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Comment by skissane | Hacker News Reader

I remember one day as a teenager, sitting in class bored at high school, I was suddenly struck by the question–"why am I I, and not somebody else?" It felt so profound, so immense.

But yes, if materialism is true, probably the question is empty. However, if some other philosophy of mind is true (there are many other options beyond just materialism and Cartesian dualism), maybe it means something. And, if one has this sense that it is profound rather than empty, that might give one a reason to prefer some other position in the philosophy of mind that treats that question more sympathetically.

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> there are many other options beyond just materialism and Cartesian dualism

Can you give some examples of the kind of options you're thinking of? I mean, I have a lot of time for functionalist accounts, and given Sufficiently Smart Technology (tm) I'm happy to allow for the possibility of something recognizably "me" being artificially duplicated in a different physical substrate. (After which we'd rapidly start diverging, and would need some new vocabulary to describe what's going on.)

But GGP's question was specifically about being born. I really struggle to imagine how someone born somewhere else, somewhen else, could be "me" with anything like the fidelity I think our intuition demands. And if you loosen your identity test to the point where it could, doesn't it then become useless as an individuation test, in that lots of people could be sufficiently like me all at the same time?

This is why I think it's tough to say "I - singular - could have been born in Brazil in 1873" without invoking something like a soul which acts as both an arbitrary GUID tag and as kind of mutex on embodiments.

But GGP's question was specifically about being born. I really struggle to imagine how someone born somewhere else, somewhen else, could be "me" with anything like the fidelity I think our intuition demands. And if you loosen your identity test to the point where it could, doesn't it then become useless as an individuation test, in that lots of people could be sufficiently like me all at the same time?

Up front let me admit this is effectively a cheat.

BUT in a multiverse or infinite universe not only are there multiple “you’s“ there are in fact infinite identical versions of you. I grant that this is not taking the spirit of the conversation into account, and is untestable to boot, it is genuinely possible.

Yeah, when I said "somewhere else" I was kind of scoping it to this universe. I know, so small-minded.

Note though that an infinite universe doesn't imply that everything imaginable occurs within it. There are an infinite number of even integers, but none of them is 3.

> Note though that an infinite universe doesn't imply that everything imaginable occurs within it

True, but in an infinite universe, everything with non-zero probability almost surely happens, an infinite number of times.

Since our own lives have non-zero probability of existing, a spatially infinite universe implies that almost surely there are an infinite number of exact copies of ourselves existing right now, and an infinite future implies that almost surely our current lives will be exactly repeated an infinite number of times in the future.

> there are in fact infinite identical versions of you

But when I say (or think) "I", am I saying or thinking of any specific one of those versions? How could I be? It seems, if there are infinite number of identical copies of me, when I say "I", I must mean all of them equally.

Based on my own personal experience of putting myself in a position of dying now probably more times than I can count (unfortunately), I've been seriously wondering if the universe does contain all of my deaths as well, but my consciousness stays on a path where it can continue, because that's all it can do.

Though that still raises the question of why this particular set of living experiences and not others.

Also, if this sort of thing is the case, I think it would make being a moral person significantly more complex. You would need to not only make moral decisions, but create as many moral possible universes as possible and shut out the immoral universes from existence by not creating paths to them. Though I guess that would make me a highly immoral person at this point (causing pain and suffering in all the universes where I've died), though I do try to be moral in this universe as much as I can.

Well, idealism is another option.

I'm not sure how easy it is even with idealism to make "Why am I I?" a meaningful question. But, if our choice is between viewing that question as a pointer to some profound mystery on the one hand, or viewing it as simply a case of muddle-headed confusion on the other, the allegiance of my heart is with the first choice rather than the second.

"Muddle-headed confusion" is harsh. I'd prefer something like "human intuition not being particularly reliable on questions it wasn't evolved for".

If preserving a sense of profound mystery is your goal then... honestly, that mindset is sufficiently alien to me that I can't really think of anything useful to say on the subject. I can understand and share it as an aesthetic choice - mysteries are cool! - but not as a philosophical one. Philosophy by definition is the love of knowledge, not the love of not-knowledge.

And if you want your mystery to be something you solve, rather than something you live with, I do think you should be able to explain what your mysterious question means.

Maybe "Why am I I?" is an expression of dissatisfaction at being trapped in the prison of the self. That I only get to experience my experiences, and not other people's.

Maybe the answer to the question then is not a proposition, but a liberation from that prison. If one is a religious believer, one might hope for that liberation after death. If one is a transhumanist (which is maybe just a different sort of religion), one might hope that future technologies like telepathy implants or mind uploading might make such a liberation possible.

Or just do enough drugs and meditation. I sort of kid, but there have been groups very committed to escaping the self, via asceticism, visions, meditation, disciplining the mind and what not with the belief that it's possible in some way. There's even Christian versions of it, although it's couched in union with God language instead of waking up from the illusion of being separate from everything else (union with the universe).

Here's an answer: You experience your own experience because it is the only way to understand what it is to be you. If you also experienced the experiences of others, you would understand instead what it means to be that amalgamation of experience.

We know that a human being can survive with large portions of their brain missing. Entire hemispheres in fact. You understand what it is to be the amalgamation of experiences from both hemispheres, but the hemispheres don't understand what it is to be that experience, they only know the experience of being a hemisphere.

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