basically the same as for the flower, and I'm also pretty confident that it is crisply quantifiable.

As to the connection with pattern matching, I'm pretty sure that the flower-approach is roughly equivalent to what a Bayesian learner would learn by looking for patterns in data. But that's a post for another time.

Why is it a problem with patternism that you can't quantify the difference?

I can definitely see it being a problem for some hypothetical belief called "quantifiable patternism."

Which I think is a pretty heavy blow for patternism.

I was with you right up until this conclusion. Seems like a non-sequitur.

Perhaps you are assuming that there has to be a single, objective, context-independent way to say whether two people are the same. Or exactly how different they are. And since patternism doesn't obviously admit that, you conclude it can't be right.

But to me, it seems like the common pattern for just about everything in life is that categories are blurry [LW(p) · GW(p)]. We start with a naive, folk view that assumes things are crisp and clear, and as we learn more we realize that categories are not platonic, but represent clusters in thingspace [LW · GW].

If a view fits this common pattern, that seems to me like a point in its favor, not a point against. In other words, I'm a bit skeptical of any philosophical account that seems too platonic. Unless you're dealing with very simple mathematical structures, there are almost always rough edges. And philosophical views should be realistic about this.

I don't think we can quantify this pattern.

I see a solution to your problem but it may include a form of torture for the "other you".

Let's say you created a simulation of you, with some kind of feelings cursors you can modify ( humour : 77% - love : 56% for example ).

You, as a human, have a past and I will assume that you took that fact in count when creating the simulation of you, meaning your other " you " has memories etc... it isn't a simple you from the present, you can also simulate the 16yo " you " and see it behaving like you when you were 16, going in class, and not having the memory of something you did when you were 23.

I consider everyone has lived key events that changed forever the way he or she see the world in the present ( breakups, accidents, losses, wounds, crimes, wedding, deals... ), so all you need to do is take your " you " and put it in situations like the one you lived for real, to see if it behaves the way you did in real life. If your simulation reacts and behaves in these events the same way as you did, you could consider it's an excellent simulation of yourself and, if it gets hurt on the screen, you could feel bad for it.

To summarize, I think some things can't be quantify using numbers or some algorithms, and testing can be a solution.

I fear that there is no real way to do this objectively and since there will always be small mutations/errors in copying you can never know which of the other "you's" is the most like you.

You're writing that you can never know which pattern is objectively most like you, because there is no objective way of comparing patterns, and this is a problem for patternism.

But you don't need to have an objective way of comparing patterns in order to be a pattern, so this isn't a problem for patternism after all.

The time to worry if someone is exactly like you in every way, is when you run into a person that looks exactly like you, and not before.