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Hey guys, it's been a while since I've posted any philosophy stuff here thought I'd do a little write up on a movie I saw recently.
The Movie Oblivion (2013) and The Metaphysical Question of Personal Identity
Joseph Kosinski's film, Oblivion, presents an interesting take on the metaphysical issue of personal identity. A metaphysical discussion of personal identity is one addresses the question of what it is that makes somebody who he or she is. Theodore Sider presents the question in a fairly concise way when he asks "Looking back at baby pictures, you say 'that was me'. But why? What makes that baby the same person as you, despite all the changes you have undergone in the intervening years?" (Sider 9). In general, the question of personal identity is an inquiry into what kind of characteristic(s) of a person is unique and can only ever be attributed that one person, such that all persons to whom the characteristic(s) belong can be said to be the same person.
For example, what makes it the case that a pair of identical twins are not the same person? This question is closely aligned with the discussion of personal identity as presented by Oblivion. I interpret Oblivion to be presenting an argument for a sort of psychological continuity view of personal identity in which having the same memories and personality traits is what makes a person who he or she is. In what follows, I intend to show that the account of personal identity presented by Oblivion, as well as psychological continuity arguments in general, are insufficient, and that versions of personal identity based on this kind of psychological continuity lack a certain quality, namely, survivability.
Let us begin with an account of the events in Oblivion which are relevant to the question, and from which I derive my interpretation of the argument presented by the film. The movie begins with its main character Jack being stationed on the dying planet Earth to oversee the collection of its remaining natural resources. The idea is that everyone else has evacuated the planet long ago, and it's Jack's job to close up shop. Throughout the story, Jack is bombarded with hazy visions of himself interacting with some woman in New York (a city which should have been destroyed prior to his birth). At some point, he runs into this woman at the site of a spaceship crash, where he saves her from an escape pod. To his surprise, he recognizes that the woman is the same woman who appears in his hazy visions.
The woman, Julia, is overjoyed to see Jack, but is confused by the fact that Jack does not remember her. She explains that she is his fiancée, and his memories of himself and their past together start coming back gradually. As it turns out, Jack and Julia were actually space shuttle pilots who were abducted by an alien mother ship which suddenly appeared in front of them on a routine flight. Jack shoved Julia into an escape pod of some sort so that she would drift in orbit and eventually land back on Earth, while he was taken into the mother ship. The mother ship made clones of Jack and programmed the clones to take over Earth. After Earth was taken over (except for a few remaining survivors), each Jack clone was programmed to collect Earth's resources under the assumption that it would evacuate the planet with the rest of the human race after its job was completed.
Once this plot was revealed to Jack and Julia, it became apparent that the number 49, which was assigned to Jack as a resource collection agent, actually meant that he was the 49th clone of the original Jack. At one point, Jack 49 actually bumps into Jack 52 and gets into a fist fight with him (this will be important later). Nonetheless, Jack 49 and Julia decide to move into the wilderness and settle down together, living the rest of their lives in peace as the couple they were meant to be. In the end though, despite protests from Julia, Jack 49 decides to go undercover and sneak a nuke into the mother ship to destroy it, sacrificing his own life in the process. The final scene of the movie shows Julia and two small children, presumably fathered by Jack 49, hanging out at their wilderness cabin when Jack 52 comes walking through the bushes. One of the children asks, "Mommy, who is that?", to which Julia replies with an excited and happy facial expression, "That's..." and the movie cuts to credits.
Did she mean to say "That's your father", or perhaps, "That's your uncle"? The film leaves this part a bit open-ended. It may be the case that the movie, rather than making an argument, is merely encouraging the viewer to think critically about personal identity. If this is the case, then it is not movie's interpretation of personal identity against which I plan to argue, but Julia's. It is the same argument in either case, though.
It is possible that Julia could have been unsure of what to call Jack 52, but her facial expression showed no uncertainty. It was that of a woman reunited with her long lost lover. Now Julia was very well aware of the fact that the original Jack was dead, and that both Jack 49 and Jack 52 were clones of the original (She had even witnessed their fist fight). Even so, she showed no hesitation in accepting Jack 49 as Jack himself, and in trying to rekindle their old romance. This fact is made exceedingly apparent when Jack 49, after finding out that he is only a clone, expresses his concerns over not being who he thinks he is, and not being who Julia wants him to be, despite carrying all the memories of the original Jack. Julia's reply to this is one of the key philosophical points in the film: "Those memories are yours, Jack. They're ours. They are you." Given this statement, her facial expression upon seeing Jack 52, and the fact that Jack 52 also has the same memories that Jack 49 carries, the viewer can safely assume that Julia probably welcomes Jack 52 with open arms as her lover at the end of the movie. This is of great importance because it is a clear presentation of a direct argument for a theory of personal identity.
The kind of personal identity theory presented here is a type of psychological continuity theory which says that what constitutes a person's identity is his or her memories, personality traits, mental characteristics and thought patterns, etc. The clones of Jack all seemed to carry these attributes from the original. What Julia wants to say here is that because Jack 49 and Jack 52 have the same memories of experiences in the life lived by the original Jack, and those kinds of memories make a person who he or she is, it follows that Jack 49 is the original Jack, and Jack 52 is also the original Jack.
It is somewhat difficult to accept this idea, since if this theory of personal identity were correct, then it should follow that Jack 49 is Jack 52. That this is not the case is made quite clear when the two Jack clones get into a fist fight. One of them wins the fight, and one of them loses. It is an intuitive principle that the same person cannot experience an event from two different perspectives at the same time.
So what are we to make of this? At the very least, from Julia's perspective, it would seem like the Jack clones, having all the same memories of their experiences together, and all of the same personality traits of the original, should be, for all intents and purposes, the same person. Of course, all this really says is that Julia is willing to settle for what seems to be an acceptable substitute for the man she loved who is now dead. This kind of memory and personality sharing is not enough to constitute each Jack clone as Jack himself. As Derek Parfit argues, it does not follow from my having a memory of an experience in the first person that "I, the person who now seems to remember it, am the person who had this experience" (Parfit 15). If we imagine a case were the memories of person A are implanted into the brain of person B such that person B remembers person A's experience as if it were person B's own, when we see person B standing next to person A, it seems pretty clear that they are two different people, even though they both have the same memory of an experience from the same experiential perspective.
One who sympathizes with Julia's position might argue that the fact that my left arm is not numerically identical to my right arm does not mean that they are not both my arm. Following the line of this argument, one could conclude that while Jack 49 and Jack 52 are not the same person, they are still a part of the original Jack. Because they contain every attribute and characteristic of the original Jack, the part of the original which each of them represent is not equivalent to being just a fraction of Jack (like my left and right arms are to me), rather, each Jack is a part of the original Jack equivalent to his whole.
One problem with this objection is that the individual Jack clones are not connected to the original Jack in the same way that my arms are connected to me. The original Jack has no control over what the Jack clones do, and what each Jack clone does has no necessary effect on what the others do. In other words, the Jack clones are individuals. Again, this is made clear enough in the fight scene between Jack 49 and Jack 52. Because Jack 49 and Jack 52 are distinct individuals, they are not the same person. If the original Jack was still alive and ran into one of his clones, it is just as likely that the original Jack might have started a fist fight with his clone as well, meaning Jack and his clone are also distinct individuals and therefore not the same person.
In general, though, the idea of personal identity is a bit different for someone like Julia to think about in the past tense than it is in the future tense. What I mean is that it is not too farfetched for Julia to look at a clone of her past lover and see the clone as the same person as the original, and to accept the clone as a sufficient substitute for the man she loved and lost. If, however, Julia were presented with the option of trading in her lover (the original) for a seemingly identical clone, it seems unlikely that she would accept that offer. Putting aside the fact that she would have no reason to want an identical clone of her lover instead of her lover (because the original works just fine), there is something about the thought of replacing one's partner (no matter how similar the replacement is to the original) that makes one feel uneasy. Adam Kadlac sees this uneasy feeling as an indication of some attribute of irreplaceability involved with personal identity as he notes that "such a possibility is unthinkable because,
for most of us, our beloveds are irreplaceable" (Kadlac 33). When one's lover dies, for example, one does not typically say "Oh well, I'll just get a new one!"
This irreplaceability that Kadlac points to is really self-evident when we think about personal identity and what replacement means. If we replace person A with person B, it seems pretty clear that person A is not person B, and this follows merely as a consequence of the definition of replacement. Replacing oneself with oneself is not really a replacement at all. If some kind of replacement is happening, then the substitute is no more than just that.
Of course, Julia could possibly argue that because the replacement Jack is the same person as Jack, then by definition of replacement, no replacement has truly occurred. In order to reply to this objection, we must think of the replacement in a different way. After all, it is easy for Julia to say that no replacement has occurred because she has the luxury of analyzing it from an external point of view. If, however, we were to ask Julia if she would be okay with dying and being replaced by a clone, it is far less likely that she would answer in the affirmative.
My argument against mere psychological continuity and for the addition of a survivability condition in personal identity rests on this idea. Even if his shared memories, personality traits, and mental tendencies being identical to that of the original Jack caused everyone external to Jack 49 to be completely certain that Jack 49 was the original Jack, and even if Jack 49 himself believed that he was the original Jack, this fact alone is not enough to show that they are the same person. The evidence for this is that the original Jack is dead. That is to say that the original Jack is the one person from whose point of view Jack 49 would clearly and unquestionably be a different person.
Let us consider a scenario in which teleportation devices exist. Let us say that the teleportation device works as follows. I step into the teleportation device and select a destination. The position of every particle in my body is then scanned, after which my body is deconstructed particle by particle. At the same time, the particles are reassembled at the destination location. When the process is complete, I find myself to have teleported instantaneously to a new location. Now from an outside point of view, this seems like a good idea. A person could travel instantly to any location in the world. From the point of view of that person's friends and family, nothing would have changed. No replacements were made. It would be like the person was emailed to a different location. Nothing about this scenario makes it seem as though the person appearing on the destination side of the teleportation device is not the same person that stepped into the departure side of it, at least from an external point of view.
The scenario becomes more interesting when the device operator asks me to step into the device. Let us say that I think nothing of it. Let us say that I subscribe to Julia's point of view about personal identity. As I step into the teleportation booth and select my destination, I burn with excitement at the prospect of being teleported to China. Then, I press the button to teleport and (here is where it gets interesting) I get ripped apart particle by particle and die. That is the end for me. The supposed "me" that is rebuilt on the other end of the device will think that it is me, since it remembers that it just pressed the button to teleport to China. Everyone who observes it sees no difference between it and me, and so life goes on. The clone that appears on the other end of the device fulfills the same functions in society and the world as I did, and to everyone observing the process, everything seems okay.
In truth, however, the clone is not me. I clearly died on the departure end of the device. My stream of consciousness ended. That is, my flow of experiences ended when I pushed the button and died. For me there is no future. It might seem as though the being that is rebuilt on the other end of the device picks up my stream of consciousness where it left off in the same way that one might pick up on his or her own stream of consciousness after waking from a coma. There is a difference, however, in that being in a coma is more similar to being asleep than it is to being dead. While in a coma, one's brainwaves are still firing here and there, and his or her vital functions are still active. This is important because even though the person in a coma is unconscious, he or she still exists to be awakened. In the case of the teleportation scenario, the original me who enters the departure side of the device ceases to exist and can never re-enter into existence. It is impossible, therefore, that what appears on the other end of the teleportation device could be me or a revival of me. It is merely a copy.
The principles of this example are the same as for the scenario presented by Oblivion. Because the original Jack died, his unique existence is no more. As a consequence of this, no clone of him can ever actually be him. No matter how similar the copy is, it can never have the same personal identity as the original had. Mere psychological similarity or continuity is not quite enough to define a person's identity, as Oblivion, or at least its character Julia, seems to be suggesting. Although it still might not be sufficient to complete a definition of personal identity, some kind of survivability condition is too important to leave out.
Works Cited
Conee, Earl Brink, and Theodore Sider. Riddles of existence: a guided tour of metaphysics. Oxford: Clarendon, 2005. Print.
Kadlac, Adam. "Irreplaceability and Identity." Social Theory and Practice: 33-54. Print.
Oblivion. Dir. Joseph Kosinski. Universal Studios Home Entertainment, 2013. Film.
Parfit, Derek. "Personal Identity." The Philosophical Review: 3. Print.
 
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Nice blog. I agree with you in the final paradox of the teleportation device. The first person is gone. I don't know how much of the other questions can be answered practically though.
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On May 25 2014 16:27 Jerubaal wrote:
Nice blog. I agree with you in the final paradox of the teleportation device. The first person is gone. I don't know how much of the other questions can be answered practically though.
Thanks!
There are some other similar examples given by other philosophers on the matter.
For example, let's say we have a car fully built on a factory floor. Now, if we were to deconstruct the car piece by piece while at the same time reconstructing it 50 feet away from its original location, at what point did the car change locations?
Kind of a weird question, and it supposes that inanimate objects have a unique identity to them as well.
I dunno, just something else to think about I guess.
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Let us consider a scenario in which teleportation devices exist. Let us say that the teleportation device works as follows. I step into the teleportation device and select a destination. The position of every particle in my body is then scanned, after which my body is deconstructed particle by particle. At the same time, the particles are reassembled at the destination location. When the process is complete, I find myself to have teleported instantaneously to a new location. Now from an outside point of view, this seems like a good idea. A person could travel instantly to any location in the world. From the point of view of that person's friends and family, nothing would have changed. No replacements were made. It would be like the person was emailed to a different location. Nothing about this scenario makes it seem as though the person appearing on the destination side of the teleportation device is not the same person that stepped into the departure side of it, at least from an external point of view.
The scenario becomes more interesting when the device operator asks me to step into the device. Let us say that I think nothing of it. Let us say that I subscribe to Julia's point of view about personal identity. As I step into the teleportation booth and select my destination, I burn with excitement at the prospect of being teleported to China. Then, I press the button to teleport and (here is where it gets interesting) I get ripped apart particle by particle and die. That is the end for me. The supposed "me" that is rebuilt on the other end of the device will think that it is me, since it remembers that it just pressed the button to teleport to China. Everyone who observes it sees no difference between it and me, and so life goes on. The clone that appears on the other end of the device fulfills the same functions in society and the world as I did, and to everyone observing the process, everything seems okay.
I think to make this argument you must be comfortable with the premise consciousness then is not a property of the brain.
If we suppose your "youness" is a property of the physical aspect of your brain (i.e. wiring of synpases, dendrites, spines, etc.) then somehow taking it apart would not destroy it because it is being rebuilt exactly as it was, with the same atoms and quarks in the same individual configurations.
Consider the case of cryonic preservation, in which the body and/or brain is stored after a person dies at extremely cold temperatures for preservation. All activity of the brain is stopped in this state. Most people I have talked to believe if you revived someone from this state without damaging them, they would be the same person...in other words your youness is a property of your physical brain.
If you subscribe to that notion, then I don't see a difference between the two examples. Both completely stop all activity, temporarily eliminating your consciousness before it is brought back.
For example, let's say we have a car fully built on a factory floor. Now, if we were to deconstruct the car piece by piece while at the same time reconstructing it 50 feet away from its original location, at what point did the car change locations?
It exists in two places at once, until the very last piece has arrived at it's end destination. Unless you define the car to be the complete fully assembled car, in which case it changes locations at the very instant the last piece arrives and actually ceases to exist for some period of time.
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On May 25 2014 17:09 L_Master wrote:Show nested quote +Let us consider a scenario in which teleportation devices exist. Let us say that the teleportation device works as follows. I step into the teleportation device and select a destination. The position of every particle in my body is then scanned, after which my body is deconstructed particle by particle. At the same time, the particles are reassembled at the destination location. When the process is complete, I find myself to have teleported instantaneously to a new location. Now from an outside point of view, this seems like a good idea. A person could travel instantly to any location in the world. From the point of view of that person's friends and family, nothing would have changed. No replacements were made. It would be like the person was emailed to a different location. Nothing about this scenario makes it seem as though the person appearing on the destination side of the teleportation device is not the same person that stepped into the departure side of it, at least from an external point of view.
The scenario becomes more interesting when the device operator asks me to step into the device. Let us say that I think nothing of it. Let us say that I subscribe to Julia's point of view about personal identity. As I step into the teleportation booth and select my destination, I burn with excitement at the prospect of being teleported to China. Then, I press the button to teleport and (here is where it gets interesting) I get ripped apart particle by particle and die. That is the end for me. The supposed "me" that is rebuilt on the other end of the device will think that it is me, since it remembers that it just pressed the button to teleport to China. Everyone who observes it sees no difference between it and me, and so life goes on. The clone that appears on the other end of the device fulfills the same functions in society and the world as I did, and to everyone observing the process, everything seems okay. I think to make this argument you must be comfortable with the premise consciousness then is not a property of the brain. If we suppose your "youness" is a property of the physical aspect of your brain (i.e. wiring of synpases, dendrites, spines, etc.) then somehow taking it apart would not destroy it because it is being rebuilt exactly as it was, with the same atoms and quarks in the same individual configurations. Consider the case of cryonic preservation, in which the body and/or brain is stored after a person dies at extremely cold temperatures for preservation. All activity of the brain is stopped in this state. Most people I have talked to believe if you revived someone from this state without damaging them, they would be the same person...in other words your youness is a property of your physical brain. If you subscribe to that notion, then I don't see a difference between the two examples. Both completely stop all activity, temporarily eliminating your consciousness before it is brought back.
One small difference to note is that the particles which compose the "you" on the other side of the teleporter are not necessarily the same particles which constructed your original body. The teleporter just has a bank of particles of some sort. It's kind of like sending blue prints for somebody to build the same lego castle you just built.
So in this case, it's possible for one to be reconstructed on the other side without ever being deconstructed on the departure end, resulting in two copies of the same person. Those two people could not possibly share consciousness, so they must be individuals. Does that make sense?
But I guess the question is, would YOU be comfortable stepping into the teleporter? Let's assume there's no pain involved. Do you think your consciousness would continue on the other side?
Personally I would never step into that kind of a machine.
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Looking forward to reading this later in some free time later. =]
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with two precautions i think i wouldn't have an issue with teleportation...
the timeframe it happens in is fast enough relative to the brains dynamics
the destination brain is similar enough to produce identical dynamics
as long as your original brain is deleted before the differing input your two brains are receiving when you are in the superstate (after the copy, before the delete) have time to manifest itself as diverging brainstates i'm down like a clown.
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On May 27 2014 03:25 nunez wrote:
with two precautions i think i wouldn't have an issue with teleportation...
the timeframe it happens in is fast enough relative to the brains dynamics
the destination brain is similar enough to produce identical dynamics
as long as your original brain is deleted before the differing input your two brains are receiving when you are in the superstate (after the copy, before the delete) have time to manifest itself as diverging brainstates i'm down like a clown.
So as long as the original you dies fast enough it's cool? I don't get it.
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I think that there needs to be a lot more focus on the fundamentals of how we determine what a "person" is, because it seems to revolve entirely around what we feel makes us a person, what we intuitively identify with, which is a very non-rigorous way of determining things. As we know from science our intuition has been wrong plenty of times in the past, and our feelings along with them. Although I don't have any replacement I just want to point out that the whole discussion is predicated on some unstable grounds and it may not be meaningful to draw many conclusions based on that.
But lets go with it anyway for fun! We can see that we still feel as if we are the same person even after being cryogenically frozen, when there is ostensibly no neural activity whatsoever. So I don't think that continuity of thought is necessary in defining personhood. Neither should it be what we are made of, just because after some time the body will eventually completely renew itself (i.e. all of the original cells will die out, and using new or recycled resources, will form new cells), yet we still feel as if we are more or less the same person as we were a few years ago (just a few new experiences in between).
I don't think it could be a combination either, just because they seem to have very little if anything to do with each other (of course I'm not speaking in terms of biological function, but in terms of effects on personality or personhood).
So I think what this comes down to is that, if materialism is true and all that, we are basically just a very advanced program running in our brain with the support of a biological structure. And in that sense, there is no such thing as "you" to begin with, the whole idea that you exist in any meaningful sense (consciousness, of *really* existing in some metaphysical sense) is just a trick of the mind. If you are just a complex program, then of course you can be transmitted and sent elsewhere just like any other piece of information. Notice in the latter case we don't speak of the original information 'dying' or not being the exact same as the new information. The details of what technical components of matter or energy the new message is composed of are not so important to us anymore, it is the same thing as far as we are concerned.
I think this makes people deeply uncomfortable because we want to believe that there is something more to ourselves than just a program or a form of information. If we were all just programs, then it would make us feel as if we were just animated corpses reacting to stimuli (very advanced corpses, mind you). This is unacceptable to us...so we believe we are more than that, more than just material cause and effect. And I think the result of this is, that somehow, we come to a belief in something beyond materialism, that we might refer to as the "soul" or whatever other word you want to use.
And of course this thing can't just be destroyed, it is not something as trivial as a message, it is a living conscious being. Even if that being were somehow duplicated and placed in a new body, it would just be your clone...it wouldn't be you. If you are not okay with cloning yourself and then shooting yourself in the head, then you shouldn't be okay with teleportation because its essentially the same thing.
But if you really do believe they are the same, then you'd probably be okay with that. Sure thing, shoot me...there's another version right there, and we're exactly the same because I am just a piece of information when it comes down to it.
Well heck maybe we are just information. But *this* piece of information wants to live!  . And this is the issue with emotions that I began with. I could just be deceiving myself, maybe there is nothing here at all in the end...just what I want to believe
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@michael
as long as the original me is deleted before anyone of the me's have time to register any input that makes their brainstate differ (the original me is deleted as my brainstate is identical in two brains with identical dynamics) i think i would be convinced that the copied me was a continuation of the original me.
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I'd say that the concept of a personal identity is an entirely human concept without any physical relevance which can lead to seemingly paradoxical ideas (like the ship of Theseus). Most of the cells in our body die off and are replaced every few days or weeks but that doesn't lead most people to question their identity, yet when it comes to the teleportation device you seem very sure that the teleported person isn't really you.
What about this scenario, let's say it was possible to freeze someone and stop their brain activity entirely until some later time when they are unfrozen, would that person be identical to the original? Because if your criteria for identity is continuity of consciousness you'd be forced to say no. What if we replaced their cells one by one while they were frozen and shipped them to China. Would the result be any different than teleportation?
When you think about it taking some lump of matter and reconfiguring it based on the extracted information is not very different than what the body does to food when it is broken down and reconfigured to cells based on our DNA.
I also want to mention that there's a difference between cloning and teleportation. True cloning (creating copies) is not physically possible, which is different from biological cloning where you grow an entirely different person with a separate consciousness based on the same or similar DNA. With teleportation there's only a single consciousness at any one time and it would be identical to the original in every way, at least in theory - actually pulling off teleportation with more than a single particle would be practically difficult.
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On May 27 2014 06:46 L3gendary wrote:
I'd say that the concept of a personal identity is an entirely human concept without any physical relevance which can lead to seemingly paradoxical ideas (like the ship of Theseus). Most of the cells in our body die off and are replaced every few days or weeks but that doesn't lead most people to question their identity, yet when it comes to the teleportation device you seem very sure that the teleported person isn't really you.
What about this scenario, let's say it was possible to freeze someone and stop their brain activity entirely until some later time when they are unfrozen, would that person be identical to the original? Because if your criteria for identity is continuity of consciousness you'd be forced to say no. What if we replaced their cells one by one while they were frozen and shipped them to China. Would the result be any different than teleportation?
When you think about it taking some lump of matter and reconfiguring it based on the extracted information is not very different than what the body does to food when it is broken down and reconfigured to cells based on our DNA.
I also want to mention that there's a difference between cloning and teleportation. True cloning (creating copies) is not physically possible, which is different from biological cloning where you grow an entirely different person with a separate consciousness based on the same or similar DNA. With teleportation there's only a single consciousness at any one time and it would be identical to the original in every way, at least in theory - actually pulling off teleportation with more than a single particle would be practically difficult.
Cryogenic freezing has already been brought up. My response to this objection is that with teleportation, the particles that compose your original body are not the same particles that compose the supposed "you" on the other end of the teleporter. It is possible for your body to be scanned and built on the other end of the teleporter without your original body being destroyed. This would result in two copies, two separate consciousnesses, and thus two different individuals. This is why I say that the you on the other end of the teleporter is not you, but a copy. That's why it's different from freezing.
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On May 27 2014 05:09 nunez wrote:
@michael
as long as the original me is deleted before anyone of the me's have time to register any input that makes their brainstate differ (the original me is deleted as my brainstate is identical in two brains with identical dynamics) i think i would be convinced that the copied me was a continuation of the original me.
I'm not sure why you think this. I wouldn't be convinced of that.
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On May 27 2014 04:40 radscorpion9 wrote:I think that there needs to be a lot more focus on the fundamentals of how we determine what a "person" is, because it seems to revolve entirely around what we feel makes us a person, what we intuitively identify with, which is a very non-rigorous way of determining things. As we know from science our intuition has been wrong plenty of times in the past, and our feelings along with them. Although I don't have any replacement I just want to point out that the whole discussion is predicated on some unstable grounds and it may not be meaningful to draw many conclusions based on that. But lets go with it anyway for fun! We can see that we still feel as if we are the same person even after being cryogenically frozen, when there is ostensibly no neural activity whatsoever. So I don't think that continuity of thought is necessary in defining personhood. Neither should it be what we are made of, just because after some time the body will eventually completely renew itself (i.e. all of the original cells will die out, and using new or recycled resources, will form new cells), yet we still feel as if we are more or less the same person as we were a few years ago (just a few new experiences in between). I don't think it could be a combination either, just because they seem to have very little if anything to do with each other (of course I'm not speaking in terms of biological function, but in terms of effects on personality or personhood). So I think what this comes down to is that, if materialism is true and all that, we are basically just a very advanced program running in our brain with the support of a biological structure. And in that sense, there is no such thing as "you" to begin with, the whole idea that you exist in any meaningful sense (consciousness, of *really* existing in some metaphysical sense) is just a trick of the mind. If you are just a complex program, then of course you can be transmitted and sent elsewhere just like any other piece of information. Notice in the latter case we don't speak of the original information 'dying' or not being the exact same as the new information. The details of what technical components of matter or energy the new message is composed of are not so important to us anymore, it is the same thing as far as we are concerned. I think this makes people deeply uncomfortable because we want to believe that there is something more to ourselves than just a program or a form of information. If we were all just programs, then it would make us feel as if we were just animated corpses reacting to stimuli (very advanced corpses, mind you). This is unacceptable to us...so we believe we are more than that, more than just material cause and effect. And I think the result of this is, that somehow, we come to a belief in something beyond materialism, that we might refer to as the "soul" or whatever other word you want to use. And of course this thing can't just be destroyed, it is not something as trivial as a message, it is a living conscious being. Even if that being were somehow duplicated and placed in a new body, it would just be your clone...it wouldn't be you. If you are not okay with cloning yourself and then shooting yourself in the head, then you shouldn't be okay with teleportation because its essentially the same thing. But if you really do believe they are the same, then you'd probably be okay with that. Sure thing, shoot me...there's another version right there, and we're exactly the same because I am just a piece of information when it comes down to it. Well heck maybe we are just information. But *this* piece of information wants to live! . And this is the issue with emotions that I began with. I could just be deceiving myself, maybe there is nothing here at all in the end...just what I want to believe
Responding to this would require a whole new essay. A few things to consider are things like desires and emotions not being purely rational as a materialistic and mathematically determined phenomena probably should be. Why would a purely mechanical being want to smoke marijuana? Why do I want to eat ice cream and play StarCraft? Why does my friend not want to eat ice cream and play StarCraft with me? Pleasure seems to be outside what a robot, no matter how complex, should be able to experience.
If we're just atoms knocking around, it's hard to explain some of these things because it would seem like every action we execute should be mathematically predictable somehow, and there should be more similarity in what each individual chooses to do in a given situation.
But I dunno, it's not an easy question to think about. It's not like this position isn't held by a ton of people. Arguments for global fatalism as a result of determinism are based on this idea.
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On May 27 2014 08:57 MichaelDonovan wrote:Show nested quote +On May 27 2014 06:46 L3gendary wrote:
I'd say that the concept of a personal identity is an entirely human concept without any physical relevance which can lead to seemingly paradoxical ideas (like the ship of Theseus). Most of the cells in our body die off and are replaced every few days or weeks but that doesn't lead most people to question their identity, yet when it comes to the teleportation device you seem very sure that the teleported person isn't really you.
What about this scenario, let's say it was possible to freeze someone and stop their brain activity entirely until some later time when they are unfrozen, would that person be identical to the original? Because if your criteria for identity is continuity of consciousness you'd be forced to say no. What if we replaced their cells one by one while they were frozen and shipped them to China. Would the result be any different than teleportation?
When you think about it taking some lump of matter and reconfiguring it based on the extracted information is not very different than what the body does to food when it is broken down and reconfigured to cells based on our DNA.
I also want to mention that there's a difference between cloning and teleportation. True cloning (creating copies) is not physically possible, which is different from biological cloning where you grow an entirely different person with a separate consciousness based on the same or similar DNA. With teleportation there's only a single consciousness at any one time and it would be identical to the original in every way, at least in theory - actually pulling off teleportation with more than a single particle would be practically difficult. Cryogenic freezing has already been brought up. My response to this objection is that with teleportation, the particles that compose your original body are not the same particles that compose the supposed "you" on the other end of the teleporter. It is possible for your body to be scanned and built on the other end of the teleporter without your original body being destroyed. This would result in two copies, two separate consciousnesses, and thus two different individuals. This is why I say that the you on the other end of the teleporter is not you, but a copy. That's why it's different from freezing.
Like I mentioned the cells in your body are constantly dying and new ones are being formed so you are not composed of all the same particles from day to day. Also, it's not possible for your body to be scanned completely without simultaneously destroying it due to the Heisenberg uncertainty principle which is why cloning is impossible and why a lot of these hypothetical teleportation scenarios assume that the original is destroyed. See this: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/No-cloning_theorem
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On May 27 2014 03:25 nunez wrote:
with two precautions i think i wouldn't have an issue with teleportation...
the timeframe it happens in is fast enough relative to the brains dynamics
the destination brain is similar enough to produce identical dynamics
as long as your original brain is deleted before the differing input your two brains are receiving when you are in the superstate (after the copy, before the delete) have time to manifest itself as diverging brainstates i'm down like a clown.
The issue with this is that while, to the outside world, you effectively have not changed, but YOU are gone. YOU go to sleep and never wake up.
In the case of Theseus' ship, we can consider what makes that ship that ship. It has relationships: where it's been, what crew served on it, what purpose it served. If you replaced one piece of the ship, it would over time acquire all of the relationship that the other pieces had. You could say the same thing happens with cells in the body. Crucially, neurons replace at a glacial pace, if at all. Mind you, this is a process that does not even require material manipulation. As you age, you gain knowledge and experience. Can you be said to be the same person at 30 as you were at 20?
One assumption we've been going on is that there is a level of material commutability. We may say that an atom of copper is equivalent and identical to another atom of copper, but of course the first atom is NOT also the second atom. We have two things that appear exactly alike and yet are totally discrete. There must be a property of otherness (I'm sure some Heideggerian is going to assault me for that ) that can't be included in a merely material evaluation. In some ways Tom Cruise #49 and Tom Cruise #52 are identical and the same person for all intents and purposes, but the are also not "the same person" . They can't be any more than the two copper atoms can be the same atom. It makes me think a bit of Plato's forms, but that's probably just because I'm so ignorant. William of Ockham argued that humans could not be classified as a genre, but that every human was an individual creation.
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@radscorpion- I'm not sure I like your formulation that "intuition is sometimes wrong, as proven by science".They are both incomplete and imperfect forms of knowledge. Science may prove intuition wrong in scientific matters, but I wouldn't say it replaces it.
+ Show Spoiler +On May 27 2014 09:09 MichaelDonovan wrote:Show nested quote +On May 27 2014 04:40 radscorpion9 wrote:I think that there needs to be a lot more focus on the fundamentals of how we determine what a "person" is, because it seems to revolve entirely around what we feel makes us a person, what we intuitively identify with, which is a very non-rigorous way of determining things. As we know from science our intuition has been wrong plenty of times in the past, and our feelings along with them. Although I don't have any replacement I just want to point out that the whole discussion is predicated on some unstable grounds and it may not be meaningful to draw many conclusions based on that. But lets go with it anyway for fun! We can see that we still feel as if we are the same person even after being cryogenically frozen, when there is ostensibly no neural activity whatsoever. So I don't think that continuity of thought is necessary in defining personhood. Neither should it be what we are made of, just because after some time the body will eventually completely renew itself (i.e. all of the original cells will die out, and using new or recycled resources, will form new cells), yet we still feel as if we are more or less the same person as we were a few years ago (just a few new experiences in between). I don't think it could be a combination either, just because they seem to have very little if anything to do with each other (of course I'm not speaking in terms of biological function, but in terms of effects on personality or personhood). So I think what this comes down to is that, if materialism is true and all that, we are basically just a very advanced program running in our brain with the support of a biological structure. And in that sense, there is no such thing as "you" to begin with, the whole idea that you exist in any meaningful sense (consciousness, of *really* existing in some metaphysical sense) is just a trick of the mind. If you are just a complex program, then of course you can be transmitted and sent elsewhere just like any other piece of information. Notice in the latter case we don't speak of the original information 'dying' or not being the exact same as the new information. The details of what technical components of matter or energy the new message is composed of are not so important to us anymore, it is the same thing as far as we are concerned. I think this makes people deeply uncomfortable because we want to believe that there is something more to ourselves than just a program or a form of information. If we were all just programs, then it would make us feel as if we were just animated corpses reacting to stimuli (very advanced corpses, mind you). This is unacceptable to us...so we believe we are more than that, more than just material cause and effect. And I think the result of this is, that somehow, we come to a belief in something beyond materialism, that we might refer to as the "soul" or whatever other word you want to use. And of course this thing can't just be destroyed, it is not something as trivial as a message, it is a living conscious being. Even if that being were somehow duplicated and placed in a new body, it would just be your clone...it wouldn't be you. If you are not okay with cloning yourself and then shooting yourself in the head, then you shouldn't be okay with teleportation because its essentially the same thing. But if you really do believe they are the same, then you'd probably be okay with that. Sure thing, shoot me...there's another version right there, and we're exactly the same because I am just a piece of information when it comes down to it. Well heck maybe we are just information. But *this* piece of information wants to live! . And this is the issue with emotions that I began with. I could just be deceiving myself, maybe there is nothing here at all in the end...just what I want to believe Responding to this would require a whole new essay. A few things to consider are things like desires and emotions not being purely rational as a materialistic and mathematically determined phenomena probably should be. Why would a purely mechanical being want to smoke marijuana? Why do I want to eat ice cream and play StarCraft? Why does my friend not want to eat ice cream and play StarCraft with me? Pleasure seems to be outside what a robot, no matter how complex, should be able to experience. If we're just atoms knocking around, it's hard to explain some of these things because it would seem like every action we execute should be mathematically predictable somehow, and there should be more similarity in what each individual chooses to do in a given situation. But I dunno, it's not an easy question to think about. It's not like this position isn't held by a ton of people. Arguments for global fatalism as a result of determinism are based on this idea.
These are vestiges of evolutionarily determined primordial survival instincts that have been sublimated in our prosperity.
To me, the more interesting question is why something would care about its particular organization at all. But we're far afield of our original discussion.
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On May 27 2014 09:09 MichaelDonovan wrote:Show nested quote +On May 27 2014 04:40 radscorpion9 wrote:I think that there needs to be a lot more focus on the fundamentals of how we determine what a "person" is, because it seems to revolve entirely around what we feel makes us a person, what we intuitively identify with, which is a very non-rigorous way of determining things. As we know from science our intuition has been wrong plenty of times in the past, and our feelings along with them. Although I don't have any replacement I just want to point out that the whole discussion is predicated on some unstable grounds and it may not be meaningful to draw many conclusions based on that. But lets go with it anyway for fun! We can see that we still feel as if we are the same person even after being cryogenically frozen, when there is ostensibly no neural activity whatsoever. So I don't think that continuity of thought is necessary in defining personhood. Neither should it be what we are made of, just because after some time the body will eventually completely renew itself (i.e. all of the original cells will die out, and using new or recycled resources, will form new cells), yet we still feel as if we are more or less the same person as we were a few years ago (just a few new experiences in between). I don't think it could be a combination either, just because they seem to have very little if anything to do with each other (of course I'm not speaking in terms of biological function, but in terms of effects on personality or personhood). So I think what this comes down to is that, if materialism is true and all that, we are basically just a very advanced program running in our brain with the support of a biological structure. And in that sense, there is no such thing as "you" to begin with, the whole idea that you exist in any meaningful sense (consciousness, of *really* existing in some metaphysical sense) is just a trick of the mind. If you are just a complex program, then of course you can be transmitted and sent elsewhere just like any other piece of information. Notice in the latter case we don't speak of the original information 'dying' or not being the exact same as the new information. The details of what technical components of matter or energy the new message is composed of are not so important to us anymore, it is the same thing as far as we are concerned. I think this makes people deeply uncomfortable because we want to believe that there is something more to ourselves than just a program or a form of information. If we were all just programs, then it would make us feel as if we were just animated corpses reacting to stimuli (very advanced corpses, mind you). This is unacceptable to us...so we believe we are more than that, more than just material cause and effect. And I think the result of this is, that somehow, we come to a belief in something beyond materialism, that we might refer to as the "soul" or whatever other word you want to use. And of course this thing can't just be destroyed, it is not something as trivial as a message, it is a living conscious being. Even if that being were somehow duplicated and placed in a new body, it would just be your clone...it wouldn't be you. If you are not okay with cloning yourself and then shooting yourself in the head, then you shouldn't be okay with teleportation because its essentially the same thing. But if you really do believe they are the same, then you'd probably be okay with that. Sure thing, shoot me...there's another version right there, and we're exactly the same because I am just a piece of information when it comes down to it. Well heck maybe we are just information. But *this* piece of information wants to live! . And this is the issue with emotions that I began with. I could just be deceiving myself, maybe there is nothing here at all in the end...just what I want to believe Responding to this would require a whole new essay. A few things to consider are things like desires and emotions not being purely rational as a materialistic and mathematically determined phenomena probably should be. Why would a purely mechanical being want to smoke marijuana? Why do I want to eat ice cream and play StarCraft? Why does my friend not want to eat ice cream and play StarCraft with me? Pleasure seems to be outside what a robot, no matter how complex, should be able to experience. If we're just atoms knocking around, it's hard to explain some of these things because it would seem like every action we execute should be mathematically predictable somehow, and there should be more similarity in what each individual chooses to do in a given situation. But I dunno, it's not an easy question to think about. It's not like this position isn't held by a ton of people. Arguments for global fatalism as a result of determinism are based on this idea.
Well I can understand that! These are certainly complex issues. But if you just consider it intuitively, not as a question of how the brain works or where our motivations come from, but in broader terms: What are the possible mechanisms by which *anything* can happen?
To me I can only come up with two possibilities; either direct causality or randomness, or some combination. I tried to stretch my brain to think of some other way that things can happen but I can't even imagine anything. Perhaps its just my/our brains being limited but for now I have to consider what I know.
Even if there are some random elements thrown in (and that in itself is a very bizarre thing; how can pure randomness exist? What would cause it?), ultimately the result is not going to be anything more than a computer program with random number generators interspersed here and there. From that I can't see how its possible that the mind, existing in this reality, can possibly generate thoughts and desires through any other mechanism.
What you call a desire to smoke marijuana could just be a chemical addiction that a part of our brain wants, it activates some neuronal discharge that we find "pleasurable", and pleasure is further defined as some other chain of events or chemicals that the brain is programmed to want more of. And by that I mean it is designed around seeking ways to reproduce particular discharges - why? Due to a very complex and chaotic evolutionary process focused on our survival, which has somehow developed other features such as the notion of pleasure in its myriad forms. And all of this advanced programming somehow generates a feeling of consciousness as well.
If the machine is designed to be complex enough to go down significantly different paths by subtle differences in brain structure and external stimuli, you could easily have mathematically predictable (or probable if randomness exists) results that are widely divergent. Just like you can program a "random" number generator through an actual computer program, which isn't really random of course, but which outputs a wide variety of results.
I would really love to believe in a ghost in the machine, and a part of me will continue to hold on to this as a possibility so that maybe I go somewhere when I die and its not just death for eternity. But so far its sad that there don't appear to be many other options. In which case the whole notion of personhood is an illusion to begin with, and to discuss its continuity may not be meaningful if it doesn't exist to begin with. We are really just playing with our emotional states and giving arguments to support a continued *feeling* of really existing in some metaphysical sense.
On May 27 2014 10:21 Jerubaal wrote:
@radscorpion- I'm not sure I like your formulation that "intuition is sometimes wrong, as proven by science".They are both incomplete and imperfect forms of knowledge. Science may prove intuition wrong in scientific matters, but I wouldn't say it replaces it.
Well if we are seeking the best explanation for some phenomenon, and we trust our intuition, we may be led to a particular conclusion. But upon performing a series of experiments we may find something radically unexpected and unintuitive. And of course we trust the experiment and reality over what our minds expect because we can do it countless times and observe the same result, it really seems like our intuition is wrong here. Every time there's such a conflict the "science" always wins, because our experience always wins. I think that's ultimately what the issue is; our real life experience tested multiple times over what we might believe or "feel" the truth is beforehand. I think in this sense science is consistently better than intuition, even if science itself has limitations.
At most there are moments when science fails to explain certain things, like how to interact with your significant other, but those are merely temporary limitations and not an indication that intuition is superior in terms of its technical capability to explain how things work. At some point, if determinism is true, even these interactions will be better explained in more rigorous terms. Not just because its based on something real that we can feel and touch, but because the language is based on these real things.
But anyway I think the real issue I had was besides all of this, just that we are using our feelings to define when we "feel" like a person and when we don't, and its not exactly the most solid grounds to define personhood to begin with. You may ask why...I think fundamentally the whole process is just unknown to us. Why do we "feel" like a person? We can't say. Its not an indicator of anything if we don't understand where the feeling comes from, so it has no explanatory power. I should probably mention that personhood isn't even defined either.
I am reminded by my math professors joke, that mathematicians define their terms and then argue, while philosophers argue first and then try to figure out what the terms they're using mean XD. Now my computer has turned my room into an inferno due to its extreme heat output. I think its possible to continue arguing the whole notion of personhood in terms of what could maintain the illusion. I think we have to isolate some form of continuity, but as shown its hard to say what that is.
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I'm not really inclined to go through that whole response, but you seem to be concerned with what type of knowledge is "superior" while I am suggesting that they have their own spheres.
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EPT
