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Comment by cvoss | Hacker News Reader

Interesting! Not compelling because you already have your own answers to the questioned posed? Or perhaps not compelling because you don't find the questions to be interesting/relevant?

The value of this story, in my opinion, isn't just that these are neat things to think about. There are deep unanswered questions here that challenge how we understand the connection between materialistic science and a non-materialistic belief in "self", and push the limits of theories of ethics. For example, right up to the very end it keeps throwing new questions at you, such as "What is justice when 'two' people have identical claims on a fundamental right? Namely, which of them gets to keep the body? Which of them gets the estate? Which of them is married?"

Dennett's story is a powerful instigator of thought on these topics.

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I don't find it compelling because I don't buy the premise, that a person whose brain has been separated from his body is anywhere at all. A simulation of life isn't life, and that's all this is. You have, on the one hand, a corpse relieved of its brain being used as a puppet, and on the other, a brain kept firing in a vat.

It's popular to think of "ourselves" as a sort of "ghost in a machine," and we particularly assume the ghost resides in the brain, but I don't think that's what people are at all. I don't think either our brains or the rest of our bodies are separable from our selves.

That's not to say you can't validly discuss how to treat the body and/or the brain, but I think the person here, the I, has died.

Is someone with a cochlear implant dead? How about someone using a BCI to move a mouse? Or a locked-in patient?

Is there a minimum number of organic connections we need to be alive?

How would you convince this person that their 'I' has died?

I think these questions are exactly along the lines of the question this story begs.

I don't know how many, but that doesn't keep me from knowing it's more than zero.

"Convincing a person that their 'I' has died" is a category error, like a married bachelor. Corpses can't know they're dead, and anything simulating life for the corpse isn't a person to convince.

There might be some other entity deserving of rights that does exist. I'm not about to argue that only persons deserve rights. I don't think a horse is a person, but I do think it has a right not to be abused. There's a meaningful discussion to be had about what rights the corpse and simulation ought to have in this circumstance.

But "convincing a person their 'I' has died" is self-contradictory. Being able to put the words together in a syntactically coherent sentence doesn't make the idea possible.

Do you consider non-persons have an "I"? I presume you do, because otherwise there wouldn't be anyone to deserve rights.

In that case, the question is still valid: how would you convince the non-person "I" that the "I" is dead?

(I can see how the original "person I" might be dead after such a change, but it doesn't really make the premise invalid.)

No, I don't think nonpersons have an "I," because that requires a level of self-reflective awareness that's incompatible with their nature. Being or not being a "thou" is a characteristic of persons, which is why I said it's a category error.

Keep in mind, this is all in the context of why I don't find the article compelling. It's because I disagree with one of the fundamental premises of its proposed hypothetical situation, one so fundamental that the thought experiment is dull without it.

I'm not here to change your mind. I'm just explaining why I don't find the thought experiment interesting. Suspension of disbelief about some core thing you believe to be true about the world is fun for the sake of science fiction stories, but it's dull for the sake of philosophical thought experiments.

I don't intend to convince you or get convinced. To me, the answer depends on the purpose of the question.

I'm curious now instead why you'd grant rights to entities that don't have an "I". Isn't that pointless? Or is it a mistake on my part, i.e. maybe there's no "I" but there's still a "you"?

In the "you" case, do you think the thought experiment could be reframed as an attempt at answering the question "where is the you?"?

I think an "it" can have rights. I'll go back to the horse. It has a basic natural right not to be beaten because it's a creature that can experience pain, not because it's an "I."

The legal system (at least in the U.S.) seems to need to call something a "person" in order for it to have rights (e.g., corporations), but I don't think the legal system is the origin of rights.

"I" and "thou" go together as references to personhood, so I wouldn't distinguish between the two. (And I'm mostly using "thou" here instead of "you" to show I'm referring to the concept rather than you personally. The "I/Thou" philosophical concept also has precedent of using the term.)

Are you sure this is a simulation of life? All the story is talking about is longer nerves, brain still connected to the body, it's just slightly further away.

The brain has been severed from the body, and a new type of connection spliced in to replace it. Even if this happens one connection at a time, by the time none of the originals are remaining, all that remains is a simulation of life.

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