Identity and Death

Most people imagine their past and future selves as links in a continuous chain, each one connected to the previous one and the next one. It seems to me that the structure might be more like a singly linked list: each moment has a "pointer" to the previous one, by virtue of remembering it, but there's no corresponding pointer to the next moment, and in fact there's no unique next moment, because we are branching all the time.

(In functional programming languages, different linked lists can "share structure" by having pointers to the same tail. That idea also works for other data structures like trees, as described in Chris Okasaki's book "Purely functional data structures". That's a digression, but a really interesting one.)

So why do we feel that we have a pointer to the next moment, or a probability distribution over next moments? I think it's because we learn by induction. Looking at our memory, we see that each moment had a previous one and a next one, so we think the same must be true for the present moment as well. But it seems to me that the whole picture can be understood by just looking at links to previous moments, and nature doesn't need to have any special laws about links to next moments, "observer fluid" and the like.

One of the benefits of such a "memory identity theory", compared to "pattern identity theory", is that it makes it easier to imagine merging two creatures. A merged creature is simply a creature that remembers being both of its predecessors. Questions about teleportation and cloning get similarly simple-minded answers. The big remaining problem is where observed frequencies come from. Maybe there's a big probability distribution over all observer-moments ("ASSA"), or maybe there's something else.

There is no reason I see to believe in the 'identity' of physical things—especially not at the level of a human being. We're conscious, and aware of that consciousness. We enjoy/suffer from a peristent delusion of 'self'. We know we're gonna die and we've evolved in such a way that we are programmed to fear and avoid it.

Our mortality + 'self' delusion + consciousness makes us say stuff like:

I want me (whatever that is) to continue living and doing stuff.

I think that most people are able to at least implicitly bite the bullet of continuous personal change. And that is why they apply some reasonable temporal discounting. Here is an SMBC that explains the basic concept. One of the very weird things about LWers is their aversion to discounting. Eliezer even wrote an emotional post about it once. Normal people can discount the preferences of their futures selves, current others and future others in a way that saves them a lot of ethical/philosophical headaches.

All that confusion arises from the attempt to find identity between physical objects. I don't think there's any identity outside of minds. Identity is a "="-relation between two representations, not two actual physical things.

That has its own problems. If a Tibetan thinks the Dalai Lama is in some essential way identical to some previous holder of that office, that's the same kind of judgement as myself believing I'm identical to the memory of myself from yesterday. I lose any objective character of identity.

But at least I don't need to have identity "emerge" (or something) from patterns. And many of the questions of the type in the SMBC comic are easily answered this way: Whether persons are "identical" before and after teleportation (or any other change, including flossing) becomes an entirely subjective judgement, with no objective truth that might be violated.

the difference between 2014!Eliezer and 2094!Eliezer is actually bigger than the difference between 2014!Eliezer and let's say 2014!Yvain due to having all the new standard enhancements.

Which is similarly true of all the enhanced people who didn't cryopreserve.

Is he the same? That's up to you. One of the hallmarks of sanity is knowing that you're not a slave to the concepts you happen to have, and can craft your concepts to serve your values. Don't ask whether a label applies, ask yourself what you want to do in this situation.

The person sitting in my chair in one minute is me as much as anyone is going to be me, and we're both okay with that.

Before I grappled with this issue, I was totally okay with that person being me, and didn't feel any existential dread. Then I realized that that person was very different from current me, and felt some dread. My pattern now will be gone forever before I post this, your pattern reading this will begone before you begin the next sentence. But you know what? That's what we've got. That's what, really, we are. That person who slept in my bed 10 years ago was fine with just making the most of it, and so am I.

We can react to finding out that things are weirder than we thought either by being weirded out all the time, or by increasing our standard for weirdness.

I suggest you perform the following thought experiment. Imagine that you(t+1) is not the same person as you(t) for any value of t=time. Every moment you die. The "you" of a moment ago died, being replaced by you (of now). You are going to die within a moment, being replaced by the "you" of in a moment.

In that reality, would you still have non-trivial preferences? If the answer is "yes", consider adapting those as your actual preferences. Suddenly you won't need answers to (IMO) meaningless questions anymore.

One thing I am noting about some of the philosophical quandaries raised above about both teleportation and enhancements is that it only considers a single life, without linking it to others.

For instance, assume you are attempting to save your child from a burning building. You can either teleport in, grab your child, and teleport out with a near perfect success rate (although both you and your child will have teleported, you twice, your child once) or you can attempt to run into the building to do a manual rescue at some lower percent success rate X. Other incidental costs and risks are roughly the same and are trivial.

The obvious answer to me appears to be "I pick the Teleporter instead of the lower X."

And If I consider the alternative:

You are attempting to save your child from a burning building. You can either take standard enhancements, and then run in, grab your child, enhance them, and then run out with a near perfect success rate (although both you and your child be enhanced, permanently) or you can attempt to run into the building to do a manual rescue at some lower percent success rate X. Other incidental costs and risks are roughly the same and are trivial.

The obvious answer to me still appears to be "I pick the enhancements instead of the lower X."

It seems like if a person were worried about either teleportation or enhancements, they would have to at have a counter argument such as "Well, X is lower, but it's still pretty high and above some threshold level, so in a case like that I think I'm going to either not have me and my child teleport or not have me and my child take the enhancements: I'll go for the manual rescue."

That argument just doesn't seem convincing to me. I've tried mentally steelmanning it to get a better one, but I can't seem to get anywhere, particularly when considering the perspective of being the person inside the building who needed help, and the possibility that given a strong enough stance against the procedures, the person outside the building could plausibly think within their value system "It would be better to let the person burn to death than for me risk my life to save them at such a low X, or to use procedures that will harm us both according to my values."

Am I missing something that makes these types of counterargument more persuasive than I am giving them credit for?

To me the obvious answer in this thought experiment is that 2014!Eliezer and 2014!Yvain are also the same person. Seems pretty likely to actually be the case looking at them as well.

Consider all of the enhancements that you have had since you were, say, five years old. Are you the "same" person as that five year old? Do you need an answer to that question?

Everything you do changes who you are. Is that a reason for doing as little as possible, seeking no new experiences, learning no new things, in order to cling onto the person "you" are right now, a single three-dimensional slice of a four-dimensional entity?

Personally, my answer is no.

"However, if you examine things closely the difference between 2014!Eliezer and 2094!Eliezer is actually bigger than the difference between 2014!Eliezer and let's say 2014!Yvain due to having all the new standard enhancements."

I question how well your delta-person-function corresponds to an intuitive notion of "similar people".

"Same person" is a slightly-blurry blob of feature space concentrated heavily around a-person-as-they-are-at-the-moment. It generally includes the person they were a second ago, and (to a lesser extent) the person they were a year ago. But it's a continuous function, not a binary one - there's not a sharp cutoff between "you" and "not you" in possible-person-space.

I wish there were an article that dealt more precisely with "Experience and Death," rather than "identity and death," because maintaining an experience is what really interests me. After all, we already don't stay the same person from moment to moment. We acquire new neural structures, associations, and memories (and lose some old ones that we aren't even aware of losing), and that doesn't particularly bother me. So maintaining a particular "identity" does not seem to me to be the problem worth really worrying about.

In fact, let's suppose that I was about to die due to some brain tumor, and there was one medical procedure that could save me, but it would entail destroying a lot of my existing memories, incidentally creating some new ones, re-arranging a lot of neural associations, and generally changing my whole personality in a drastic way.

If death and non-experience were not threatening me, then all other things being equal (meaning, assuming this personality will be relatively as happy and functional as my current self), my current self would NOT prefer to undergo this procedure (although the preference is not a particularly strong one. It's more of an "avoiding Buridan's Ass, risk-averse, all other things being equal, might as well stick with this current personality that I already know about" preference). However, if this procedure involving a lot of relatively neutral changes to my personality meant the difference between having future experiences of any sort and not having future experiences of any sort, then I would absolutely jump onboard with the procedure.

Let's kick it up one notch further, though. Let's say there's a brain procedure that will change a lot of memories and associations in such a way that I will be a happier and more successful/functional person. Let's say the procedure will raise my IQ by 100 points, increase my willpower, and so on. Then my current self would absolutely elect to undergo the procedure, even without being threatened with death otherwise.

When it comes to the classic teleporter thought-experiment, what really interests me is not the usual question people focus on of "will society recognize the duplicate as me," or "will I 'identify' with my future duplicate self," but rather, "will I experience my future duplicate self." I do not want the teleporter to be a suicide machine as far as my first-person experience is concerned.

When people usually try to address this question, I often hear things like, "your first-person experience will continue if you want to identify with that duplicate" or statements that imply something similar. This just doesn't make any sense to me.

Here's why: imagine a teleporter experiment, except in this case when your first body steps into the teleporter chamber and gets vaporized, two duplicates get re-constructed in different neighboring rooms.

The first duplicate gets re-constructed in a torture chamber, where it will get tortured for the rest of its life.

The second duplicate gets re-constructed in a normal waiting room, gets handed a billion dollars, and is set free back into society.

Now, if it is at all possible, I would like to experience the experiences of the second duplicate. How can I make sure that that happens? From what I have read, people make it sound like it is as easy as making your pre-teleporter self pre-commit to not caring about duplicates of yourself that get materialized in the torture chamber rather than the waiting room.

That just doesn't make sense to me. Normally reality doesn't work like that. I can try to pre-commit to not caring about the pain signals coming from my finger before I smash it with a hammer, but pain I will feel nonetheless. Granted, as of now I don't have full control over the self-modification of my own source code / nerves and neurons. If I did, I suppose I could re-program myself to not to feel pain or care about pain in that circumstance.

Still, this only goes so far. If I wanted to experience Neil deGrasse Tyson's experience, or experience his brain (because maybe I perceived him as having higher IQ than me or more interesting memories than me or more wealth than me), I cannot just go to sleep tonight and pre-commit to caring only about Neil deGrasse Tyson and expect to wake up tomorrow morning experiencing Neil deGrasse Tyson's reality, with all of his memories, feeling as if I had always been Neil deGrasse Tyson, with no memory of ever having experienced anything different.

Or maybe I can? How would I know that I have not repeatedly done this? How do I know that I did not just do this 5 seconds ago? I guess I don't know. But...it just doesn't FEEL LIKE I have.

Okay, NOW I am experiencing Matthew Opitz. And...NOW I am experiencing Matthew Opitz. And...NOW I am experiencing Matthew Opitz.

How could I seriously believe that I really just started experiencing Matthew Opitz after the 2nd "NOW" just now, and the first two "NOWs" are just false memories that I now have?

But still, it could be possible, when I look at the issue from the vantage point of this new NOW.

Really, when you think about it, the experience of time does not make any sense at all...

On what Selves are

Read up to number three, and the links, ignore the rest. http://lesswrong.com/lw/jke/how_not_to_make_money/ My view on Selves and identity.

http://static.squarespace.com/static/520cf78be4b0a5dd07f51048/t/52f57354e4b008f86b8a52b6/1391817556763/Strohminger.Nichols.2014.pdf

Personally, I wouldn't care if my body was changed (for the better), I'd still call it me. To me, pattern identity theory is only interesting as it could be used as a theory which would allow us to copy our consciousness, if the difference is merely additions, I see no harm to the original pattern as long as the original me was in the set {me, enhancements}.

This kind of thing used to bother me a lot more before I read The Quantum Theif. The cavalier attitude of the characters toward copying and modification rubbed off on me I guess.

The person who wakes up remembers all that good old Eliezer did and seems to act like you would expect an enhanced Eliezer to act. However, if you examine things closely the difference between 2014!Eliezer and 2094!Eliezer is actually bigger than the difference between 2014!Eliezer and let's say 2014!Yvain due to having all the new standard enhancements.

I'm not convinced that that's possible, at least according to my idea of what count as big differences.

Further: I think the usual opinion around here is that questions of the form "is this the same person as this?" generally don't have well-defined answers, and that if you find yourself asking one you should figure out what thing it is you really care about. (And, yes, that "does this have cognitive structure and memories very similar to this?" is often quite close to what you really care about when asking that question. But that's not the same as endorsing any particular positive theory of personal identity.) If so, then saying

I don't care if anything that looks like me or thinks it's me is expereincing stuff - I want me (whatever that is) to continue living and doing stuff.

may be a preference that's no more meaningful than, e.g., "I want my immortal soul to continue living and doing stuff".

[EDITED to fix a typo.]

Imagine, everyone is your incarnation. Co-incarnation. Then, there is no logical problem, suddenly.