Comment by mikk14
7 days ago
I don't know if this is discussed by actual serious philosophers, but consider the issue of "mind uploading." I have seen very staunch monists seriously discussing that, if you were to produce a complete digital copy of your brain -- copying any possible information to the most minute synapse -- then you effectively "uploaded" yourself into a computer and can live a digital life.
These people believe this while at the same time considering dualism so ridiculous as to laugh dualists out of the room. The evident problem being that "mind uploading" is the most dualistic possible position to take. A real monist would easily see that by doing mind uploading you have just created a clone that is a whole separate entity from yourself and it is not yourself.
But you are taking an opinionated view of the resolution to the Ship of Theseus paradox. If you are a computational functionalist, then it really is "you" afterwards (or rather there's now two identical "you" until the original "you" is destroyed). A monist could also point to your hypocrisy of believing that you are still your child self despite every atom in your body having been replaced between then and now.
believing that you are still your child self despite every atom in your body having been replaced between then and now.
Oft-repeated but not true. Neurons, for the most part, are never replaced. If a neuron dies, it's gone forever. Repeated head traumas (leading to CTE) are known to cause personality changes as the brain has been permanently altered due to neuron losses.
A true monist would realize that any experience of the uploaded being that received a copy of the brain is not felt by the original brain that has been copied. This is a fact and it is elementary to see it as true, as well as supporting the view that the copy is not the same being at all. If your description of computation functionalists is accurate, then they simply are dualists and would do good in admitting this to themselves.
Invoking the Ship of Theseus is a distraction. The Ship of Theseus paradox does not involve a full copy at the atomic level while the original still stands. If it did, the paradox would not even exists. The paradox exists because there is the key element that you do not have in mind copying/uploading: _continuity_.
There is no prove that continuity really matters. In fact who goes to say that your current conscious self is the same as your self from five minutes ago. After all you do not feel what they felt. The only thing that makes you think that the two are related or even the same is your state (memories, emotions). Why would we even think about whether cloning is able to transmit consciousness when we don’t even know if consciousness is transmitted over time?
Edit: Just to clarify my opinion: This means that the relationship between my self from five seconds ago and my current self and the relationship between my self from five seconds ago and a clone of that self that aged the same amount would be equivalent. Both of us would _not_ be the same as my past self
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Isn't continuity just an implementation detail? Suppose your brain was replaced a bit at a time with mechanical hardware, the end result is an uploaded mind while maintaining continuity.
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Imagine you are destroyed in your sleep by aliens and replaced by an atomically identical duplicate. Would you call this "you"?
If not, what if the aliens recycled the atoms from your original body to make the new body, putting each original atom into the same original spot with the same position and momentum (ignoring quantum and uncertainty principle).
What if they recycled 99% of the atoms from your original body, but swapped 1% of them for different atoms?
What if they only destroyed 5% of your brain and reassembled that destroyed portion, leaving the rest of you untouched? What about 50%?
What if they waited 1 planck moment before reassembling you versus 5 seconds?
Where is your dividing line in this scenario space between "that's really me" versus "that's just a copy and is not really me" ?
The functionalist answer, as I understand it, is fungibility across time and copies when arriving at definitions of words like "you".
The functionalist answer is not that > 1 copy can communicate telepathically or supernaturally share experiences is a dualist sense. They are still causally independent physical entities.
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The ‘you’ that wakes up tomorrow is a whole separate entity from you right now, unless you want to concede that identity is a path variable and that whether the exact same physical/mental/emotional entity is you or not depends on how those particles got there.
Just because the brain doesn't form memories while you sleep, doesn't mean you have ceased to exist. You have probably forgot many things that have happened to you today: does that mean you didn't exist in those moments you forgot? Am I misunderstanding your point?
If the universe was created 5 minutes ago, then you didn't exist before that, but it doesn't matter, because past and present don't interact.
Are there people who say that digitizing one's conscious moves their mind? If I upload a file from my computer to to a server, the file still exists on my computer (until deleted). I've never thought that a mind upload would work any differently.
I think that many who talk about consciousness digitization handwave away what happens to their body/brain afterwards, but I don't necessarily think that means they think they'll move into the computer.
depends if you do a copy paste or cut and paste
My point is that the word "upload", without context indicating otherwise, does not imply that the original is changed in any way.
I think reasonably faithful clones would be mes. We could live my life, from multiple perspectives, some of them quite separate. It might be necessary to distinguish them with numbers, or claim that one of them has become too different to really count as a me, but those are details and semantic matters.
> copying any possible information to the most minute synapse
That's reducing an individual to, I assume, the sum of its neural network. So like considering everything else happening in the fleshy body matters to what a human is, nor how they relate to the rest of cosmos as such a body.
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