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wateroverfire posted:
The mechanics of reference in this case are relevant because they determine what the object of reference is, both for a given locution and for a given concept. I'm personally inclined toward the causal-historical account of reference on which a concept (and therefore a phrase expressing that concept) refers to an object by virtue of that object's having reliably activated that concept in the past. If this is right, then to determine the referent of a given concept/phrase constitutively requires tracing that object's trajectory in space-time. Which is just what is at issue for the identity question. Just pointing out that communication is generally successful doesn't resolve this issue. That and I think we should generally avoid trying to read our metaphysics off our epistemology.
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May 5, 2016 19:58
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Piell posted:
Your (implausible) premise was that the two were completely identical, for all the time they were actually capable of experiencing anything, that's not the same in the hand case. Brutal Garcon fucked around with this message at 23:34 on May 5, 2016 |
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May 5, 2016 20:40
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Piell posted:The perspective the other side is coming from (or at least I am): You are the brain in your body, that's why messing around with your brain matter messes up you. If that brain dies, you die. Copies don't matter. This has nothing to do with anything I said
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May 5, 2016 21:00
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wateroverfire posted:You(a week ago) is just a manner of speaking about someone as they were a week ago. It's just you(0) at time t-1 week. If you want a moving reference that changes overtime that is fine too, but then its on you to justify why we cant just move it to the clone. You keep switching between different meaning, I am not asking for truth here, I am so past right or wrong, I am just asking that you start being consistent GlyphGryph fucked around with this message at 21:13 on May 5, 2016 |
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May 5, 2016 21:06
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Piell posted:Because there's absolutely no connection between the original and the copy. You can do whatever you want to the original, and (assuming the copy doesn't see a video of it or something) it will never be affected by anything that happened to the original, because they're two separate individuals who merely look and act identically (at least at first). Yes. quote:What if you split up the twins, raise them in two separate but identical environments with exactly equivalent inputs, so that their memories, personalities, bodies and everything else are exactly the same. When they are 18 years old you shoot one of them in the head. Did you kill someone? Did anyone die? Of course. But the "exactly equivalent inputs" would have to come from the exact same place in my opinion. One of the reasons I call the clone me was because it shares exactly the same past in both space/time as me. If I had a twin that was indistinguishable from me it would have had to be raised by an exactly equivalent mother and have exactly equivalent set of friends, and they would all mourn my twin being shot in the head. What I'm saying is your invoking a parallel universe here, when the duplication experiment takes place in one universe. quote:Let's say you take a brain scan of someone, then take someone else of similar height and build, and give them plastic surgery and superimpose the brain scan so they look and act like the original person. Then you take the original person and shoot them in the head. Did you kill someone? Did anyone die? As soon as you have an original and a scan functioning at the same time they have become different people, but I see it as an individual branching into two individuals who share the same past up to a point. This is the same deal, kind of, where your killing one of the branches. The teleportation experiment doesn't create two individuals though.
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May 5, 2016 22:17
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What if you had a twins, one on earth, one on venus. Both were kept in identical rooms, spoke to the same person only through electronic devices at the exact same times everything exactly identical. They're both told they're on earth. Until one day someone goes to the one on earth and says, "We're teleporting you to venus" and shoots him in the head. Then for the one on venus they open the door and he is clearly on Venus. Did they lie? Exact same scenario except instead of shooting one they put each twin in "teleportation machine" the machine on Venus does literally nothing just some flashing lights and poo poo. The one on Earth is a gas chamber that kills Earth twin. Did they lie? How is that different from making an exact clone of someone and killing the original? Doorknob Slobber fucked around with this message at 00:07 on May 6, 2016 |
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May 6, 2016 00:03
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Dzhay posted:Your (implausible) premise was that the two were completely identical, for all the time they were actually capable of experiencing anything, that's not the same in the hand case. Hmm, at the moment of hand chopping, a new person is born then? Phyzzle fucked around with this message at 18:16 on May 6, 2016 |
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May 6, 2016 00:53
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Kilroy posted:I think anything where you could in principle be cloned instead of teleported, is a death. So anything that writes you out as a string of bits then destroys your body is a death. Phyzzle posted:Suspended animation does write out a great portion of you as bits. Kilroy posted:Ah sorry, I didn't read your linked post carefully enough. I was referring to cryogenic freezing. Qualify as what? As not a death? So the process of life can stop and go, but the person is the same as long as the matter is the same? But that does raise difficulties with the amount of matter that constantly goes into and out of our bodies. Perhaps having your matter swapped out is death, unless it's done 'slowly enough'. But what on earth could 'slowly enough' be? And cloning isn't ruled out by suspended animation; you can do both. Surely you don't mean, "anything where you could in principle be cloned instead of teleported, is a death." Did you mean, "any means of continued life which is in principle equivalent to a cloning is a death"?
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May 6, 2016 00:56
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GlyphGryph posted:They are not numerically identical (which you explicitly demonstrated with position being a property for the clone's person) so it is perfectly acceptable to see them as different people depending on your "in what sense?" answer. If you like, you are a four-dimensional object extending backward and forward in time, but this is just tedius quibbling. If someone stabs you in the arm out of the blue you respond "Dude why did you stab me" and not "Sure sucked to be that guy a second ago!". Saying "me from a week ago" is just a manner of speaking of yourself (the very same person) as you were in the past. GlyphGryph posted:If you want a moving reference that changes overtime that is fine too, but then its on you to justify why we cant just move it to the clone. If we can move it to the clone (and I don't think we can, but hey, ok), why can't we move it to anyone we decide is sufficiently like GG? And why not to someone who is nothing like GG, but whome we just like better than GG?
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May 6, 2016 17:18
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Phyzzle posted:And cloning isn't ruled out by suspended animation; you can do both. Surely you don't mean, "anything where you could in principle be cloned instead of teleported, is a death." Did you mean, "any means of continued life which is in principle equivalent to a cloning is a death"? Phyzzle posted:Qualify as what? As not a death? So the process of life can stop and go, but the person is the same as long as the matter is the same? But that does raise difficulties with the amount of matter that constantly goes into and out of our bodies. Perhaps having your matter swapped out is death, unless it's done 'slowly enough'. But what on earth could 'slowly enough' be? If I understand correctly, with quantum teleportation there is no point where your body could be said to be gone. There is no vaporizing you or whatever like with classical teleportation. You are entangled with some matter somewhere else (and with pretty much nothing else in the universe) and then decohered at the destination once the instructions for how to do it are received at the target site. Contrast this with classical teleportation where you are vaporized and written out as a sequence of bits: even in the case where you're vaporized before "arriving" at the destination, and so there are never two of you, you're still written out as a sequence of bits while being "transported", and I don't think you can justify calling a sequence of bits a person. You can use those bits to make a new person if you want, but it is a new person - the amplitude distribution that was "you" has been scrambled unrecoverably. So far this is kind of orthogonal to suspended animation and cryostasis, however just as with quantum teleportation, there is no point where your amplitude distribution is scrambled. Instead, it is put into a low-energy state and held there. It may be that this kills you for other reasons, though it is not clear to me what those reasons might be. What does seem clear is that even if suspended animation and cryostatis, and for that matter quantum teleportation, do kill you, they would do so for very different reasons than classical teleportation would. Kilroy fucked around with this message at 18:23 on May 6, 2016 |
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May 6, 2016 18:21
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wateroverfire posted:If someone stabs you in the arm out of the blue you respond "Dude why did you stab me" and not "Sure sucked to be that guy a second ago!". lol But to be fair, you'd say the same thing if you suddenly found yourself bleeding and in pain and saw your friend withdraw with a bloody knife (even if you hadn't been stabbed). Your acting like a guy suffering from a stabbing aftermath whether you were stabbed or not. Just like your clone would be dealing with the aftermath of whatever you were thinking before the teleportation. But this is just invoking Hume's bundle theory, which some find tedious, but does explain why people holding that belief of self is so comfortable with teleportation.
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May 6, 2016 19:15
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crowoutofcontext posted:lol LOL, true. But it seems like a very odd belief to hold and I wonder why people would adopt it. I mean, consider your personal experience, right now. You, personally, who are reading this. You obviously couldn't discount with 100% certainty something like the proposition that the people around you are being destroyed and replaced with new, identical people with every quanta of time that passes. But you would have to be at least skeptical of the idea that it was happening to you, personally. And you'd still have to be REALLY skeptical of the idea that you survive in your clone, because even if through some mechanism we are discontinuous and tricked into thinking we're persistent, being turned into a fine mist of component atoms by a disintegrator is probably not mimicing that mechanism. Like...propositions such as "time is discrete therefore in the 5th-dimensional moments between I cease to exist, and am recreated with the next metaphorical clock tick!" still don't imply you come back from being disintegrated by the transporter or beaten in the head with a hammer.
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May 6, 2016 20:15
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edit: bah, not worth it
GlyphGryph fucked around with this message at 20:29 on May 6, 2016 |
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May 6, 2016 20:27
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Piell posted:Is a robot designed to act exactly like you (and no one would ever discover it's not actually you) , you? Would you have a problem getting your head blown off with a shotgun and the robot taking over your life? If you do have a problem with that (and I assume you would, because if you are ok with that you're dumb as gently caress), then how is that different from the copy scenario? Again, a thing designed to emulate me is not me, a thing which is literally indistinguishable from me save for in ways that, for example, a few days sleep or possibly an injury would make me distinguishable from myself, then that thing is me. Otherwise I should logically wake up in existential dread because I have been birthed onto this earth this morning and will expire the moment I fall asleep again. OwlFancier fucked around with this message at 03:05 on May 7, 2016 |
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May 7, 2016 03:03
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OwlFancier posted:Again, a thing designed to emulate me is not me, a thing which is literally indistinguishable from me save for in ways that, for example, a few days sleep or possibly an injury would make me distinguishable from myself, then that thing is me. Do you mean indistinguishable from an omniscient perspective, or indistinguishable from a limited human epistemology?
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May 7, 2016 03:39
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Juffo-Wup posted:Do you mean indistinguishable from an omniscient perspective, or indistinguishable from a limited human epistemology? I mean indistinguishable in the sense that I could not reasonably tell the difference.
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May 7, 2016 12:12
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OwlFancier posted:I mean indistinguishable in the sense that I could not reasonably tell the difference. This is a little strange, then, since people vary greatly in their ability to perceive differences. At the limit this would imply that, if you were in a coma, everything would be identical with everything. Why should we attach any special metaphysical significance to your (or anyone's) situated perspective?
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May 7, 2016 15:27
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You wouldn't even have to be in a coma, you could just be rewired such that you're convinced you're OwlFancier. It's a very poor metric.
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May 7, 2016 16:15
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But my thinking I'm OwlFancier and everyone else not disputing that, along with physiological similarities are what makes me me already. I might have been replaced by an alien sleeper agent for all I know but I assume I haven't because, well, why would I not? If I believe I am me, medical examination cannot prove I am not me, and everyone I meet still thinks I am me, I am me, with as much rigor as you are you.
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May 7, 2016 17:00
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OwlFancier posted:But my thinking I'm OwlFancier and everyone else not disputing that, along with physiological similarities are what makes me me already. Maybe! But you can't really help yourself to this proposition (as a premise), because 'what it is that makes you you' is just exactly what is at issue. That and, like I said earlier, I think it's a bad mistake to think that metaphysics is straightforwardly given to us by epistemology. Leibniz's law applies to 'things that share all their properties,' not 'things that, for all we know, very well may share all their properties.'
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May 7, 2016 17:39
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I would suggest that any further degree of scrutiny, while perhaps academically interesting, should not really have any effect on one's conception of oneself or others' conception of you. Basically while you can argue whether a thing is really, fundamentally, integrally itself, the answer to the question on a practical level for the purpose of human functioning is quite definitely "Yes".
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May 7, 2016 17:46
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Yeah, I get that a lot, and still I'm pretty much at a loss as to how to respond to it. So, okay, I guess.
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May 7, 2016 17:56
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OwlFancier posted:But my thinking I'm OwlFancier and everyone else not disputing that, along with physiological similarities are what makes me me already. So when original you gets kidnapped by aliens and tortured for a hundred years, while alien- replacement-you-programmed-to-think-its-original-you lives your life, that'd be totally fine with you?
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May 7, 2016 18:19
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Piell posted:So when original you gets kidnapped by aliens and tortured for a hundred years, while alien- replacement-you-programmed-to-think-its-original-you lives your life, that'd be totally fine with you? Which me? It's probably find with the me on earth in as much as I don't know about it, though me in the alien gulag is probably not very fine with it. I would suggest at that point though what you have is two distinct individuals because their lives have diverged. Duplicating people and having multiple duplicates alive at the same time requires an amendment to the idea because at that point you can't just apply single continuity to both people. What you have is one life, up to the point of duplication, and then functionally, two branching ones. You could either assign one primacy and declare the other to be not actually a person (seems silly) or you could just consider that a new life has been created starting from the experience up to that point of the original, and that both are valid, if different.
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May 7, 2016 18:23
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OwlFancier posted:Which me? Why would you not just allow that the copy is a new person while you continue to be yourself?
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May 7, 2016 21:53
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That would be what assigning one primacy would be. I think it's silly because both are just as valid as each other as regards which is the "true" me.
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May 7, 2016 22:41
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Another famous thought experiment about this goes something like this: Person A is going to be tortured, Person B is going to be rewarded. Person A gets rewired to think they are person B and there body IS tortured. Person B gets their rewired brain to think they are person A and there body gets rewarded. Should Person A fear being tortured or expect to be awarded? Person B? -- This is usually cited to prove that identity is more than just the "mind", yet I still feel that if I were person A I should fear being tortured, and if I were person B I should expect to be rewarded. The same philosopher also said something like: "if you were going to have your mind wiped, or replaced with another person's conscious, and your body would be tortured afterwards "you" would be right to fear impending pain. I can't see it that way. If my memory were to be wiped I would pretty much be brain-dead, while my nervous system might still feel pain. I mean something that makes me brain dead is worse to me than something that hurts my nerves after I'm brain-dead. I sometimes grind my teeth in my sleep if i am super stressed but it only "hurts" when I wake up even though my nervous system might be processing some subconscious pain.
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May 7, 2016 23:24
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crowoutofcontext posted:"if you were going to have your mind wiped, or replaced with another person's conscious, and your body would be tortured afterwards "you" would be right to fear impending pain. I can't see it that way. Nor can I. Once when I was given a drug before an endoscopy, I was told that I would actually be conscious during the procedure, but I would forget all about it afterwards - and so I did, completely. I now have no fear of endoscopies, as long as I am going to be drugged. (Still don't like the starving beforehand, mind you; they should give drugs for that too.)
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May 8, 2016 08:56
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Oh dear clone posted:Nor can I. Once when I was given a drug before an endoscopy, I was told that I would actually be conscious during the procedure, but I would forget all about it afterwards - and so I did, completely. I now have no fear of endoscopies, as long as I am going to be drugged. (Still don't like the starving beforehand, mind you; they should give drugs for that too.) All else equal, would you prefer a drug that eliminated the pain to the one that just makes your forget it afterward?
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May 8, 2016 16:29
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The pain eliminator because painkillers can be enjoyable. But really it seems logical that some sort of pain is eliminated from the universe if you choose that option. I'd much rather be dead than a brain that wasn't aware of itself albeit having a spasming nervous system- even though I think the experiences would virtually be the same. But really, you couldn't call, in any way, the erased experience part of their self or their life. Another way to put it would be if some genie offered you a seemingly hour long experience of pure joy and happiness every night, but you would forget it completely afterward, your brain returning to its initial chemical state as soon as your experience ended. I think many would be compelled to experience it but it would make no difference to your "self" or your "life." One could still be a depressed suicidal shut-in no matter how ecstatic your forgotten nights are.
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May 8, 2016 19:16
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Personally I would favor pain eliminators because while you don't remember the pain, it is still experienced, and the goal should be to minimize humans experiencing pain where possible.
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May 8, 2016 20:23
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Juffo-Wup posted:All else equal, would you prefer a drug that eliminated the pain to the one that just makes your forget it afterward? The pain eliminator, of course, because anyone's pain is bad. But that proves nothing about identity being more than the mind.
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May 9, 2016 16:32
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crowoutofcontext posted:"if you were going to have your mind wiped, or replaced with another person's conscious, and your body would be tortured afterwards "you" would be right to fear impending pain. I can't see it that way. If my memory were to be wiped I would pretty much be brain-dead, while my nervous system might still feel pain. I mean something that makes me brain dead is worse to me than something that hurts my nerves after I'm brain-dead. I sometimes grind my teeth in my sleep if i am super stressed but it only "hurts" when I wake up even though my nervous system might be processing some subconscious pain. Maybe you're thinking about this. "Bernard Williams by way of Tim Urban posted:The Torture Test
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May 9, 2016 17:31
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Oh dear me posted:The pain eliminator, of course, because anyone's pain is bad. But that proves nothing about identity being more than the mind. But the pain still accrues to a person, and isn't simply free-floating, yeah? So there was a point, or a duration of time during which the person who experienced the pain ceased to be, and another person ('you') came to be. So there are three relevant persons here, call them A, B, and C. A: the person who experienced all your memories up to the lapse caused by the drug a.k.a the person who was told about the drug. B: the person who experienced the pain. This person ceases to be at some point. C: the person who experienced all memories since the lapse a.k.a you now. A couple of possible answers to the identity question: Case 1: A and B are identical, and are not identical to C. I think this road ends with denying that identity persists at all, but maybe not; if this is your view feel free to disagree with me. Case 2: A and C are identical, and are not identical to B. I think this involves backward causation, which is generally seen as a bad result for metaphysics, but I've known people to bite the bullet on this one. Case 3: Neither A nor B nor C are identical. This, even more clearly than case 1, is just a denial of diachronic identity. Case 4/5: B = C != A and A = B = C are denied ex hypothesi so they don't matter.
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May 9, 2016 17:32
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Juffo-Wup posted:All else equal, would you prefer a drug that eliminated the pain to the one that just makes your forget it afterward? Before the procedure I'd want the pain eliminator. After the procedure I'd be indifferent. 
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May 9, 2016 17:41
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Juffo-Wup posted:Case 3: Neither A nor B nor C are identical. This, even more clearly than case 1, is just a denial of diachronic identity. Hm. Doesn't this rely on thinking of people as atomic entities? Unless one is using 'identical' in an unusual and misleading way, 'identical' and 'identity' are rather different concepts. I would happily call all three of them versions of me, though I see myself now as having differences from myself then. But I do not now contain version B's unique mental content, which has ceased to be.
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May 9, 2016 17:55
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Juffo-Wup posted:But the pain still accrues to a person, and isn't simply free-floating, yeah? So there was a point, or a duration of time during which the person who experienced the pain ceased to be, and another person ('you') came to be. So there are three relevant persons here, call them A, B, and C. Alternatively, someone experiences pain while the procedure is being performed, that they do not remember it does not undo the experience. Thus regardless of the existence or similarity of any of those posited individuals, it is preferable to avoid pain being experienced.
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May 9, 2016 19:03
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Oh dear me posted:Hm. Doesn't this rely on thinking of people as atomic entities? Unless one is using 'identical' in an unusual and misleading way, 'identical' and 'identity' are rather different concepts. I would happily call all three of them versions of me, though I see myself now as having differences from myself then. But I do not now contain version B's unique mental content, which has ceased to be. If by 'atomic' you mean 'having no parts,' then no, I don't think it relies on that. It relies on thinking that people are the sorts of things that can be the subject of determinate reference over time. Obviously this is a contentious view, there are definitely people who deny that persons as such are not part of the ontological furniture of our universe. But this again seems to solve the problem of the persistence of identity over time by saying that identity doesn't persist so there's no problem. As for 'identity,' at this point I'm just using it sort of naively to indicate the logical relation that holds just between a thing and itself. So in this case, to say that A and B are identical is just to say that A and B co-refer to some concrete thing. The notion could use some sharpening, especially since Leibniz' law doesn't seem to apply here (clearly A, B, and C don't share all their properties), but I think what I've said holds for any possible extension of that notion of identity on which it can apply to things at different times. But maybe not? I'm not sure - what do you see as the difference between 'identical' and 'identity'? OwlFancier posted:Alternatively, someone experiences pain while the procedure is being performed, that they do not remember it does not undo the experience. Thus regardless of the existence or similarity of any of those posited individuals, it is preferable to avoid pain being experienced. Yes, and this answers the normative question, but any one of cases 1-5 will yield that conclusion. But cases 1-4 yield additional weird conclusions, and cases 4 and 5 contradict the theory of identity in question. So even if we think the normative conclusion is explanatorily prior, the metaphysics of identity are undetermined by it.
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May 9, 2016 19:50
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Juffo-Wup posted:what do you see as the difference between 'identical' and 'identity'? Identical means the same in every respect. Identity variously means either the same reference or the same person, with 'person' meaning some vague collection of attributes but not including all possible respects. So it makes perfect sense to point at a photo of a baby and say 'That's me', without thinking that baby is identical to me (who would think that?). It also makes perfect sense to say 'She was a different person after the accident', while at the same time being willing to sign her passport photo declaring that she is the same person she always was. In your example, for passport purposes A = B = C, and I do not know why you excluded that ex hypothesi if you are really using identity just as a reference. e: clarity Oh dear me fucked around with this message at 21:56 on May 9, 2016 |
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May 9, 2016 20:23
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Oh dear me posted:Identical means the same in every respect. Identity variously means either the same reference or the same person, with 'person' meaning some vague collection of attributes but not including all possible respects. So it makes perfect sense to point at a photo of a baby and say 'That's me', without thinking that baby is identical to me (who would think that?). It also makes perfect sense to say 'She was a different person after the accident', while at the same time being willing to sign her passport photo declaring that she is the same person she always was. In your example, for passport purposes A = B = C, and I do not know why you excluded that ex hypothesi if you are really using identity just as a reference. Well, I took the following exchange: Oh dear clone posted:Nor can I. Once when I was given a drug before an endoscopy, I was told that I would actually be conscious during the procedure, but I would forget all about it afterwards - and so I did, completely. I now have no fear of endoscopies, as long as I am going to be drugged. (Still don't like the starving beforehand, mind you; they should give drugs for that too.) Juffo-Wup posted:All else equal, would you prefer a drug that eliminated the pain to the one that just makes your forget it afterward? Oh dear me posted:The pain eliminator, of course, because anyone's pain is bad. But that proves nothing about identity being more than the mind. to mean that, for whatever relation is important for you to be able to identify with a past person, that relation does not hold between you now and you who experienced pain. So I took it to be your view that any account of identity persistence (whether we're talking about the logical identity relation, or the mental/social identity relation you are interested in above, as long as it's reflexive and transitive) that entails B = C is a non-starter. But now I see maybe not? So let me ask: whatever reasons there are to prefer the painkiller over the amnesia drug, are they essentially egoistic or are they altruistic?
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May 10, 2016 01:14
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