Ghosts and Mind Copies - The Identity Question

[Pomphis]

Originally Posted by vicky_molokh

I mean unique markers that do have an effect on the mind/ghost, and that are either constant, or change in predictable way, such that they remain meaningful markers.

Well, _what_ do you mean ? An insubstantial soul would do the job. But IIRC you do not believe in souls. So which specific marker do you mean ?

[vicky_molokh]

Originally Posted by Pomphis

Well, _what_ do you mean ? An insubstantial soul would do the job. But IIRC you do not believe in souls. So which specific marker do you mean ?

Certain behavioral characteristics that remain consistently stable, or consistently but predictably changing slightly, throughout life. The 'nature' part of a person, as opposed to the 'nurture' part.

[leslie]

Originally Posted by whswhs

(a) I think that everyone here agrees that the newborn you and the present-day you count as the same person.

Hm. I think this is an accepted convention, resulting from legal, biological and so on constraints placed upon human consciousness riding inside a biological person.

However, at the same time, I definitively don't think me-as-1-year-old-baby counts as the same person as me. As a matter of fact, I don't consider me from 5 years ago to be the same person, I'm significantly different right now, though I have the same vessel (physical body) and more or less the same skillset.

Interestingly enough, there was recently a nice article on procrastination on Yourenotsosmart http://youarenotsosmart.com/2010/10/27/procrastination/ which shows the underlying reason for procrastination - present bias, which results from the difference in identity between Present Me and Future Me.

Which brings me to my point: identity is not binary, identity is a continuum. Since we change constantly, our identity changes. I'm closer in identity to me-five-minutes-ago and me-in-one-hour-in-the-future than to me-five-years-ago, and I'm almost completely different than me-when-I-was-five (although riding a vehicle that was shaped by what I did when I was five and by genetic code identical for all my temporal instances).

And thus my conclusion - since we assume I'm the same me I was ten years ago, even though my decision-making and emotional core has drastically changed, why wouldn't we assume I'm the same me as my uploaded copy in a robotic body, sitting across the room?

When we do get uploading technology, the methods of thinking about identity will have to change. Destroying one copy may not be murder if there's a backup, but it's still inflicting grevious bodily and psychological harm.

Wil McCarthy, in his Collapsium series had nice terms for this - murder five, for example, was killing of a single instatiation with no significant memory loss, up to murder one, which was killing all instatiations and deleting or corrupting all backups. Murder five was not really that big of a deal (a bit like assault nowadays) while murder one was almost completely unheard of.

[Ze'Manel Cunha]

Originally Posted by vicky_molokh

Certain behavioral characteristics that remain consistently stable, or consistently but predictably changing slightly, throughout life. The 'nature' part of a person, as opposed to the 'nurture' part.

Again you're creating a mind/soul definition which is metaphysical, not measurable.

Brains change based on the stimuli in their environment, minds/souls are consistent.

[vicky_molokh]

Originally Posted by Ze'Manel Cunha

Again you're creating a mind/soul definition which is metaphysical, not measurable.

Brains change based on the stimuli in their environment, minds/souls are consistent.

There are limits to change. Or are you like Lysenko, denying the 'nature' part in favor of believing exclusively in 'nurture'?

[Ze'Manel Cunha]

Originally Posted by vicky_molokh

There are limits to change. Or are you like Lysenko, denying the 'nature' part in favor of believing exclusively in 'nurture'?

There are few limits to change when you have access to full body chemistry and stimuli.

Your religious faith may tell you that souls/minds exist in a vacuum, coming into being at birth or at some other magical time, but brain chemistry means that thoughts are strictly chemical and physical reactions based upon physical stimuli.

Taking a snapshot of a brain and creating an information entity out of that snapshot has as much or as little to do with the actual "nature" of that person as any other snapshot taken at any other given time.

[whswhs]

Originally Posted by vicky_molokh

There are limits to change. Or are you like Lysenko, denying the 'nature' part in favor of believing exclusively in 'nurture'?

Your clone, or your identical twin, would almost surely have the same markers.

Bill Stoddard

[vicky_molokh]

Originally Posted by whswhs

Your clone, or your identical twin, would almost surely have the same markers.

Bill Stoddard

Clone - yes. Twin - not sure; probably not past birth age. Random other person not purposefully made to resemble me - highly unlikely.

[whswhs]

Originally Posted by vicky_molokh

Clone - yes. Twin - not sure; probably not past birth age. Random other person not purposefully made to resemble me - highly unlikely.

Is there any factual evidence whatever that this is true? It sounds to me like you've just made it up because you (a) find it inconvenient to claim that you at birth and you now are not the same person but (b) are not prepared to accept being-on-the-same-worldline as a criterion of "being the same person." So you're trying to find any sort of pattern similarity criterion that applies to your newborn self and your current self and does not apply to your newborn self and any other person's current self . . . or perhaps simply asserting that one must exist.

[Of course, there is your newborn self and your present self having the same DNA. But (a) that would apply to your hypothetical identical twin and (b) it would not apply to your digital ghost, which would not have DNA at all.]

In any case, I think you've changed the nature of what you're asserting. You started out saying that "identity" meant pattern similarity, or information content, overall; now you're saying that most of that information doesn't count, and that only certain key markers are important . . . the markers that just happen to give exactly the same results as relying on worldline continuity would give. Those are two different claims.

Bill Stoddard

Bill Stoddard

[Ze'Manel Cunha]

Originally Posted by vicky_molokh

Clone - yes. Twin - not sure; probably not past birth age. Random other person not purposefully made to resemble me - highly unlikely.

The only difference between a clone and a twin is... nothing.

From the second the brains starts receiving stimuli the fact that they may have started out chemically identical ceases to matter, since as stimuli diverge, so too do the physical brains.