Ghosts and Mind Copies - The Identity Question

[whswhs]

Originally Posted by sn0wball

Did you miss the smily after that sentence of mine ? I seem to remember that attempts of mine at humor don´t work on you.

I don't perceive smileys. I can't tell what facial expression that sort of iconography is meant to convey without a lot of effort, so my brain tunes it out as noise. Truly, I didn't even see that it was there.

Bill Stoddard

[whswhs]

Originally Posted by sn0wball

What I meant with that I already tried to describe - what ever makes you you and, as of now, different from everybody else, is a physical property of your body or probably rather of your brain.

"Physical property" is an ambiguous phrase. On one hand, it can mean a property of an entity whose constituents are all fully describable by the concepts and laws of physics. On the other hand, it can mean a property that itself is describable by the concepts and laws of physics. The two are not equivalent.

Terry Pratchett has a scene in Thief of Time where a group of auditors, in an art museum, are taking apart a piece of art, down to something like the molecular level, trying to find the physical element of beauty. They are, of course unsuccessful. But that doesn't mean that the work is not a physical object; it means that "beauty" is a matter of the work having certain kinds of symmetry that affect human brains in certain somewhat predictable ways, and that can be measured by the responses of human brains. But, as yet, no physicist knows how to construct or program a callistoscope to measure the beauty of works of art. So is "beauty" a physical property?

Bill Stoddard

[sn0wball]

Originally Posted by whswhs

I don't perceive smileys. I can't tell what facial expression that sort of iconography is meant to convey without a lot of effort, so my brain tunes it out as noise. Truly, I didn't even see that it was there.

Bill Stoddard

So, you´d say I won´t be able to claim a discount on my Language (English) skill, for not being able to convey humor to you in an internet forum ? Too bad, I could use the points.

[whswhs]

Originally Posted by sn0wball

So, you´d say I won´t be able to claim a discount on my Language (English) skill, for not being able to convey humor to you in an internet forum ? Too bad, I could use the points.

You would probably do better not to try to joke with me, as you can't count on me to notice that that's what you're doing. Of course, in this case, you were trying to joke with Ernham, and I don't suppose it's reasonable to say that you should never joke with anyone. Just tell me if I failed to notice that you were joking.

Bill Stoddard

[leslie]

Originally Posted by whswhs

I would not call a system without criminal law "transhuman" but "subhuman." Criminal penalties amount to a price that is paid for negatively valued conduct, and thus imply a kind of exchange: a transaction between two decision makers.

This definition assumes people are rational decision-makers, which simply isn't true. Criminals don't commit crimes because they have conducted an in-depth cost-benefit analysis and decided that beating people to pulp with a two-by-four in order to take their wallets is a nice regular job with benefits outweighing the potential negative consequences.

A transhuman law with no criminal penalties would take criminals (people who significantly break societal norms to the detriment of other members of the society) and treat them like the sick people they are. With transhuman brain modifications, it will be possible to transform the sick criminal into a healthy member of the society, who will then work in order to provide his/her victims with proper restitution awarded to them by a civil court, according to civil law settlement.

No criminal law needed. Just civil law and the societal adjustment board.

[whswhs]

Originally Posted by leslie

This defintion asumes people are rational decision-makers, which simply isn't true. Criminals don't commit crimes because they have conducted an in-depth cost-benefit analysis and decided that beating people to pulp with a two-by-four in order to take their wallets is a nice regular job with benefits outweighing the potential negative consequences.

A transhuman law with no criminal penalties would take criminals (people who significantly break societal norms to the detriment of other members of the society) and treat them like the sick people they are. With transhuman brain modifications, it will be possible to transform the sick criminal into a healthy member of the society, who will then work in order to provide his/her victims with proper restitution awarded to them by civil court accourding to civil law settlement.

No criminal law needed. Just civil law and the societal adjustment board.

* This argument from the inability of criminals to act rationally strikes me as a complete fallacy. The game theoretic logic of action applies perfectly well to entities that cannot do game theoretic analysis, just as orbital mechanics applies to orbiting bodies that can't do equations. Evolutionary theory gets a lot of mileage out of looking at organisms and populations as if they had strategies. And evolution gives rise to behavioral and emotional mechanisms that respond to incentives; "if you inflict damage on me I'll inflict damage on you" is something a cat can understand, or a goose. See Axelrod's computer simulations of game theory and his discussion of the *** FOR TAT strategy.

* The point of economics is not that human beings rationally plan everything they do, but that they respond to incentives at the margin. Your whole argument seems to turn on the idea that criminals cannot respond to incentives. I don't think the evidence bears that out.

* The implied argument that "they still committed crimes, and so they aren't responding to the incentives that the state is offering, so the state should give up on incentives and forcibly subject them to brain readjustment" is implicitly totalitarian. In effect, it says that the state is in control, and that if anyone doesn't respond to the state's control, then they're defective, and the state gets to do whatever is necessary to bring them under control.

* I find it ironic that THS envisions a society where every brick in a building contains a CPU that functions as a decision-making node and communicates with other bricks in making decisions—but your proposed strategy for dealing with lawbreakers is to treat them as incapable of making decisions, make no attempt to communicate with them, and physically remake their brains without their consent to get them to behave the way you want. THS is a world where even inanimate objects have autonomy and the capacity to negotiate and cooperate . . . but you don't seem to think the same of humans. That's not a very appealing form of "transhumanism."

Bill Stoddard

[leslie]

Originally Posted by whswhs

* This argument from the inability of criminals to act rationally strikes me as a complete fallacy.

My point isn't that criminals are unable to act rationally. My point is that human beings, as a species, are generally not rational beings, they make decisions using emotional heuristics and then rationalise them, which is quite different to purely rational analysis. (This makes a lot of sense, because we almost never have all the data available necessary to make a rational decision)

Not that game theoretic logic does not apply to brain modification of law breakers. There will be people saying that, in effect, this would be still criminal law, with only one criminal penalty possible - forced mind modification.

In civilised countries, like the EU, they will be a vocal and ignored minority, because civilised cultures will try treating people as something more than an animal trained using physical punishment (in the US nowadays, incarceration is usually connected with physical punishment due to high level of inmate violence, and US TV cop shows have policemen routinely use the threat of physical violence and rape by other inmates when interrogating subjects, which is rather barbaric, IMHO). Brainbugs may be used to treat emotional disorders which result in criminal behaviour in the same manner as they are used to treat emotional disorders which result in, say, inability to enter large open spaces, inability to enter small closed spaces, social anxiety and other such issues.

Originally Posted by whswhs

* The implied argument that "they still committed crimes, and so they aren't responding to the incentives that the state is offering, so the state should give up on incentives and forcibly subject them to brain readjustment" is implicitly totalitarian. In effect, it says that the state is in control, and that if anyone doesn't respond to the state's control, then they're defective, and the state gets to do whatever is necessary to bring them under control.

Prison is also "forcible brain readjustment". It's just a very, very old and time proven brain readjustment, by locking somebody behind bars and subjecting him to threat (and sometimes reality) of physical violence and rape by other inmates. It's just that prison is Orwell 1984 brand of totalitarianism, an incarceration state, whereas brainbug resocialisation is Huxley's brand of totalitarianism, a state which controls its subjects by using positive instead of negative emotions.

As somebody who once lived in a 1984-style totalitarian state and watches the slow slide of the US towards such a model of government I really prefer the Huxley's type of totalitarianism.

Originally Posted by whswhs

THS is a world where even inanimate objects have autonomy and the capacity to negotiate and cooperate . . . but you don't seem to think the same of humans. That's not a very appealing form of "transhumanism."

The capacity to negotiate and cooperate ends after the human commits the crime in both 1984 model you are advocating (lock the criminals up, this will incentivise them not to commit crimes) and in the mildly Huxleyian model I am advocating (use brainbugs to make the criminals content to be productive members of the human hive). The difference is that criminal minds in your model are modified through punishment, and in my model, through advanced medicine. The first model is significantly less humane.

[whswhs]

Originally Posted by leslie

Prison is also "forcible brain readjustment". It's just a very, very old and time proven brain readjustment, by locking somebody behind bars and subjecting him to threat (and sometimes reality) of physical violence and rape by other inmates. It's just that prison is Orwell 1984 brand of totalitarianism, an incarceration state, whereas brainbug resocialisation is Huxley's brand of totalitarianism, a state which controls its subjects by using positive instead of negative emotions.

As somebody who once lived in a 1984-style totalitarian state and watches the slow slide of the US towards such a model of government I really prefer the Huxley's type of totalitarianism.

So you present the issue as only a choice between different sorts of totalitarianism? That's how it was presented in the German election of November 1932, too. I don't find that an appealing choice; I'm opposed to all forms of totalitarianism, no matter where they fall on the political spectrum.

Moreover, you should not assume that in advocating the use of retribution, I am also arguing either that prison is the most desirable form of retribution, or that the American prison system is a desirable model for it. To start with, the United States applies criminal penalties to a wide range of actions that I would simply not treat as crimes at all, starting with penalties for the use, possession, sale, and production of addictive drugs. I would also point out that American penology is not shaped purely by retributive ideas; the conservative intelligentsia favor deterrence, the progressive intelligentsia favor rehabilitation, and the general populace favor retribution, and you end up with a chimera that does none of those effectively or rationally.

Prison is also a recent innovation, not an ancient approach. Before the Industrial Revolution, few societies could afford to lock up large segments of their population. And, in fact, the industrial model of penology, where criminals are treated as a mass of objects to be processed bureaucratically, is subject to the same criticism on the ground of objectification as the medical model you seem to favor. You just prefer to dehumanize criminals by nonconsensual brain modification rather than by warehousing.

Bill Stoddard

Edit: One of the common failure modes of this type of discussion is that when someone criticizes left-wing policy recommendations, as I have, people tend to assume reflexively that they must be advocating right-wing policy recommendations, as you assumed about me. That in itself is a relic of primitive thinking in terms of in-groups and out-groups. There are almost always more than two choices, and often enough the two choices that people focus on turn out to share the same underlying false premise.

[Flyndaran]

Originally Posted by whswhs

...

Bill Stoddard

Edit: One of the common failure modes of this type of discussion is that when someone criticizes left-wing policy recommendations, as I have, people tend to assume reflexively that they must be advocating right-wing policy recommendations, as you assumed about me. That in itself is a relic of primitive thinking in terms of in-groups and out-groups. There are almost always more than two choices, and often enough the two choices that people focus on turn out to share the same underlying false premise.

So very true. I "accidentally" made friends with grossly right wing bitter parents of a friend by mocking the overly liberal hippie style of graduation of said friend. I get sarcastic when tired.
It got me a free ticket to Hawaii and high end hotel stay when said friend got married, so..... I'm of two minds on the assumption. (Smiley face)

[leslie]

Originally Posted by whswhs

So you present the issue as only a choice between different sorts of totalitarianism? That's how it was presented in the German election of November 1932, too. I don't find that an appealing choice; I'm opposed to all forms of totalitarianism, no matter where they fall on the political spectrum.

Well, I find it rather difficult to create a plausible future without a totalitarian state (OK, post-apocalyptic futures excluded). Since the Great Industrial War of the 20th Century (also known as the 1st and the 2nd World Wars), states have been accumulating power, and accumulating power makes it easier to accumulate more power. However, the general improvement of GDP, technology and so on mean that living in modern totalitarian state, whether it is the corporate-sponsored oligocracy of the US or the more or less heavily socialist EU is still much more comfortable and safe for the average citizen than it was before the Great Industrial War.

I don't see totalitarian state as something undesirable in of itself. You can have a totalitarian participatory democracy with strong protection for some individual rights. People will still denounce it a totalitarian fascist state if it, for example, forbids them to use corporeal punishment on their own children.

Originally Posted by whswhs

Moreover, you should not assume that in advocating the use of retribution, I am also arguing either that prison is the most desirable form of retribution, or that the American prison system is a desirable model for it.

What do you propose, then?

Originally Posted by whswhs

And, in fact, the industrial model of penology, where criminals are treated as a mass of objects to be processed bureaucratically, is subject to the same criticism on the ground of objectification as the medical model you seem to favor. You just prefer to dehumanize criminals by nonconsensual brain modification rather than by warehousing.

Why do you assume I intend to dehumanize criminals? I am in favour of healing them, not dehumanizing them. Of course, for some people the nonconsensual part might be highly controversial, but criminal penalties are also nonconsensual. What system of criminal law do you propose where the people who are found guilty have some kind of consensual punishment imparted on them? For me, it seems impossible, so the issue is not on whether we subject people who break the most important societal rules to something they do not consent to (we always will), the issue is what we subject them to.

Originally Posted by whswhs

Edit: One of the common failure modes of this type of discussion is that when someone criticizes left-wing policy recommendations, as I have, people tend to assume reflexively that they must be advocating right-wing policy recommendations, as you assumed about me. That in itself is a relic of primitive thinking in terms of in-groups and out-groups. There are almost always more than two choices, and often enough the two choices that people focus on turn out to share the same underlying false premise.

Good point (although I do not consider prisons in themselves to be right-wing, there are plenty of left-wingers in favour of heavy prison punishment, at least around here). You have now piqued my curiosity - what kind of a criminal law system do you envisage that would not subject the criminals to nonconsensual penalties?

People who break the law frequently do so again (for example, because they have a less-developed fear response than average people and thus the negative incentives in the form of prison do not deter them). You need some kind of controlling system. Imprisonment, treatment, what else do you propose? Deportation is not really an option, and involuntary termination of life seems more drastic than involuntary brain modification (even though you could put dangerous criminals through a fMRI and determine that they are psychopaths and will probably kill again given opportinuty).