A Quantifiable Self

[Ana the Ist]

Are you familiar with the "bicameral mind" theory ? Fascinating, imo. This somewhat reminds me of it, a little bit.

I think 3000 years is a bit short for mankind to be recognizing their own consciousness. I took what he said as a more "you're different people around different people" type thing. It's something I think most young men get confronted with when they start dating and their gf inevitably says "you always act different when we're with your friends".

In regards to myself, because of my behavior, I felt like radically different people depending upon who I was around when I was younger. As in, "this person only knows half of what I'm like"...but I never regarded myself as either person I acted like nor was I a combination of the two personalities...rather, I was someone else that no one knew who just pretended to be like others.

 

[Eudaimonist]

Let's say we can identify a "moment of mind's creation" and we could reduce your mind back to that moment...blanking out everything after that moment. Then through some tricky dna manipulation, we change the organic structure of your brain to become the organic structure of my brain, slap it inside an Ana clone, which is then inserted into a perfectly recreated perfectly realistic simulation of my entire life (this a terrifying prospect, even for me ).

Would you then be me?

Yes, though in a minimalistic sense. More on that below.

(My guess is that you'll say at the moment of reduction back to creation, nothing of you will remain...or shortly thereafter)

That is true, but really we're getting into the "Star Trek transporter" philosophical puzzles. If Scotty beams you up, is the recreated "you" actually "you". And if a copy of you is made by accident, is that "you" as well?

My answer to those scenarios is yes.

Let's start with Wesley Crusher. He steps into the transporter, and a transporter accident makes him unrecoverable. Now imagine a line (not a perfectly straight line, but one that wanders a little) drawn on paper that comes to an abrupt end. Goodbye Wesley Crusher. His life is over.

Now consider a successful transport of Captain Picard. Imagine a line that has a very tiny break (during the destruction and recreation by the transporter), but clearly continues on from where it was. His life continues as Picard as if the break had never really happened. Welcome aboard, Captain!

Now let's consider William Riker. He is accidentally duplicated during transportation. Now imagine a line that has a very tiny break as in the first example, and re-emerge at the same point, but that point leads to two lines that slowly diverge. Riker was split into two Rikers who live different lives from that point on, but are still both "Riker".

In your example, everything starts at the same point, and then two lines diverge just as with the transporter duplicates. This is "minimalistic" since one never starts with a line, but with only a point.

I hope you are getting at what I mean by the lines. I'm talking about a path of development into the future. At any one point on the line you have a particular mental state. Perhaps it is the exact state of your neurons at that moment. The line is a plot of the change of state over time as you gain new experiences, act on your circumstances, and are changed by your choices and experiences.

Keep in mind that I don't view selfhood as pertaining only to slices in time. I view it as pertaining to the pattern of one's development across a lifetime. Selfhood for me is the line.

When two lines diverge, it is their shared history as one line (or in the minimalistic case, one point) that entitles one to view the lines as the same "self". I would say that the two Rikers are indeed Riker, even though their "lines" had diverged. Sure, one can focus on a slice of time and declare that their states are not identical, but that is the sort of thinking that would lead one to not see Riker of even one minute ago as Riker.

It's not unreasonable to make a distinction between the two Rikers. In a certain respect, they are two different persons. The lines have diverged. But in another respect, they are the same person. They are both Riker.

I think that the respect in which they are both Riker is compelling enough to make the claim that I'm making. If selfhood is seen as a dynamic pattern that takes place over time, and not a "snapshot" in time, then we can identify our selves with our past, and you can be the "same" (but not identical) self as you were when you started reading my post.

So maybe a more interesting question would be, do you think you would do everything as I had? Is that a little too deterministic?

Since I believe in a limited form of free will then, no, I don't think that I would necessarily lead an identical life in identical circumstances.


eudaimonia,

Mark

 

[Ana the Ist]

Yes, though in a minimalistic sense. More on that below.



That is true, but really we're getting into the "Star Trek transporter" philosophical puzzles. If Scotty beams you up, is the recreated "you" actually "you". And if a copy of you is made by accident, is that "you" as well?

My answer to those scenarios is yes.

Let's start with Wesley Crusher. He steps into the transporter, and a transporter accident makes him unrecoverable. Now imagine a line (not a perfectly straight line, but one that wanders a little) drawn on paper that comes to an abrupt end. Goodbye Wesley Crusher. His life is over.

Now consider a successful transport of Captain Picard. Imagine a line that has a very tiny break (during the destruction and recreation by the transporter), but clearly continues on from where it was. His life continues as Picard as if the break had never really happened. Welcome aboard, Captain!

Now let's consider William Riker. He is accidentally duplicated during transportation. Now imagine a line that has a very tiny break as in the first example, and re-emerge at the same point, but that point leads to two lines that slowly diverge. Riker was split into two Rikers who live different lives from that point on, but are still both "Riker".

In your example, everything starts at the same point, and then two lines diverge just as with the transporter duplicates. This is "minimalistic" since one never starts with a line, but with only a point.

I hope you are getting at what I mean by the lines. I'm talking about a path of development into the future. At any one point on the line you have a particular mental state. Perhaps it is the exact state of your neurons at that moment. The line is a plot of the change of state over time as you gain new experiences, act on your circumstances, and are changed by your choices and experiences.

Keep in mind that I don't view selfhood as pertaining only to slices in time. I view it as pertaining to the pattern of one's development across a lifetime. Selfhood for me is the line.

When two lines diverge, it is their shared history as one line (or in the minimalistic case, one point) that entitles one to view the lines as the same "self". I would say that the two Rikers are indeed Riker, even though their "lines" had diverged. Sure, one can focus on a slice of time and declare that their states are not identical, but that is the sort of thinking that would lead one to not see Riker of even one minute ago as Riker.

It's not unreasonable to make a distinction between the two Rikers. In a certain respect, they are two different persons. The lines have diverged. But in another respect, they are the same person. They are both Riker.

I think that the respect in which they are both Riker is compelling enough to make the claim that I'm making. If selfhood is seen as a dynamic pattern that takes place over time, and not a "snapshot" in time, then we can identify our selves with our past, and you can be the "same" (but not identical) self as you were when you started reading my post.



Since I believe in a limited form of free will then, no, I don't think that I would necessarily lead an identical life in identical circumstances.


eudaimonia,

Mark

Yes, I believe I understand what you mean with the lines analogy, and I think I agree. I also thoroughly enjoyed that you used Star Trek to create the analogy. Bravo, sir, bravo.

It reminds me a bit of the 6th day with Ahhnold "Maid Banger" Governator. If you didn't see that one, the premise is that perfect clones can be created and minds can be copied and imprinted into said clones. The creator of this industry thinks this gives him access to "immortality" only to realize he's a jerk when his clone tells him to "Stop bleeding on my clothes, strip down, and give them to me". He replies that he isn't dead yet, to which his clone replies with something like, "Would you care?" Lol. (Really the only good scene in the movie).

Thank you for your reply. You've crystallized an idea for me and made it fun too. You should've been a teacher.

 

[Davian]

Describe a phenomenal self please.

(missed this earlier- sorry)

I will not try to rephrase wiki, but "I" will poke at it.

Self-model theory of subjectivity - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

"The PSM (phenomenal self-model) is an entity that “actually exists, not only as a distinct theoretical entity but something that will be empirically discovered in the future- for instance, as a specific stage of the global neural dynamics in the human brain” . Involved in the PSM are three phenomenal properties that must occur in order to explain the concept of the self. The first is mineness, “a higher order property of particular forms of phenomenal content,” or the idea of ownership.[3] The second is perspectivalness, which is “a global, structural property of phenomenal space as a whole”.[4] More simply, it is what is commonly referred to as the ecological self, the immovable center of perception. The third phenomenal property is selfhood, which is “the phenomenal target property” or the idea of the self over time. It is the property of phenomenal selfhood that plays the most important role in creating the fictional self and the first person perspective. Metzinger defines the first person perspective as the “existence of single coherent and temporally stable model of reality which is representationally centered around or on a single coherent and temporally stable phenomenal subject”. "

This part is the easiest for me to grasp:
"The first-person perspective can be non-conceptual and is autonomously active due to the constant reception of perceptual information by the brain. The brain, specifically the brainstem and hypothalamus, processes this information into representational content, namely linguistic reflections. The PSM then uses this representational content to attribute phenomenal states to our perceived objects and ourselves. We are thus what Metzinger calls naïve realists, who believe we are perceiving reality directly when in actuality we are only perceiving representations of reality."
Which of course has lots of explanatory power when bits of your brain are not working properly.

"The data structures and transport mechanisms of the data are “transparent” so that we can introspect on our representations of perceptions, but cannot introspect on the data or mechanisms themselves."

I disagree with the word "cannot" in this last sentence. There are many ways to examine the data and mechanisms that support the PSM, such as through optical illusions.

Dennett does some stuff with demonstrations of visual processing.

Dan Dennett: The illusion of consciousness | Video on TED.com

In my work, I use things like the Haas effect to enhance the audio in theatres and other venue designs, and you can hear it mess with your brain even when you know what is happening.

Precedence effect - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia


Is that what you had in mind (excuse the pun).