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Comment by philwelch | Hacker News Reader

It's one of those weird philosophical questions. The sad part is, there's no possible empirical answer--transferring my memories to a robot, the robot would believe it was me and any test you could possibly devise would confirm that the robot was me, but regarding my subjective experience inside this soggy bag of meat, who knows whether that continues inside the robot or just ends?

EDIT: Useful thought experiment from philosophy, devised during the time Ronald Reagan was still alive. Suppose someone told you that they would take you, erase your memories from your brain, upload Ronald Reagan's memories, and then torture the inhabitant of your body. How willing are you to say, "go ahead! You'll just be torturing Ronald Reagan, not me!"? Personally, I'm not so willing.

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For minor surgeries these days, like when I had my wisdom teeth removed, a common combination is a local anesthetic plus a drug, midazolam, that temporarily prevents forming new memories. Patients are conscious and responsive during the operation, but don't remember being conscious; in retrospect they remember it as if they had been knocked out with general anesthetic. An odd thought experiment: if the local anesthesia hadn't worked well and I was actually feeling pain, do I care in retrospect? I sort of don't, I think, oddly enough. I don't remember it, so it doesn't really matter to me either way. I mean, I wouldn't want to see a video of myself experiencing pain, but so long as I neither remember it nor ever have to see it, somehow it doesn't matter to me a whole lot.

Well, yeah--after the fact, it doesn't really matter if you experienced terrible pain that you didn't remember. But by that argument it's fine to torture babies, since they won't remember it.

The question is whether, before the fact, you would go into minor surgery without anesthetic at all knowing perfectly well that you would forget all of the pain afterwards. Maybe you would if it was the best option, but I would wince in anticipation.

Yeah, I think I would wince at it, but I don't think I'd be that opposed. Somehow to me the idea of pain that I know up front I'll never remember isn't all that frightening a prospect, though I suppose I'd still avoid it given the option. It feels almost as if it's really just my body that'll experience pain, not "me", in the sense that I won't remember anything about it, it'll have no lingering traumatic effects, won't be an experience that'll do anything to shape my personality, etc. I'd definitely be much less apprehensive about it than if I knew I would remember it.

Hence the eternal philosophical problem with thought experiments (or "intuition pumps" as some people call them)--different people have different intuitions so maybe your thought experiment won't even make sense to them :)

Exactly.

Peter F. Hamilton explores this in "The Reality Dysfunction".

Although it's Sci-Fi and a space-opera it's it illustrates the problem pretty well.

Actually, I'd say "Torture? What? Don't torture anyone! Even Reagan! Damn!"

Then I'd quite rightly get thrown out of the thought experiment for involving the Golden Rule without a licence.

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