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Comment by selcuka | Hacker News Reader

I believe your explanation answers the easy question, not the hard one. It explains how organisms evolve to be smarter to survive, but doesn't explain why or how the first person perspective exists.

It's actually a different question (sometimes called "the even harder question" or "the vertiginous question"), but if you have ever asked yourself the question of "why am I me and not someone else", the gap in our understanding of consciousness becomes clearer.

To use the same example: If there was a spreadsheet simulating every neuron in my brain, which one would be "I"? The original "I", or the spreadsheet?

Note that this question becomes meaningless if you change "I" to something else, so "both would be me" is not a valid answer. There is only one "I" (since I can't be experiencing the world from two sets of eyes, one organic and one spreadsheet-eyes, simultaneously), so I have to choose one of them.

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This does not seem like a particularly difficult question to answer to me, and I suspect it's because I'm not particularly precious about what it means to "be me."

The logical answer is that this spreadsheet, supposing identical mechanical processes - inputs, outputs, stored data - and I would both be convinced that they're "me", and they'd both be correct in that they'd both be something that functions, and therefore thinks, acts, and experiences things identically to me. Two different processes on different hardware running the same code. The concept of "ego" is a result of this code. To me, I'd be "me" and the spreadsheet would be "a copy of me". To the spreadsheet, it would be the exact opposite.

Of course, that predisposes that the software isn't hardware-dependent. But even then, I wouldn't discount the possibility of an emulation layer.

It really isn't hard once you accept that we're not special for being able to think about ourselves.

Note that you said "this spreadsheet and I", meaning that there is something particularly precious about the current "I". You don't think that you'd suddenly become the spreadsheet, "detaching" (can't find a better word) from your existing body. You intrinsicly assume that the spreadhseet would remain a third person from "your" perspective, even though it's a perfect replica.

I don't follow? I can copy a file and then consider the two files to be separate copies of the same data?

What should I have said instead? "We"? "Him and it"? Self-modeling is part of my experience. I'm sure it'll be part of the spreadsheet's experience as well, if it functions identically to me.

I don't see the gotcha at all?

I believe it's a concept that is hard to explain. This other comment of mine may be a bit clearer:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48175605

There is nothing which makes either of them are “you.” The feeling of Self is a useful predictor which a physical subsystem uses to nagivate the world and predict observations. “I” is not a physically real label which attaches the “you”-ness to physical systems, the physical systems simply are, and are inherently first-person in character. The only real you is the global quantum wave function, or whatever the underlying real stuff is doing.

Materialism directly implies no-self and Advaita Vedanta schools of thought.

I think the key point in my theory is that my brain simply hasn't evolved to intuitively conceptualize it. I've asked similar questions before, including what it's like to die and be dead forever, and I can't form an intuitive understanding of it. My brain rejects the premise. But just because I can't imagine it doesn't mean it won't happen. I'm pretty sure I will still be dead for trillions of years into the future.

To your question, the answer is similar. If we remove this limitation of intuition, there doesn't seem to be a real paradox. Both you and a spreadsheet-like copy of you would each claim to be the real you, and from an outside observer's perspective, there is no contradiction.

> from an outside observer’s perspective, there is no contradiction

Indeed. As I said, the question is meaningless from an outside observer's perspective. The paper "Against Egalitarianism" by Benj Hellie [1] explains it better than I can:

> I trace this odd commitment to an egalitarian stance concerning the ontological status of personal perspectives—roughly, fundamental reality treats mine and yours as on a par.

[1] http://individual.utoronto.ca/benj/ae.pdf

>Note that this question becomes meaningless if you change "I" to something else, so "both would be me" is not a valid answer.

I think the question remains meaningful after substitution: why a giraffe is a giraffe and not an elephant? Likewise "both giraffe and elephant are elephants" is not a valid answer.

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