Transplant an organ? Why not an entire body?
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Get back to me when people are swapping brain hemispheres with each other. Then we can have a meaningful discussion over the nature of self in a transplant scenario.
Even if they spends years in physical therapy and in the end aren't able to move and walk like a "normal" person, this could transform the lives of many people in impossibly meaningful ways given it works even to the level face transplants work today.
I once read someone describe academics as “floating heads with bodies attached.” I think that could apply to society at large.
We routinely replace every other part except the brain, whether by mechanical, artificial biological, or donor/transplant means.
Prosthetic arms and legs are normal, millions need things like insulin replaced in their bodies that is manufactured by yeast, and every day thousands donate blood to be put into other people and replacing kidneys, hearts, lungs, and various other organs from those who are brain dead is routine.
Everything except the brain is a swappable part (quality/success of swap may vary).
That doesn’t make it actually the case, and furthermore, doing so has a lot of negative consequences for our actual embodied selves.
What if I put you in a coma and wake you up a few days later and tell you a team of surgeons had replaced one of your internal organs with a lab-grown genetically equivalent version. Or maybe they just cut you open and closed you up again. Sure, there's a small scar left as evidence and some residual pain. But how would you be able to tell the difference? How does it connect to your perceptible self?
- Why is our perceptible self the only thing that should determine our sense of identity? Aren’t there many aspects of our body and mind that aren’t we aren’t aware of on a conscious level?
- Is there a point at which replacing your organs replaces You? This is called the Ship of Theseus and is a pretty deep problem.
- Is the ability to be conscious or communicate via language the sole determiner of a thing’s existence? If I put my head on your body, what is this new thing? Just me? My head on your body? Even if your cells and body continue to exist, with anything like tattoos or personal elements. Etc.
In any case, I’m talking mostly about the metaphysical model of treating the mind (ergo the brain) as the real Self and the societal consequences that leads to.
That said, pretty much our entire legal system is built on specific concepts of identity. And most contemporary political issues seem based around it too.
Not really. Your molecules turn over in a matter of days to years anyway (depending on the tissue and compounds in question).
All that remains is information encoded in larger structures that are retained across that turnover. And the largest part of that is in the brain.
> - Why is our perceptible self the only thing that should determine our sense of identity? Aren’t there many aspects of our body and mind that aren’t we aren’t aware of on a conscious level?
By perceptible I meant observable in one way or another, even parameters that are only subconsciously noticeable such as hormonal balance, gut flora signalling, DNA methylation, immune memory or whatever is important to the stateful system of the body. These considerations add complexity if you want a high-fidelity replacement but they're still far fewer variables than the state maintained in your brain.
> - Is the ability to be conscious or communicate via language the sole determiner of a thing’s existence? If I put my head on your body, what is this new thing? Just me? My head on your body? Even if your cells and body continue to exist, with anything like tattoos or personal elements. Etc.
I would say it's mostly you, a little me. Consider it as an exercise in tallying the number of non-redundant bits persistently stored in something. Its kolmogorov complexity. The body carries a smaller fraction of that.
Today we solved the Ship of Theseus, and yesterday I solved that one with the tree in the forest that makes a sound so I feel like we can finish solving philosophy by the end of the week.
I don't think I agree, but it doesn't seem preposterous either.
Integral part vs. disposable is not a binary distinction.
No different than getting some drug that improves your organ's health without replacing them. Perhaps via gene therapy, stem cell manipulation or whatever.
> Brain/mind main property is that it's dynamic, and this dynamism is brought through by the rest of the body, and the environment it lives in and senses and adapts.
It does that whether you transplant organs or not. Your tomorrow's self will not be quite identical to today's self either way. Replacing body parts only changes the trajectory in a similar way a change of environment would. Perhaps a drastic change, but still a decision that people could consciously make.
To the best of our knowledge and experience with it comes to transplanting organs, it seems to be?
> doing so has a lot of negative consequences for our actual embodied selves
Can you elaborate? Organ transplants (and most likely other medical procedures) definitely throw wrenches into various spiritual & religious beliefs, but in the physical world (which we can observe & study), beyond the immediate risks of the procedure and things like transplant rejection and the need for immunosuppression (which are by now understood well enough to do procedures with a reasonable likelihood of success), what other negative consequences are there?
Organ transplants are done because the alternative is death or severely reduced quality of life and the patients, the medical community and society at large appears to agree otherwise they wouldn't be done.
I'm not saying there aren't some hidden consequences we aren't aware of, but so far we haven't encountered any. As we push the envelope of what's currently possible we might stumble upon new ones and figure out way to mitigate them.
My thought is something like this: because we treat our “real selves” as just our heads/minds, we unintentionally or intentionally disregard the rest of our body.
To me, this seems to be related to some specific negative things like obesity, for example. Many people don’t treat their body with the same level of respect as they do their perceptions or their minds. Some old Daoist stuff delves into this a bit.
In short, because we treat our minds separately from our bodies and we privilege consciousness and speech/thought, it has effects on what we do.
It is also probably just conceptually wrong to think that our bodies are just a side accessory, especially when it comes to understanding how much of our actual intelligence comes from being embodied.
There's not a single study to show this, so calling it 'probably wrong' is just disingenuous. All the current results simply say 'sensory data impacts our cognition', which people who think that the brain encompasses the whole of the mind also believe.
The real test would be whether 'faking' body parts by sending mock sensory data would lead to the same result as having the real body part.
The view that's closest to traditional cognition - and generally regarded as uncontroversial - is that the body has a strong influence on the mind. A lot of (most?) computationalists would accept this idea with no issue.
It's the idea that our mind is actually distributed, that our body is part of our mind, which is actually contentious. It's a philosophical position you can argue for, but there definitely aren't a lot of studies to back it up, as all of them (or at least all that I know, feel free to prove me wrong), can just as easily be explained with a non-distributed model.
I appreciate the coherent and open way that you have responded to so many different comments in this thread.
Like, with the brain we know that the mind is deeply linked to it because it's just very obvious. Brain damage heavily impacts cognition, people lose memories, their personalities change, they lose the capacity to feel certain things or certain concepts - we even have some idea of damaging what area causes what.
Compare this with people losing limbs or sensory organs. Someone who loses their sight, doesn't lose their visual memory, their ability to visualize things, spatial concepts, etc. If these organs were actually part of the mind I would have at least expected some part of it to be lost.
So unless evidence for the contrary comes to light, it only seems reasonable to me to assume that no or at the very least minimal real processing occurs outside of the brain.
If there was some other influence causing changes to the mind, I don't know of it. It doesn't seem like the hormone creating organs are itself is part of the mind, as just taking the hormones seems to cause the same effects. So what else could it be? I guess it's theoretically possible that some systems like the blood stream itself are part of the mind - but there's nothing that indicates this, so I think it's pretty unlikely.
Or, staying closer to measurable things, glands mean that you should expect the personality of a brain being getting a full body transplant can become significantly different, just because of all the new hormone glands they will be exposed to. So in some sense, you are not moving a person to a new body, but creating a new person that will inherit many characteristics from the brain donor (memories, for sure, probably others), and many other characteristics from the body donor (personality traits, such as aggression or how sedentary they may be, very likely some dietary preferences).
Edit: clarified first sentence.
I'm not sure whether the changes would really be large enough to classify them as a new person. Hormone replacement therapy seems like a pretty damn large change, but I don't think I've heard of a case where there's truly radical personality changes. The same goes for other gland issues and their treatment. Though this is just guessing of course.
The same could likely be said for pieces of the brain, if we had a way to synthesize the right substances. What seems much more relevant to me is whether the glands are directly controlled by the brain, in which case they are simply a kind of support organ, just like the heart; or if they have their own signal processing and can "decide" (in the algorithmic sense) to secrete substances based on their own analysis of the internal or external environment, separate from the brain. If so, then I would characterize them as a part of the mind. The fact that their function CAN be replaced by taking hormones doesn't mean that X+testicles would be the same person as X+testosterone-testicles: the part of their mind that decided WHEN to produce testosterone would be gone.
Note that this is all an IF. It's quite likely that the decision to release certain hormones in certain quantities is controlled entirely by the brain, with the glands responding only to nerve signals.
> Hormone replacement therapy seems like a pretty damn large change, but I don't think I've heard of a case where there's truly radical personality changes. The same goes for other gland issues and their treatment.
From what I know, there can be pretty extreme effects from hormone issues, like extreme mood swings and defensiveness related to child birth, for example, or extreme aggression/irascibility related to high testosterone.
How about a test that fakes that body part which receives sensory data and triggers a response? Perhaps it can lead to the same results as having a real brain! /s
(Sorry, couldn't resist!)
On a serious note, articles about how for example the gut affects our mental state (all the way to links with autism) were posted to HN many times.
Calling the idea that our bodies are like side accessories attached to our brains “probably wrong” may be an overreach, but personally I suspect the stage at which it becomes a viable idea would also be one where we are able to just copy an entire human brain. (Which might just turn out not to be a meaningful proposition, but I guess we’ll see!)
And as long as we aren’t there/don’t know for sure, I’d put forward that the mere possibility of a “body replacement” actually destroying personality to an unknown extent is enough of a reason to never deploy it in foreseeable future except as last resort.
Of course, but that's because our gut is directly connected to the brain. Hardcore embodiment people will tell you that you're literally thinking with your gut. It's not like I'm saying you could just swap bodies and it wouldn't have an effect, it absolutely would, my point is simply that this is due to causation, because of the body influencing the brain, rather than distribution where the body is literally part of the mind.
>And as long as we aren’t there/don’t know for sure, I’d put forward that the mere possibility of a “body replacement” actually destroying personality to an unknown extent is enough of a reason to never deploy it in foreseeable future except as last resort.
Sure, but I'd say it's essentially what we're doing already. We know e.g. hormone treatment as part of sex reassignment causes changes to the brain and definitely influences personality. It's not like anyone is proposing this sort of stuff for fun (I think).
Along with the rest of the body; and note that we can’t treat autism by altering just the brain or the signals sent between the brain and the gut—we have to resort to introducing changes in the gut. To me it looks like a strong indicator that given current level of progress for medical purposes we ethically cannot assign personality and consciousness to any particular part of the body (including the brain).
> Hardcore embodiment people will tell you that you're literally thinking with your gut.
…and while I don’t quite identify with that position, we can’t deny they may be partially right until we exclude that possibility. We haven’t definitively concluded what consciousness is and where it arises.
Many people gravitate towards visualizing thought and consciousness as happening fully in the brain, but it’s not the only way of visualization—and perhaps neither is it even the most optimal: if gut microbiota affects us so much, doesn’t it make sense to include the gut into the feeling of “mind’s I”? Where then to draw the line?
> I'd say it's essentially what we're doing already. We know e.g. hormone treatment as part of sex reassignment causes changes to the brain and definitely influences personality.
For a while I’ve been thinking about continuity, and how it might be among the key puzzle pieces of consciousness. A sex reassignment brings a somewhat fast but still gradual change, while getting a body replacement may not be very different from a death from insider’s view: you go under anaesthesia; but is there a you that wakes up?
But then I guess should we be concerned with that “insider’s view”? What is that insider and does it even exist? (I know this is getting into the territory of the Star Trek Transporter thought experiment and the like, but that it’s easy to end up there might also hint at an insufficient level of knowledge we have about consciousness.)
You're joking, but this "fake brain" would be an AGI, and building an AGI has many active fields of research and development around it. Of course most of these fields don't care about perfectly replicating human brains and embodying such artificial minds, because it's just extra work, and building a mind without a body is already hard enough.
Your brain is also calibrated to your organs.
Your brain may notice you need to release X amount of adrenaline, and sends out a signal. Then your new body releases a different amount, because your new adrenal glands are used to a slightly different signal intensity.
And the body contains an enormous amount of complicated metabolical processes which are tightly coupled together.
Imagine the chaos, if everything starts to work a little differently, because “there is a new boss”.
I have no formal education in this yopic and my comment is only speculation, but it seems logical.
As it appears, now I know, that transplanted scrotum will produce semen with dna of previous owner - not recipient. Also, there are cases, where transplanted bone marrows are rewriting dna of receiver. So, brain is swappable in the end as well... sure.
Btw, your understanding of transplants is way too trivial - recipient body not always accept donor organs and people die because of it. Prosthetics are not transplants and they too can be rejected by body - and people who have them still "enjoy" side effects of not having proper arm or leg... the videos of happy sprinters with "better legs" do not convince me after I had been living with such people together, where higher body temperature is just one of those side effects of lost limb, not to mention dramatic impact on mind, where those battles about loss of limbs has to be battled every day.
Of course we don't even know whether this sense of self is really purely attached to the brain. That brain is still connected to the rest of your body, and who knows what the body chemistry of the body donor will do to the new brain? Maybe we'll end up with a completely new person. Maybe not all memories will survive the transplant, but even if they do, you'll have a person who has the memories of the brain donor, but will be recognised by everybody as the body donor.
Mind you, if you transplant the entire head and not just the brain, this issue will lean a lot more strongly towards the head donor.
There's a great little anime called Kaiba which explores exactly that: https://myanimelist.net/anime/3701/Kaiba
Probably this came up in cases of amnesia already
Imagine just one aspect of this. A thyroid disorder.
If the donor body was hyperthyroid, the head transplant would result in someone with the symptoms of hyperthyroidism. Angry, irritable, racing pulse, etc. If they had hypothyroidism, they would be depressed, lethargic, etc.
And that's just one organ in the body. It could radically alter the "person" who they are presuming lives only in the head.
The separation of cojoined twins is potentially even more drastic, especially if it could be accomplished in those whose self-aware consciousnesses are not entirely independent.
Everyone's entire body, brain included, is undergoing continual change, simply from aging if not from injury or disease, and the changes that are most challenging to the concept of self are those that affect the brain.
The brain is still the same old brain just responding to changed input with appropriate output.
Thus the communicating, arguing culture becomes even more self-referential as time goes on. And all that does not concern talking, thinking and arguing gets forgotten.
And that forgotten part is 99.999% of reality.
The act of focusing attention, which is also, implicitly, an act of vast ignoring, is a fascinating phenomenon.
As fascinating as these ideas are, hopefully repairing a severed spinal cord will be a reality soon: https://news.yale.edu/2021/02/22/yale-scientists-repair-inju...
We have owned it for almost nine hundred years, see. Of course, sometimes it needed a new blade.
And sometimes it has required a new handle, new designs on the metalwork, a little refreshing of the ornamentation . . . but is this not the nine hundred-year-old axe of my family?
And because it has changed gently over time, it is still a pretty good axe, y'know. Pretty good.”
- T. Pratchett - "The fifth elefant"
If any subset of the new ship is a subset of the original ship then surely. But this also raises the question if we take a subset and build a new ship. Which is the original?
Another interesting take is to introduce non-physical attributes such as a name of the ship. That way every piece of wood could be changed but the name attribute would still make it a subset
How would we go about confirming this was more than propaganda?
I mean, who does? That’s why people have invented a myriad coping mechanisms.
> I imagine that some of this research is being done in secret.
Maybe if that was an engineering problem... But we lack so much fundamental knowledge. It’s the same as saying someone is working on time travel device. Good movie plot, completely implausible.
https://www.bbc.com/news/health-29645760
https://futurism.com/neoscope/genetic-engineering-paralyzed-...
As far as we know. But we really know so little and there's a lot of interesting work being done regarding the networks of nerves in other parts of the body.
It's extremely likely that the brain is where most of the memories are stored, things like your name and age and so on. It could turn out that a lot of other types of memory, like muscle memory or emotional memory, are more distributed.
We also know we can replace limbs and organs with replacements from donors and our brains remember how to use them. This has also been used to control artificial limbs even. Also, hand transplants have been performed already, for example.
Finally, we pretty much know the layout of the brain pretty well and personality changes because of brain injuries are well documented. Also companies like Neuralink seem to be well on their way to repair and augment brains. Also, there have been cases of musicians undergoing brain surgery while playing their instrument so the doctors could see the direct impact of their actions and avoid unnecessary damage.
All that suggests that if this distributed memory is a thing, it's a very minor thing that seems to survive transplants and amputations.
That's in the cerebellum, part of your brain, not in your muscles. The state that your muscles remember is mostly the amount and composition of muscle fibers, i.e. how strong and fast they are due to exercise.
They aren't. We've removed almost every body part/organ we can and it doesn't seem to have any effect on your emotional memory. Muscle memory actually involves the nerves of the muscles, we already know that, but it's not the kind of conscious memory the rest of the comment refers to.
The functionality that hand transplant recipients obtain from the transplant apparently varies, but the results can be quite impressive. The Wikipedia article notes one recipient was able to use his transplanted hand to drink from a bottle of water a week after the procedure, and tie shoelaces after a few months.
If brains can successfully adapt to controlling a transplanted hand, under the right circumstances perhaps they can also adapt to multiple transplanted limbs, or a whole body.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hand_transplant#Long-term_func...
That was a fun thought experiment. Hopefully it answered your question. I’d love to hear your thoughts.
I think the distinguishing factor that people want to latch onto is that if "identity" applies to recognizable configurations or organization of parts, is replacing large chunks qualitatively different from replacing small ones (e.g. blood donation)?
Maybe another interesting comparison is virus recombination or reassortment -- where meaningfully large, recognizable chunks are put together in a new arrangement. We recognize this process as giving rise to a new strain, but you could just as easily view it as a successor to one strain, but with modifications.
Or changes among institutions or groups: we think the United States is a country with a ~245 year history, though its geography and population changed a lot, with sudden expansions.
This, like so many other “philosophical quæstions” is a futile quibble of semantics that answers nothing.
The simple answer to this problem, and many other problems, is that the exercise of giving clouds of atoms in vicinity to one another “identities” is not one based in salient thought. — there is no such thing.
All Theseus' Ship shows is that, indeed, this theory is flawed, and easily reduced to the absurd, but that is a trivial conclusion an unindoctrinated child should be able to easily make in a multitude of ways. It's as though one come with a thought experiment that demonstrates that the borders of countries are an artificial man-made construct, rather than an actual physical property of the universe. — it is rather obvious.
Are you implying identies don't exist? Because that either has to be sophistry (i.e. trolling) or insanity.
I'm saying that “identities” are a fuzzy human “You know it when you see it, and different men see it differently.” category that is bereft of any definition that can be objectively measured and reasoned about, and that what I just said is a trivial and obvious conclusion.
They “exist” in the same way that borders between different oceans exist, arbitrarily drawn, and different people will think differently as to where they lie.
If you wish to call that an “existence”, then be my guest, though many others would præfer to not call it such. — ironically the border between “existence” and “nonexistence” is of a similar quality.
Most of nations of the world officially define Crimea to be within the Ukrainian border, but it is the Russian government who wields the actual, practical power there.
It took a rather long time for many countries to stop defining mainland China as falling within the power of the R.O.C. government, despite the R.O.C. wielding no practical power there any more, and the R.O.C. still defines mainland China as falling within it's power.
If “borders” of nations were defined descriptively based on sovereign entities having control over them, then they would certainly be more useful, but, this would also assume a simplified world where it is easy to decide what powerbase is sovereign, and what powerbase binarily has control over what surface of the planet; it is often not so simple and often multiple parties vie for control over a single area, and whether a powerbase be sovereign is not so easy to simply answer.
Reality isn’t a computer program. The fact that some rules are broken occasionally doesn’t mean that they aren’t rules.
If the law is observed broken once, that is a falsification of the entire theory.
And I assume you live in a rather peaceful area if you think powers adheres to borders. In many parts of the world governments have a harm time enforcing their law upon fringe areas where effective anarchy is quite common. — the picture is certainly not as simple as you paint it.
Most countries follow borders most of the time.
This really isn’t that complicated.
I.e., you claim that identities don't (really) exist.
Do triangles exist? Is the definition of triangle "bereft of any definition that can be objectively measured"?
Is the Ship of Theseus fundamentally different than a triangle, or is it merely a difference of degree?
Ask any random human to define some extremely complex mathematical entity, and you'll get various fuzzy answers.
Does that mean complex math doesn't really exist?
Certainly not, the definition of a triangle is quite a rigorously defined mathematical construct.
> Is the Ship of Theseus fundamentally different than a triangle, or is it merely a difference of degree?
It is not a difference of quantity but quality. A triangle is an objectively defined, mathematical concept; identities are as I said “You know it when you see it, and different men see it differently.”. — you will not find many mathematicians disagreeing on what is, and is not a triangle.
Another fundamental difference is that a triangle is an abstract reasoning tool, not an empirical one, and no mathematician would suggest that real life objects are, or are not, triangles.
> Ask any random human to define some extremely complex mathematical entity, and you'll get various fuzzy answers.
A lay human being with no mathematical understanding perhaps, but all of these entities have been defined rigorously in mathematical terms.
> Does that mean complex math doesn't really exist?
You were the one who speaks in such terms as “existence”. I will not have you put words in my mouth.
All I said is that one has an objective, rigorous definition such that you will find that every single educated man in the field agrees on what is, and what is not a triangle, such that a machine proof assistant can be fed this definition, and verify machine-level proofs that reason about them, and that the other lacks this such that you find that nigh any man, expert or not, has a different definition of what constitutes the identity of a physical object, and where a new object starts.
There is no evidence for this, you're claiming this purely out of personal bias.
Just because nobody bothered yet to define a rigorous mental model of 'Ship of Theseus' doesn't mean such a model doesn't exist in principle.
(In fact, the job of programmers is exactly that - to define rigorous models for things that nobody bothered to define before.)
Bothered to?
MY good man, giants have attempted, and failed. — you speak as though no one attempted, rather than that many have, and none could.
> (In fact, the job of programmers is exactly that - to define rigorous models for things that nobody bothered to define before.)
The difference being that they generally succeed and when after millennia of attempts none have, tend to acknowledge that it probably cannot be done.
In particular, our notion of the identity of an object has no relationship with the physical world, as the Ship of Theseus shows. Our idea that objects "shatter" and "transform", so that if I break a glass the pieces are a different object than the glass; or if I mix of bowl of flower with water and roll it into a dough, the dough is a different object than the bowl of flour and the water - these are not physically definable notions.
When it comes to human identity, the identity perceived by myself, the same logic MUST apply, unless you believe in a soul. The fact that I can think of myself as the same identity as myself 2 seconds ago, or myself when I was a handful of cells in my mother's womb, is obviously an artifice of the human mind. There is no such continuity in the physical world.
And this has all been said from the perspective of classical physics. If you go into QM, where any notion of identity of particles would contradict the theory and observations of it, things really break down.
I tend to draw the border of self a little looser than most. I'm a human, a living being, and a piece of me extends both forward and backward in time far beyond the start and end of this meat bag at a keyboard.
There is no problem, and there is no answer. There is only a complex problem from assuming a falsehood and trying to explain it. — there is nothing arrogant about calling out obvious nonsense.
He went on: suppose you kill the original — did you "transport" the person?
Star Trek creeps me out a little now.
I imagine a mining colony around the asteroid belt where the CEO uses the more expensive tech that is slower to visit every so often but the workers are forced to use the tech that kills them everyday but they are just a light beam of zero and ones on their "commute"
I rather suspect that “you” are simply information. If that information is copied, there’s another you—at least for the instant before that “you” starts having its own thoughts and receives information through its own senses.
For you to die on transport and “someone else” to come out the other side, you’d have to exist in some way separate from your physical self; which might suggest you can survive death anyway.
So, when you step into the teleporter, you can perfectly equivalently think of the person that will come up at the other side as a "copy" of you, or "future you". Let's say that the teleporter doesn't affect the local copy, it just creates a remote copy. What reason do you have to care more about the local copy than the remote copy? Why are you imagining that hacking the body up into tiny pieces, sending the pieces, and reassembling them would be any different from just killing the local copy and sending the information away? You'd still die and another person would be assembled on the other side.
Now, if you do believe in a transcendent soul (I don't), things get much more interesting. In fact, teleportation in this way would amount to experimentation of this hypothesis. If humans have unique souls given to them by some god at the moment of birth, then copy teleportation should not be able to produce two copies - either one of the body copies would not be conscious at all, since one of the bodies would not have a soul, OR the two bodies would be completely different in personality, as one would have the original soul, and the other would have the new soul, which would be a completely different person. For the "move" style teleportation, the risk would be that the disassembly process kills the body and causes the soul to be separated, so that the reassembled body ends up being soul-less and doesn't function, or is inhabited by a different soul, so it must act differently.
That is a big claim considering we have no idea what causes consciousness. It is however certain that the copy is not you. Whether the original gets destroyed on teleportation or not, the original you will not feel, see, hear etc anything that the copy does.
That's not certain at all, and depends on how we define "you". And, as you say, we don't know enough about consciousness to flesh out that definition.
If consciousness depends only on the layout of neurons in the brain (for example), then a teleporter that destroys your body and makes an atomically (quantum-ly?) identical copy at the destination actually does move "you" from one place to another. But if there's more to it than just that, perhaps it doesn't.
There is no known process in physics that could give meaning to that identity. So regardless of whether consciousness is emergent or quantum or computational or whatever we will discover it to be, unless it is transcendental, there is no way to physically define this continuity or give it some special meaning, such that teleportation would be meaningfully different from the normal passage of time, or that perfectly copying an individual could be said to produce anything different than moving them.
I am arguing that we don't know enough about consciousness or about the universe to claim there is no difference between the original and the copy. So saying "there is no known process in physics" doesn't undermine my position.
Here is one possibility, perhaps a bit silly, but if we are in a simulated universe, not that I think this is likely, but if we are then each person could maybe have a unique hash. A copy then would have a different hash to the original.
Like I said I am not saying we are in a simulation. It is just an example scenario where a perfect copy would not be the same as a move.
Also note, a hash or a mind in a higher-level universe is exactly a transcendent soul: it transcends what we call physical reality (or it transcends 'the simulation' in that story). Just because it's framed in scientific concepts doesn't make it any more or less scientific than Brahman or Christian souls.
Only if our conscious experience truly stops during sleep (which as far as I know isn't actually backed up - there's a world of difference between minimally consciousness and stopped consciousness. From my understanding we simply don't know enough about consciousness) and if you believe whatever makes up experience isn't baked into the physical i.e. panpsychism, unless you want to classify that as a 'soul' (but then I'd reject your characterization of a soul as some magical thing that influences personality).
And even if 'whatever makes up experience is baked into the physical', that doesn't give a path to a time-stable identity. In fact, it makes that even less plausible, as it implies that every atom leaving your body, every cell that dies, and certainly something like losing a hand or getting a transplant, fundamentally changes your psyche at the physical level.
I'm not sure what that even means. How can an experience be an illusion? It seems to me that at point everything just breaks apart.
>Just because I remember when I started writing this comment doesn't mean I am the same thing that started writing it.
The point isn't that you remember it (false memories are a thing), but that you're experiencing continuity from moment to moment. If you think this continuity doesn't exist, how could you care about anything at all?
>From one moment to another, everything is different, or at least there are no clear boundaries
How is everything different? On the contrary, I'd say that actually most things seem to change only marginally and as time periods approach the infinitesimal, so do the changes. And I don't understand what you mean by clear boundaries. Why would there be any? Isn't lacking clear boundaries what actually makes it continuous.
>Am I the same thing as the feritilzed egg? Present-me and past-me are just as related as copy1 and copy2 with a hypothetical perfect copy machine.
If you reject continuity, sure, but otherwise the key difference is that there's continuity between the objects.
Let me ask you, why do you care about your future 'self'? That is, why do you not just maximize _your_ (current) pleasure, rather than caring about the experience of someone that you seem to think isn't actually yourself. At the very least, it seems like from your point of view there is no reason to place more importance on your future self than any other future person.
>And even if 'whatever makes up experience is baked into the physical', that doesn't give a path to a time-stable identity. In fact, it makes that even less plausible, as it implies that every atom leaving your body, every cell that dies, and certainly something like losing a hand or getting a transplant, fundamentally changes your psyche at the physical level.
'time-stable' identity doesn't mean that it must be forever frozen, but rather that it's continuous in the time dimension and happens slowly enough that the subject can experience this. You can replace parts of the 'soul material', without identity being lost as long.
This experience of continuity is built from memory, I think I am the same person I was 2 minutes ago because I can remember what it was like to be that person. If I take a roofie or drink too much or sleep walk, I will feel that the things that I did happened to another person, because I don't remember them at all. Likewise, the experience of continuity is often lost - I generally experience sleep as "falling asleep" -> "waking up", even if an EEG would show that I am not even entirely losing consciousness for this time.
> How is everything different? On the contrary, I'd say that actually most things seem to change only marginally and as time periods approach the infinitesimal, so do the changes. And I don't understand what you mean by clear boundaries. Why would there be any? Isn't lacking clear boundaries what actually makes it continuous.
Yeah, that phrase was really bad, I didn't get my point across at all. What I wanted to say is that in physics you actually look at every moment in time individually, even if functions of time are continuous; and you look at every piece of every object individually - any object can be equivalently represented as multiple objects held together by strings (or springs). There is no need or use for object identity across time.
> Let me ask you, why do you care about your future 'self'? That is, why do you not just maximize _your_ (current) pleasure, rather than caring about the experience of someone that you seem to think isn't actually yourself. At the very least, it seems like from your point of view there is no reason to place more importance on your future self than any other future person.
Because in this view, a single experience is extremely fleeting, far too little to gain any great pleasure. Also, my future "self" is the person I can empathize most with in the world, so I feel it is natural to want to help him. Not to mention, for any desire I have, he is the most likely to actually see it through.
Also, we often sacrifice our happiness for other people, often ones that we have much less reason to empathize with than our future selves. Not to mention, of course I occasionally sacrifice my future self's happiness for my current one - such as eating an extra piece of cake, or drinking another glass. But there has to be some limit, especially when I have such an intimate idea of how much the future person will suffer.
> 'time-stable' identity doesn't mean that it must be forever frozen, but rather that it's continuous in the time dimension and happens slowly enough that the subject can experience this.
Yes, I think we mean the same thing by time-stable. It doesn't have to be frozen, but it must be well defined for more than one moment of time (it's pretty trivial to define an object at time T, even the Atlantic Ocean, but it's much harder to define an object that remains itself over some interval T0-T1).
> You can replace parts of the 'soul material', without identity being lost as long.
This is the part I don't understand. In the materialistic computational theory of the mind, it's pretty clear why the mind doesn't change just because cells die and are replaced, or just because every atom in a body is replaced. But if each atom carries a part of the soul, I really don't understand how this works, or at least what it buys you in terms of identity or mind.
I think there are good reasons to believe this is not generally how the writers of Star Trek thought the transporters in their stories were supposed to work, but they weren't always perfectly consistent on the subject.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reasons_and_persons#Personal_i...
I remember one episode of one of the TV shows (I forget which one), they used a transporter to transport a bomb off the ship, so it detonated in space instead. If transportation is converting matter to information, transmitting the information, then reassembling it at the other end, why would one bother doing that to a bomb? Just do the first step of converting matter to information, and then instead of transmitting it and reassembling it somewhere else, just send the information to /dev/null
(I think if someone was designing a bomb, in a situation in which such technology was known, they'd try to design it so that any attempt to dematerialise/transport it would detonate it instantly.)
Thought experiments are often not intended to be carried out empirically (Schrodinger did not poison cats, Maxwell could not summon demons, Einstein did not throw people off buildings or construct clocks made of light, and so on), but they are nevertheless useful tools that can lead to insights about the real world, or serve as inspiration for actual experiments (Bell tests [6] are perhaps a good example of this, as they derive directly from Ian Bell's careful consideration of a famous thought experiment of Einstein, Podolsky and Rosen [7]).
Quantum teleportation is also of course a real phenomenon [8], and it does have some of the same properties as the imaginary teleportation device that Parfit and other philosophers consider in their work, albeit that it has only been demonstrated at the atomic scale for now.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Swampman
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Knowledge_argument
[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/China_brain
[4] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Philosophical_zombie
[5] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_room
[6] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bell_test
[7] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Einstein_Podolsky_Rosen_Parado...
With the benefit of current scientific knowledge, most people who think carefully about personhood identify the brain as the seat of consciousness, and will tend to assume that any procedure that leaves the brain intact will leave the person intact too. If a brain (or a head in this case) can receive a 'body transplant' though, some will find it natural to wonder whether other radical interventions in the nervous system are possible; for instance whether subdivisions of the brain can be successfully transplanted, and what the effects of that might be.
That kind of speculation in turn prompts questions about the consequences that physical changes in the brain might have for conceptions of personal identity. Thought experiments about teleportation — in which all the physical matter of a brain is replaced while preserving its structure and function — offer a template for thinking about these questions by allowing their scientific and ethical consequences to be examined in the most extreme cases. The most extreme cases may or may not be realisable, but legitimate conclusions can nevertheless be arrived at by thinking about them.
Many of the most influential thought experiments in science were never conceived with the belief that they could be carried out in reality; that is often why they were thought experiments rather than laboratory exercises. The purpose of thought experiments is typically to help extend the theoretical investigation of scientific and philosophical ideas into realms beyond the reach of current empirical methods. They are a tool for considering interesting questions where attempts to test them cannot be made; sometimes this helps to inform practical experimental work, and sometimes the thought experiment itself is sufficient to reach reliable conclusions, if the reasoning is rigorous, and the underlying theory is demonstrably valid in enough areas where verification is possible for its extension to be trusted.
Edit: Made my statement more vague. There is definitely more to sleep though than turning consciousness off and on again.
The only difference with splitting later in life is that you'd share more life memories from before the split.
Star Trek: cloning takes seconds. You can have as many copies of a veteran warrior as you want. Dangerous mission? just send in the red shirts and a few highly trained veterans in the hope that nobody important dies (again).
But instead we have "pattern buffers" that "degrade" quickly, and presumably keeping around copies of the full quantum states of many humans would require too much storage.
It really takes off in the book "A Little Immortality":
https://www.schlockmercenary.com/2016-12-05
but the core ideas leading to that book go back much further in the comic's archives.
When you step into the teleporter, there will actually be two future selves created: one will stay in the teleporter chamber, the other will go to the destination. So to decide if you should do it your not, you need to weigh the benefits to 3 people: (1) your future self if you don't go into the teleporter; (2) your future self who arrives at the destination; (3) your future self who stays back anyway, so who is very similar to (1). If (2) is much happier than (1) and (3) is not significantly less happy than (1), you should rationally do it. If (3) would be significantly less happy, there is also the option of considering having them (painlessly) killed in the process.
Either way, the person making the decision will not get to experience either (1), (2), or (3)'s experiences.
https://www.fantasticfiction.com/d/thomas-m-disch/echo-round...
Does it really matter though? It's just a different way of encoding the information. These things force one to think about the nature of what is real and what matters. Is the important thing actually hearing your Mum (whatever that means), or making the connection with her at an emotional level?
Occasionally something goes wrong and the source is not "deconstructed" properly by the equipment so the procedure is for the transporter crew to terminate the original person.
PS It was "Think Like A Dinosaur"
At the end they had to free merry by burning it :)
It is similar to high-energy physics in this way.
That’s a fancy way to say you believe in soul.