ThomasP wrote:Number Theoretic wrote:Yes, but it is exactly this illusion or magic trick that counts. Dying and getting my brain sliced in order to get a copy of me ressurected in a computer or robot body sounds to me like a drastic breaking of this illusion. It's the process that matters. If you break it, that person ceases to exist and you can't transfer it just by looking at it with a scanner and making a replica of it. At least as far as i understand it.
I think people are too attached to the idea that consciousness is a rock-hard thing, like you can dig into the brain and find a "Self Module". But by all indications, there is no such thing. The "self" that feels like a unitary being is actually woven out of neural modules working in networks, and a layered hierarchy of those networks. "You" is nothing more than the integration of sensory processing and motor-control that took one extra step and created a narrative of continuity and connectedness.
There's actually quite a depth of philosophical writings on this subject, stretching back to David Hume's bundle theory. More recent treatments include Derek Parfit's Reasons and Persons, Douglas Hofstadter's I Am a Strange Loop, and most recently Julian Baggini's The Ego Trick, all of which are highly recommended for a deeper treatment of this thought experiment.
The cliff's notes summary is that self is a functional, rather than biological, classification. Parfit argues that people survive all manner of changes in brain and body, emerging as effectively different people, but we still consider them the same "person". Memory, which we cling to as a source of continuity, is fallible -- itself a product of the brain's storytelling -- and is not enough by itself to fix identity. Likewise the physical brain is enough to create our sense of psychological unity but, again, is not enough by itself to completely define identity. Our bodies and social roles and the people around us and memory and everything else all goes into this job of defining "person".
The problem is that we're loose with our definitions of identity. We (meaning us as a culture) tend to get hung up on the quantitative aspect of identity, which is the replication of every last property of an object. But identity also has a qualitative aspect, in which exchanging two functionally identical objects makes no difference to the outcome. Intuitively, we gravitate to the quantitative notion; part of this is the brain's wiring, and part of it is because we're brought up in a culture that treats self as fixed, unchanging, and eternal -- but that kind of "sameness" is only useful for a reasonably stable object, which your sense of self is clearly not.
In Parfit's thinking, there is no simple answer to the mind-transfer problem until you can define what matters to the person asking the question. What property of sameness matters to you? Is it your biological cells, the atoms that make up your body? Or is it your memories, your internal experience of reality, the unique motor and sensory processing that, in aggregate, creates your sense of self? Is it the connections to people and places and social roles? For most of us, it's the inner life and connectedness that "matters".
Baggini says that this leads to two separate questions: the logical question of "is it me?" (the question that Parfit says doesn't really matter, as the "what matters" part of the question isn't every last quantitative property of our identity), and then the question of existence, the elements that matter about our sense of unity and connectedness. The entire notion of sameness doesn't make sense as self is, by definition, a process of on-going change; we retain a sense of selfhood over time, but this is not identical to sameness.
We wind up with a concept of "pragmatic identity", where personhood is by necessity an ill-defined notion. Practically speaking, we can usually point at a person and say "that's Dave", but we may encounter scenarios, such as extremely long life as one example, or uploading as another, where there is no simple right or wrong answer.
Personally speaking, I want the Thing Behind My Eyes to last as long as it can, but in saying that, I've come to realize that said Thing is a construct and that, no matter what I do, I won't be the same Thing in 10 years, just as I'm not what I was 10 years ago.
Throwing curveballs like flash-scan uploading and gradual replacement and whatever else runs counter to our intuitions, as we aren't used to those ideas in the same way we accept change over time, but I'm no longer entirely convinced that such changes are inherently bad, nor that they "destroy" the person. It's not about preserving biological continuity per se, but whether or not the process in question maintains "what matters" to us about our identities.
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- PeZook