LESSWRONG

Prismattic

Feb 15, 2011

79 comments

I have been trying to absorb the Lesswrong near-consensus on cryonics/quantum mechanics/uploading, and I confess to being unpersuaded by it. I'm not hostile to cryonics; just indifferent, and having a bit of trouble articulating why the insights on identity that I have been picking up from the quantum mechanics sequence aren't compelling to me. I offer the following thought experiment in hopes that others may be able to present the argument more effectively if they understand the objection here.

Suppose that Omega appears before you and says, “All life on Earth is going to be destroyed tomorrow by [insert cataclysmic event of your choice here]. I offer you the chance to push this button, which will upload your consciousness to a safe place out of reach of the cataclysmic event, preserving all of your memories, etc. up to the moment you pushed the button and optimizing you such that you will be effectively immortal. However, the uploading process is painful, and because it interferes with your normal perception of time, your original mind/body will subjectively experience the time after you pushed the button but before the process is complete as a thousand years of the most intense agony. Additionally, I can tell you that a sufficient number of other people will choose to push the button that your uploaded existence will not be lonely.”

Do you push the button?

My understanding of the Lesswrong consensus on this issue is that my uploaded consciousness is me, not just a copy of me. I'm hoping the above hypothetical illustrates why I'm having trouble accepting that.

1 points

Prismattic

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17 points

I'm not sure I follow your objection here, but my best guess is something like "the upload can't be me, because I'm experiencing a thousand years of agony, and the upload isn't."

Is that even close to right?

I won't presume to speak for the LW consensus, but personally I would say that the upload is me, and the body is also me. When the body dies in the cataclysm, I have died, and I've also survived. This sounds paradoxical because I'm used to thinking of my identity as traveling along only one track, but in the case you're describing Omega's device has made that no longer true, and in that case I need to stop thinking as though it were.

I am not sure whether either of me, after pressing the button, considers the other me to be them... but I suspect probably not.

Does any of that help?

Oh, and, yes, I press the button. Shortly after pressing it, I both deeply regret having pressed it, and am enormously grateful to myself for having pressed it.

17 points

3 points

Oh, and, yes, I press the button. Shortly after pressing it, I both deeply regret having pressed it, and am enormously grateful to myself for having pressed it.

Shortly after pressing it both of me are grateful to myself for having pressed it. I do still consider the other me to be me. It is only after the agony starts to completely strip away my conscious identity and rational thought that I start to experience the regret. Although I suspect even the state of regret wouldn't last long. Regret is a relatively high level emotion, one that would be completely overwhelmed and destroyed by the experience of pain and the desperate, incoherent desire for it to stop.

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3 points

At the risk of utter digression, I'm interested in this question of considering the other me to be me, post-split.

The way I experience identity clearly treats the results of various possible future branchpoints as roughly equivalent to one another (and equivalently associated to "me"), but does not treat the results of past branchpoints that way. A decision that has yet to be made feels very different from one that has already been made.

Normally it doesn't make much difference -- I don't have much difficulty treating the "me" that put on a different shirt this morning in some other Everett branch as sharing my identity, despite the branchpoint in the past, because we're so awfully similar -- but when we start introducing vast differences in experience, my ability to extend my notion of identity to include them proves inadequate.

The timeless approach you describe strikes me as a useful way of experiencing identity, but I can't imagine actually experiencing identity that way.

Is this perspective something that seems intuitively true to you, or is it something you've trained (and if so how?), or is it more that you are describing your intellectual rather than your emotional beliefs, or ...?

Just to be clear: this is entirely a question about human psychology; I'm not asking about the "actual nature of identity" out in the world (whatever that even means, if indeed it means anything at all).

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1 points

Is this perspective something that seems intuitively true to you, or is it something you've trained (and if so how?), or is it more that you are describing your intellectual rather than your emotional beliefs, or ...?

It does seem like something that is intuitively true. I suspect having spent a lot of time considering bizarre duplication based counterfactuals has had some influence on my intuitions, bringing the intellectual and emotional beliefs somewhat closer together.

Also note that the emotion experience of identifying as 'me' isn't an all or nothing question. Even in everyday experience the extent to which I self identify as 'me' does vary - although always in the high ranges. Which parts are me? comes in to it here. So would experimenting with localized magnetic stimulation of certain parts of the brain, if you really looked at the science!

Note that I (guess I) would not continue to identify with the other me as me indefinitely. It would probably go from like looking at a mirror (an abstracted intellectual one in this example) to only a vague feeling of association over time and depending on stimulus.

In the other direction there are definitely parts of my past history that I don't experience as 'me' either - and not purely dependent on time. There are a couple of memories from when I was 5 that feel like me but some from even my twenties (I am less than thirty) that barely feel like me at all.

I compare this to the experience of turning into a vampire in Alicorn's luminosity fanfiction. (FYI: That means a couple of days of extreme pain that does not cause any permanent damage.) While being tortured I may not feel all that much identification with either pre-torture human me or post torture vampire me. As vamp-wedrifid I would (probably) feel a somewhat higher identification with past-human-wedrifid as being 'myself'. Say ballpark 80%. From the perspective of painful-half-turned-wedrifid the main difference in experience from the me in this Omega counterfactual would be the anticipation of being able to remember the torture as opposed to not. Knowing the way the time forks are set up It would make a little difference but not all that much.

Summary: Yes, the timeless perspective relates to actual anticipated experience not just intellectual abstraction.

1 points

PlaidX

14 points

Why does every other hypothetical situation on this site involve torture or horrible pain? What is wrong with you people?

Edit: I realize I've been unduly inflammatory about this. I'll restrict myself in the future to offering non-torture alternative formulations of scenarios when appropriate.

14 points

9 points

Why does every other hypothetical situation on this site involve torture or horrible pain? What is wrong with you people?

We understand why edge cases and extremes are critical when testing a system - be that a program, a philosophy, a decision theory or even just a line of logic.

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7 points

I've often wondered that.

In some sense, it's not actually true... lots of hypotheticals on this site involve entirely mundane situations. But it's true that when we start creating very large stakes hypotheticals, the torture implements come out.

I suspect it's because we don't know how to talk about the opposite direction, so the only way we know to discuss a huge relative disutility is to talk about pain. I mean, the thing that is to how-I-am-now as how-I-am-now is to a thousand years of pain is... well, what, exactly?

7 points

Perplexed

5 points

I'm hoping the above hypothetical illustrates why I'm having trouble accepting that.

I'm sorry, but I don't understand the illustration. My answer would be the same if my original mind/body was immediately and painlessly dissolved, and it was my uploaded (copied?) mind that experienced the thousand years of pain. Same answer in a more realistic scenario in which I remain physically embodied, but the pain and immortality are caused by ordinary vampire venom rather than some bogus cryonics scheme orchestrated by Omega. :)

I would probably request painless death in all cases. Other people here would choose immortality. But the difference has nothing to do with different outlooks about cryonics and uploading. It has to do with different outlooks about torture.

ETA: Having now read TheOtherDave's analysis, I guess I now do understand the hypothetical. I'm not sure whether I would push the button or not. But if I decided to, I would be anticipating both the joy and the pain of my two future versions.

My understanding of the Lesswrong consensus on this issue is that my uploaded consciousness is me, not just a copy of me.

That is pretty much correct, as I understand it, but it may be worth while breaking that phrase "is me, not just a copy of me" into its semantic parts. I understand it to mean:

That copy of me is someone.
That 'someone' remembers being me.
I care about that future someone every bit as much as I care about future me.

Are there any other parts that I have missed?

I'm guessing that the third part above is the one you have trouble swallowing. Ok, but if you do swallow the first two, consider the weirdness of 'someone' remembering that his younger self didn't really care for him.

5 points

9 points

consider the weirdness of 'someone' remembering that his younger self didn't really care for him.

Well, that happens all the time in the actual world. It may be weird, but it's a weird we're accustomed to.

9 points

Perplexed

9 points

Damn. I laughed so hard at your comment that my dentures fell out. I should have flossed more.

9 points

NihilCredo

1 points

consider the weirdness of 'someone' remembering that his younger self didn't really care for him.

I have a little trouble seeing this weirdness.

Imagine if you were put in Prismattic's scenario, and chose a painless death as you said; you would go to sleep fully expecting never to wake up again. Immediately after you fall asleep but before Omega can kill you, his trickster brother Omicron sneaks in, uploads your consciousness, and wakes up your uploaded copy somewhere safe.

Now think about what that consciousness would feel upon waking up. Is that what you were describing in the quote above, and is that particularly weird?

1 points

JoshuaZ

2 points

Hmm, speaking as someone who sort of buys into the cryonics part but doesn't buy into the rest of what you label as the "LW consensus" I think for all of these issues the consensus level to them here is probably overestimated. Note that the QM sequence is the sequence which by far has the most subject matter experts who would disagree.

As for the button, I'm not sure if I'd push it or not, I suspect no. But that may indicate irrationality on my part more than any coherent notion of what constitutes "me".

2 points

Sniffnoy

1 points

Note that the QM sequence is the sequence which by far has the most subject matter experts who would disagree.

I suspect it may be helpful when discussing this to split the QM sequence into the direct QM part, and the "timeless physics" part at the end. The latter seems to have generated a lot more disagreement than the former.

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1 points

I suspect it may be helpful when discussing this to split the QM sequence into the direct QM part, and the "timeless physics" part at the end. The latter seems to have generated a lot more disagreement than the former.

Many Worlds was discussed in the direct QM part, was it not? People whine about that all the time.

1 points

Eneasz

1 points

I would push the button. I'd also feel very grateful to myself for having pushed it and undergone that torment for my sake. Probably similar to the gratefulness that christians feel for Jesus when they think of the crucifixion. The survivors would probably create a holiday to memorialize their own sacrifice for themselves, which sounds kinda self-serving, but hell... I'd think I deserve it.

1 points

Manfred

1 points

I, for one, would not say that an upload is "me," or at least doesn't fulfill all of the parts of how I use "me." The most notable lack, since I think I do disagree with LW consensus here, is continuity.

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1 points

Do you push the button?

My understanding of the Lesswrong consensus on this issue is that my uploaded consciousness is me, not just a copy of me. I'm hoping the above hypothetical illustrates why I'm having trouble accepting that.

I would consider both consciousnesses you. The problem seems to be one of preference. I would press the button but I can understand why people would not.

1 points