Lesswrong Philosophy and Personal Identity

I took a stab at dissolving personal identity, and managed to do so to my own satisfaction. Most people seemed to feel like this made progress but did not actually solve the question, however.

Short version of my personal answer: "personal identity" doesn't actually correspond with anything fundamental in the world, but for whatever reason, our brains seem to include planning machinery that's based on subjective expectation ("if I do this, what do I expect to experience as a result?") and which drives our behavior more strongly than abstract reasoning does. Since you can't have subjective expectation without some definition for a "self", our brains always end up having some (implicit or explicit) model for continuity of self that they use for making decisions. But at least in epistemic terms, there doesn't seem to be any reason to assume that one definition would be better than any other. In instrumental terms, some definitions might work better than others, since different conceptions of personal identity will lead to different kinds of actions.

It seems to me that most of the confusion that arises about sense of self and identify comes out of the desire for some hard line in the sand, some cutoff point beyond which some entity is or isn't "the same". Unfortunately, that model isn't compatible with what the universe has provided to us; we've been given a hugely complex system, and there's a point where jamming binary descriptors on it is going to break down. I view it largely as a "word mangling" problem.

I doubt I could write a useful paper or article on this, but I can give my viewpoint in the form of question and answer:

Is a perfect copy of me 'me'? Yes. We are both the same person, both me.

Is an imperfect copy of me 'me'? Maybe. It depends on the amount of difference between us and our utility functions.

Is an older/younger copy of me still 'me'? Maybe. It depends on the amount of difference between us and our utility functions.

If I create a perfect copy of me and wait a week, so that we both collect additional experiences, is that copy me? At this point in time, with high probability, yes, we are still both me. The differences between us acquired in the course of a week are not likely to be so huge as to make us different people.

How much of a difference would there have to be for us to be different people? Probably pretty big. I can't draw a line in the sand easily for this; a difference of 90% of my age is probably guaranteed to be a different person, and 0.1% is probably not.

If you have to choose between one of two copies to keep, how do you do so? Look through the differences between them, figure out which set of experiences is most valuable according to our utility functions, and keep that copy.

I largely ascribe to the 'identity as pattern' concept. My pattern happens to be stored as combined matter and data in physical body right now; it should be entirely possible and reasonable to move, store, and update that pattern in other media without losing my identity or sense of self. A copy of me as a .tgz archive sitting idle on a hard drive platter is still me; it's just in suspended animation. Similarly, a copy of me in a cryogenic vault stored as biological data is still me.

Suppose that, on Monday, the theory of Identity as Continuity of Form is true. What do you expect to see in the world?

Suppose that, on Tuesday, the theory of Identity as Continuity of Matter is true. What do you expect to see in the world? How is it different from what you saw on Monday?

What happens if you taboo the word "identity"?

How do you define the term "correct" when applied to the personal identity models? In a physical sense, as testable and passing the tests better than other models? Or as least self-contradictory? Or as least controversial? As most intuitive? Or what? In the map/territory meta-model, what corresponds to the personal identity in the territory? How do you tell?

Scott Aaronson touched on this issue in his speculative writeup The Ghost in the Quantum Turing Machine:

Suppose it were possible to “upload” a human brain to a computer, and thereafter predict the brain unlimited accuracy. Who cares? Why should anyone even worry that that would create a problem for free will or personal identity?

[...]

If any of these technologies—brain-uploading, teleportation, the Newcomb predictor, etc.—were actually realized, then all sorts of “woolly metaphysical questions” about personal identity and free will would start to have practical consequences. Should you fax yourself to Mars or not? Sitting in the hospital room, should you bet that the coin landed heads or tails? Should you expect to “wake up” as one of your backup copies, or as a simulation being run by the Newcomb Predictor? These questions all seem “empirical,” yet one can’t answer them without taking an implicit stance on questions that many people would prefer to regard as outside the scope of science.

[...]

I’m against any irreversible destruction of knowledge, thoughts, perspectives, adaptations, or ideas, except possibly by their owner. Such destruction is worse the more valuable the thing destroyed, the longer it took to create, and the harder it is to replace. From this basic revulsion to irreplaceable loss, hatred of murder, genocide, the hunting of endangered species to extinction, and even (say) the burning of the Library of Alexandria can all be derived as consequences.

Now, what about the case of “deleting” an emulated human brain from a computer memory? The same revulsion applies in full force—if the copy deleted is the last copy in existence. If, however, there are other extant copies, then the deleted copy can always be “restored from backup,” so deleting it seems at worst like property damage. For biological brains, by contrast, whether such backup copies can be physically created is of course exactly what’s at issue, and the freebit picture conjectures a negative answer.

Also: http://www.nickbostrom.com/papers/experience.pdf (has been open in a tab for a while now as Something I Really Should Read).

I would start by imagining possible worlds of humanoids where personal identity does not exist, just to roughly outline the boundaries. Not sure if this has been done in literature, except for science fiction.

For example, let's assume that everyone is perfectly telepathic and perfectly tele-empathetic (telempathic?), so that everyone perceives everyone else's thoughts and feelings unattenuated. Would personal identity be meaningless in a society like that? (SF example: Borg)

Another example: hive-mind structure with non-stupid drones controlled by a superior intelligence. Would the drones have a sense of identity?

Real-life examples: impaired left brain/right brain connections, multiple personality disorders etc. -- do these result in multiple identities in the same body? By what criterion?

If you treat identity as an equality relation, transitive and symmetric closures will force it into a weird and not very useful concept. If you don't treat identity as an equality relation, "identity" is a very confusing word to use. The first case isn't very illuminating, and the second case should taboo the word "identity".

I haven't tried to solve the hard problem of continuity of personal identity yet, but I've got a couple of hours to kill on a train tonight, so I'll give it a go and report back to you.

I have come to regard the core of personal identity as the portion of our utility function that dictates how desirable changes to the information and mental processes in our brains are (or, in a posthuman future, how desirable the changes whatever other substrate they are running on is). I think this conception can capture pretty much all our intuitions about identity without contradicting reductionist accounts of how our minds work. You just need to think of yourself as an optimization process that changes in certain ways, and rank the desirability of these changes.

When asking whether someone is the "same person" as you, you can simply replace the question with "Is this optimization process still trying to optimize the same things as it was before?," "Would my utility function consider changing into this optimization process to be a positive thing?," and "Would my utility function consider changing into this process to be significantly less bad than being vaporized and being replaced with a new optimization process created from scratch?"

For the issue of subjective experience, when asking the question "What shall happen to me in the future?" you can simply taboo words like "I" and "me" and replace them with "this optimization process" and "optimization-process-that-it-would-be-desirable-to-turn-into." Then rephrase the question as, "What will this optimization process turn into in the future, and what events will impact the optimization-process-that-it-would-be-desirable-to-turn-into?"

Similarly, the question "If I do this, what do I expect to experience as a result?" can translate into "If this process affects the world in some fashion, how will this affect what the process will change into in the future?" We do not need any ontologically fundamental sense of self to have subjective experience, as Kaj_Sotala seems to assert, "What will happen to the optimization-process-that-it-would-be-desirable-to-turn-into that this process will turn into?" yields the same result as "What will happen to me?"

Having one's identity be based on the desirability of changes rather than lack of change, allows us to get around the foolish statement that "You change all the time so you're not the same person you were a second ago." What matters isn't the fact that we change, what matters is how desirable those changes are. Here are some examples:

Acquiring memories of positive experiences by means of those experiences happening to the optimatization process: GOOD

Making small changes to the process' personality so that the process is better at achieving it's values: VERY GOOD

Acquiring new knowledge: GOOD

Losing positive memories: BAD

Being completely disintegrated: VERY BAD

Having the process' memory, personality, and values radically changed: VERY BAD

Changing the process' personality so that it attempts to optimize for the opposite of it's current values: EXTREMELY BAD

Some people seem to believe that having a reductionist conception of personal identity somehow makes death seem less bad. I disagree with this completely. Death seems just as bad to me as it did before. The optimization process I refer to as "me" has certain ways that it wants to change in the future and having all of its memories, personalities, and values being completely erased seems like a very bad thing.

And this is not a purely selfish preference. I would prefer that no other processes be changed in a fashion they do not desire either. Making sure that existing optimization processes change in ways that they find desirable is much more important to me than creating new optimization processes.

Or, to put it in less clunky terminology, Death is Bad, both for me and other people. It is bad even if new people are created to replace the dead ones. Knowing that I am made of atoms instead of some ontologically fundamental "self" does not change that at all.

I suspect that the main reason people think having a reductionist concept of personal identity makes personal identity less morally important is that describing things in a reductionist fashion can shut off our ability to make proper judgements about them. For instance, saying "Bob stimulated Alice's nociceptors by repeatedly parting her epidermis with a thin metallic plane." doesn't sound as bad as saying "Bob tortured Alice by cutting her with a knife." But in surely no one would argue that torture is less bad because of that.

Anecdote; I know from personal experience that another human in a roughly similar culture, with a different remembered childhood and different body (including in one case a different gender) has a greater than 1/(2*10^9) probability of qualifying as you for every practical purpose including survival and subjective anticipation of experiencing events.

Oddly enough, I was about to make a similar post, stating it this way:

"What questions would I have to answer, in order to convince you that I had either solved or dissolved the question of identity?"

The things that came up when I thought about it were:

• Born probabilities
• Continuity of consciousness
• Ebborian splitting question.
• Why aren't I a Boltzmann brain?

On a side note - a possible confusion w.r.t. identity is: You-that-thinks is not necessarily the only thing that gets Utility-Weighting-of-You; if I clone someone perfectly, many people will care about the clone as much as about themselves, but the moment the clone thinks a different thought from them it's not you-that-thinks anymore.

It is not a problem to solve, but a choice to make.

Come to think of it, in reterospect I should have put more emphasis on the following:

What do people here think of Derek Parfit's theory of personal identity? On the face of it it seems pretty good as far as it goes, but what criticisms can be validly made of it?

My identity is probably an illusion. OTOH, I probably wouldn't use a teleporter unless my life was on the line. This doesn't seem like an incoherent position to me. Even if the odds are tiny, the disutility to my subjective experience is very high if I am wrong.

I think it helps to look at statements of personal narrative and whether they're meaningful and hence whether they can be true or false. So, for example, change is part of our personal narrative; we mature, we grow old, we suffer injuries, undergo illness, etc. Any philosophical conception of personal identity that leads to conclusions that make change problematic should be taken as a reductio ad absurdum of that conception and not a demonstration of the falsity of our common sense concepts (that is, it shows that the philosopher went wrong in attempting to explicate personal identity, not that we are wrong). Statements of personal narrative are inclusive of our conception, birth, events of our life, etc. Most cultures give meaning to post-death statements but it's a clearly differentiated meaning. But I can't meaningfully speak of being in two places at once, of being destroyed and recreated, of not existing for periods of time, etc, so a large range of philosophical and science fiction scenarios are ruled out. (Again, if a philosopher's attempt to explicate personal identity makes these things possible then it is the philosopher who erred, since the common sense concept clearly precludes them; or he/she is now using a novel concept and hence no pertinent inferences follow). If we create a new person and give him the memories of a dead man, we have only played a cruel trick on him, for a statement of personal narrative that includes being destroyed and recreated has no sense ("I didn't exist between 1992 and 1998" isn't like "I was unconscious/asleep between 1992 and 1998" because non-existence is not a state one can occupy).

Note that the meaningfulness of novel statements like "I teleported from Earth to Mars" or "I uploaded to Konishi Polis in 2975" depend entirely on unpacking the meaning of the novel terms. Are "teleported" and "uploaded" more like "travelled" or more like "destroyed and recreated"? Is the Konishi Polis computer a place that I can go to? The relevant issue here isn't personal identity but the nature of the novel term which determines whether these statements are meaningful. If you start from the assumption that "I teleported from Earth to Mars" has a clear meaning, you are obviously going to come to a conclusion where it has a clear meaning. Whether "teleported" means "travelled" or "destroyed and recreated" does not turn on the nature of personal identity but on the relationship of teleportation to space - i.e., whether it's a form of movement through space (and hence travel). If it involves "conversion from matter to information" we have to ask what this odd use of "conversion" means and whether it is a species of change or more like making a description of an object and then destroying it. The same is true of uploading. With cryonics the pertinent issue is whether it will involve so much damage that it will require that you are recreated rather than merely recovered.

You aren't just "data", you are a particular being who persists in time. But you will never know this via "LessWrong philosophy" if the latter is understood as requiring that you presuppose physics, computation, a timeless multiverse, etc., in order to analyse anything. To get even just a glimpse of this truth, you have to notice that experienced reality involves realities like the existence of someone (you) who "knows" things and for whom time flows; and you may have to kick out certain habits of automatically substituting static abstractions for lived experience, whenever you want to think about reality.

Conceivably a "wrongosopher" could still arrive at such perspectives, if they had tuned into the parts of the Sequences that are about paying attention to the feelings of rightness and wrongness that accompany various thoughts, and if they had tuned out all the "scientistic" conceptual triumphalism that tramples over unscientific subjectivity. But since the habit of treating anything about consciousness that is odd from the perspective of scientific ontology, as just an illusion and/or a sort of computational annotation made by the brain, is very widespread, this hypothetical philosophical prodigy would have to be seeing past the everyday beliefs of contemporary scientific culture, and not just past the everyday beliefs of Less Wrong.

The philosophy that has made the most bold claims about the individual is egoism. More than that, I'll save for an in-progress essay for Less Wrong about the topic.

Max Stirner, The Ego and His Own 1845

• Wikipedia
• Project Guttenberg

Ragnar Redbeard, Might is Right 1890

• Wikipedia
• Might is Right - this is the definitive annotated edition, and cheap!

Dora Marsden, The Freewoman / The New Freewoman / The Egoist 1911-1919

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• weekly quotes