Backup and Death for Humanlike AI

Most AI systems can be precisely copied. Suppose this is also true of future conscious AI persons, if any exist. Backup and fissioning should then be possible, transforming the significance of identity and death in ways our cultural and conceptual tools can't currently handle.

Suppose that two humanlike AI neighbors move in next door to you, Shriya and Alaleh.[1] Shriya and Alaleh are (let's stipulate) conscious AI persons with ordinary, humanlike emotional range and, as far as feasible, ordinary, humanlike cognition.[2] Each undergoes an expensive annual backup procedure. Their information is securely stored, so that if the processors responsible for their personalities, values, skills, habits, and memories are destroyed, a new robotic body can be purchased and the saved information reinstalled. Subjectively, the restored person would be indistinguishable from the person at the time of the backup.

As it happens, Shriya dies in a parachuting accident. (Safety precautions for robot parachuters have yet to be perfected.) But "dies" isn't exactly the right word, since a week later a new Shriya arrives, restored from a back up from five months ago. Shriya-2 says it feels as if she fell asleep in March, then awoke in August with no sense that time had passed.

Shriya-2 has no direct memories of the intervening months, though Alaleh fills her in on major events and selected details. She'll also need to retake her knitting course. She only died in the sense that Mario "dies" in Super Mario Bros: losing progress and returning to a save point -- so different from ordinary human and animal death that it really deserves a different word. Maybe this is why Shriya was so willing to parachute despite the risks.

Should you mourn Shriya's loss? Should Alaleh? There's something to mourn: Five months is not trivial. In one sense, a part of a life has been lost -- or maybe just forgotten? Is it more like amnesia?

Consider variations. Suppose Shriya hadn't been able to afford a backup for the past ten years and is restored to her twenty-five-year-old self instead of her thirty-five-year-old self. What if her last backup was at age five? That would be much more like death. The new Shriya would be nothing like the old, and would likely grow into a very different person. Is death, then, a matter of degree?

Shriya-2 receives the original Shriya's possessions. This "death" isn't enough to trigger inheritance by others. But what about contracts and promises made after the last backup? Suppose the original Shriya promised in July to deliver lectures in China, and Shriya-2 -- who has no memory of this and dreads the idea -- must decide whether to honor the commitment. If the backup is from five months before, perhaps she should. If it's from five years before, maybe not. And if it's a child, presumably not.

What about reward and punishment? Should Shriya-2 accept a Nobel prize for work done post-backup? Should Shriya-2 be imprisoned for crimes committed in July, which she couldn't even possibly remember having committed and which -- she might plausibly say -- were committed by a different person. In defense of this view, Shriya-2 might offer a thought experiment: If she had been installed in a duplicate body immediately after the March backup, thereafter living her own life, she'd have no criminal responsibility for what her other branch in did July. The only difference between that case and the actual case is a delay before installation.

Suppose Shriya-2 plunges into unrelenting depression. She ends her life, hoping that a new Shriya-3, reinstalled from a pre-depression save point, will find a new, happier way forward. Is that suicide?

If someone kills Shriya-2, is that murder? Does it matter whether the backup was ten days ago or ten years ago?

A fire sweeps through your neighborhood. The firefighters can rescue either you and your spouse, two ordinary humans, or Shriya and Alaleh, who have backups from seven months ago. Probably they should save you and your spouse? What if the backups were from ten years ago, or from childhood?

Should healthcare be more heavily subsidized for ordinary humans that for AI persons whose maintenance is equally costly? If irreplaceable humans are always prioritized, then human irrecoverability becomes a source of privilege, and AI persons will not enjoy fully equal rights in certain respects.

How obligated are we to store the backups properly? Is this a public service that should be subsidized for less wealthy AI persons? If Dr. Evil deletes Shriya’s backup, he has surely wronged Shriya by putting her at risk, even if the backup is never needed and the deletion goes unnoticed. But how much has he wronged her, and it what way exactly? Is it similar to assault? How much does it differ from ordinary reckless endangerment? Does it depend on whether we regard Shriya-2 as the same person as the original Shriya, or as a distinct but similar successor?

What if the backup is imperfect? How much divergence in personality, values, memories, habits, and skills is tolerable before the appropriate attitude toward Shriya-2 changes -- whatever the appropriate attitude is? Small imperfections are surely acceptable. People change in small, arbitrary ways from day to day. Huge differences would presumably make it appropriate to regard the new entity as merely resembling Shriya, rather than being a restored version of her. Once again, this appears to be a matter of degree, laid uncomfortably across crude categorical properties like "same person" and "different person".

We're in unfamiliar territory, where our usual understandings of death and personal continuity no longer straightforwardly apply. If such AI systems ever come to be, we will need to develop new words, concepts, and customs.

[Data and Lore from Star Trek; image source]

---------------------------------------

[1] Names randomly chosen from lists of former lower division students, excluding Jesus, Mohammed, and extremely unusual names.

[2] Unless humanlikeness is enforced by policy, this might not be what we should expect: See Chilson and Schwitzgebel 2026. For some puzzles about AI with different emotional ranges, see "How Much Should We Give to a Joymachine?" (Dec 24, 2025).

---------------------------------------

Related: Weird Minds Might Destabilize Human Ethics (Aug 13, 2015).

"Severance", "The Substance", and Our Increasingly Splintered Selves

Anyone remember the excitement about "Severance" and "The Substance" in early in 2025? Last January I published an op-ed about them. I'd long aspired to place a piece in the New York Times, so it was a delight to finally be able to do so. As a holiday post, here's the full piece reprinted with light editing. (Thanks to Ariel Kaminer for soliciting and editing the piece.)

[original drawing by Evan Cohen]

From one day to the next, you inhabit one body; you have access to one set of memories; your personality, values and appearance hold more or less steady. Other people treat you as a single, unified person — responsible for last month’s debts, deserving punishment or reward for yesterday’s deeds, relating consistently with family, lovers, colleagues and friends. Which of these qualities is the one that makes you a single, continuous person? In ordinary life it doesn’t matter, because these components of personhood all travel together, an inseparable bundle.

But what if some of those components peeled off into alternative versions of you? It’s a striking coincidence that two much talked-about current works of popular culture — the Apple TV+ series “Severance” and the film “The Substance,” starring Demi Moore — both explore the bewildering emotional and philosophical complications of cleaving a second, separate entity off of yourself. What is the relationship between the resulting consciousnesses? What, if anything, do they owe each other? And to what degree is what we think of as our own identity, our self, just a compromise — and an unstable one, at that?

In “Severance,” characters voluntarily undergo a procedure that severs their workday memories from their home-life memories. At 9 each weekday morning, “severed” workers find themselves riding an elevator down to the office, with no recollection of their lives outside of work. These “innies” clock a full workday and then, at 5, ride the elevator back up, only to find themselves riding back down the next morning. Meanwhile, their “outies” come to consciousness each weekday afternoon in the upbound elevator. They live their outside lives and commute back the next morning, entirely ignorant of their innies’ work-time activities.

In “The Substance,” the cleaving works differently: An experimental drug splits users into two bodies, one young and beautiful, one middle-aged or old. They spend a week in each body while the other lies comatose. The young and old selves appear to have continuous memories (though the movie can be tantalizingly ambiguous about that), but they develop different priorities and relationships. Sue, the younger self of Elisabeth, rockets to Hollywood stardom, while Elisabeth becomes a recluse, discarded by an entertainment industry that reviles aging female bodies.

The question of what makes you “you,” from moment to moment and across a lifetime, has been a subject of intense debate among philosophers. Writing in the 17th century, John Locke emphasized continuity of memory. By his standard, each innie-and-outie pair from “Severance” constitutes two entirely different people, despite their sharing one body. Conversely, Elisabeth and Sue from “The Substance” constitute a single person because they seem to recall some of the same experiences. In contrast, the 20th-century philosopher Bernard Williams prioritized bodily continuity, a perspective that makes an innie-and-outie pair a single person but Elisabeth and Sue two distinct people. The 21st-century psychologist Nina Strohminger and the philosopher Shaun Nichols emphasize continuity of moral values, yielding more complex judgments about these fictional cases. Other scholars view selfhood as a social construct, determined by relationships and societal expectations.

Unsurprisingly, the characters themselves are confused. In “Severance,” the innies sometimes seem to regard the outies as themselves, sometimes as different people, whereas the outies seem to regard their innies with indifference or worse. Meanwhile, in “The Substance,” mature Elisabeth says of young Sue that “you are the only lovable part of me” — in a single sentence treating Sue both as other and as part of herself.

In real life, such confusion rarely arises because memory, embodiment, personality, values and relationships typically align. Both my wife and the D.M.V. can decide on sight that I’m me, even if they care more about memory, skills and responsibility over time — since they trust in the correspondence of body with mind.

Of course, even outside of science fiction, the correspondence isn’t perfect. Advanced dementia can strip away memory and personality, leaving loved ones to wonder whether the person they once knew still exists. Personality, memory and social relationships can fragment in multiple personality or dissociative identity disorder, raising the question of whether Jekyll should be held responsible for the malevolence of Hyde.

But increasingly, we choose to splinter ourselves. The person you present on Instagram or Facebook is wittier, prettier, more accomplished than the person your spouse or roommate knows. Your 500 “friends” never see your pre-coffee-uncombed-depressed-in-bed self (unless sharing that self is your social media personality — in which case that becomes the curated, theatrical fragment of you). In the 1800s, Karl Marx talked about the alienation of labor; today people talk about not “bringing their whole self” to work. Many of us strive to be one person here, another person there, another person there.

People have always presented themselves differently in different social contexts. But social media, Zoom, photo-editing software and responses filtered through large language models raise our fragmentation to new heights. “Severance” and “The Substance” amplify these fissures through radical new technologies that irreconcilably divide the characters’ home selves from their career selves.

Future technological developments could render this fragmentation an even more acute daily perplexity. Designer drugs might increasingly allow us to switch into one self for work, another for parties, another for bedtime. If artificial intelligence systems ever become conscious — a possibility that neuroscientists, psychologists, computer scientists and philosophers increasingly (but by no means uniformly) take seriously — they too might fragment, perhaps in radical and unfamiliar ways, merging and splitting, rewriting their memories, strategically managing and altering their values and personalities.

Our concepts of personhood and identity were forged by a particular evolutionary, social and developmental history in which body, memory, values, personality and social relationships typically aligned and exceptions mostly fell into predictable patterns. By inviting us to rethink the boundaries of the self in an era of technological change, “Severance” and “The Substance” disrupt these old concepts. Today they read as dystopic science fiction. Soon, we may remember them as prophetic.

Severance, The Substance and Our Increasingly Splintered Selves

today in the New York Times

From one day to the next, you inhabit one body; you have access to one set of memories; your personality, values and appearance hold more or less steady. Other people treat you as a single, unified person — responsible for last month’s debts, deserving punishment or reward for yesterday’s deeds, relating consistently with family, lovers, colleagues and friends. Which of these qualities is the one that makes you a single, continuous person? In ordinary life it doesn’t matter, because these components of personhood all travel together, an inseparable bundle.

But what if some of those components peeled off into alternative versions of you? It’s a striking coincidence that two much talked-about current works of popular culture — the Apple TV+ series “Severance” and “The Substance,” starring Demi Moore — both explore the bewildering emotional and philosophical complications of cleaving a second, separate entity off of yourself. What is the relationship between the resulting consciousnesses? What, if anything, do they owe each other? And to what degree is what we think of as our own identity, our self, just a compromise — and an unstable one, at that?

[continued here; if you're a friend, colleague, or regular Splintered Mind reader and blocked by a paywall, feel free to email me at my ucr.edu address for a personal-use-only copy of the final manuscript version]

The Envy Argument Against the View That Teletransportation Is Death

Oh how mistaken other philosophers are! I was especially struck by this poll result in the just-dropped Bourget and Chalmers study of professional philosophers' opinions:

Teletransporter (new matter)

Survival 35.2%
Death 40.1%
Accept an alternative view 1.8%
The question is too unclear to answer 4.8%
There is no fact of the matter 7.5%
Agnostic/undecided 10.1%
Other 0.6%

Unpacking the terse formulation: In the standard teletransporter scenario (made prominent in philosophy by Derek Parfit), a person walks into a machine that scans their body molecule-for-molecule, destroying it in the process. The machine beams all that information to a distant planet. On the distant planet, a molecule-for-molecule identical copy of the original person's body is constructed from local materials. The created entity walks out of the machine, acting just like the original person, having apparent memories of that person's childhood on Earth, continuing that person's plans, saying "oh, the transportation didn't hurt at all", and so on.

The question is: Is that person on the distant planet just a replica of the original person, who died when their original Earthly body was destroyed, or is this -- as advertised -- really just a form of (non-lethal) transportation?

To get a sense of why a philosopher might say "no, it's death", consider the case in which information is sent to two planets and two new bodies are made. Since those two are different people, in different locations, they can't both be identical to the original person on Earth; so therefore -- the thinking goes -- neither is identical. But if neither is identical to the original in the doubling case, neither is identical to the original in the standard case, since whether someone is you shouldn't depend on whether a distant duplicate has been created. (Would the person on Mars have to wait for news from Venus to know if they survived?) Alternatively, consider a non-destructive scanning process. The undestroyed person on Earth would presumably still fear death from local causes even if a duplicate exists on Mars.

Right, so "teleportation is death" is not an outrageous answer -- I can see how someone might feel forced to accept that view. But still. Haven't these people seen Star Trek?! (Okay, Star Trek transporters might transmit atoms and not just information, but even the writers don't seem to have been entirely clear about that, and there are duplication problems anyway.)

[image of duplicate Rikers from Star Trek: The Next Generation]

In further defense of the view that teletransportation need not be death, let me offer the Envy Argument.

Imagine a world in which teleporters are commonplace and extremely well-functioning. No one is ever lost or doubled. The entities who walk out on the far side are healthy and qualitatively identical to those who walked in, to as high a degree of precision as anyone could possibly care about. There are no half-killed, dying people staggering out of the input side of the transporter. And so on.

Now imagine that you are an old-fashioned philosopher who refuses to enter one of these devices: "It's death!" you say. "The person who walks out on the other side is only a duplicate! I'll never step into one of those so-called 'transporter' death machines. It's all a grievous metaphysical error!"

Your friends pooh-pooh you. One pops into a transporter, her duplicate has a nice little vacation on Mars, the duplicate on Mars then steps into a transporter, and another duplicate emerges on Earth. "It's me, Gabrielle!" she says, striding up to you. "I had such a splendid time on Mars. You really should go someday!"

"Oh, you're not Gabrielle," you reply. "Gabrielle died when she stepped into the 'transporter'. I'm in mourning her now. You are just a duplicate of a duplicate of her."

Gabrielle-duplicate-2 notices your mourner's attire. "No, no," she says, "I really am Gabrielle! See me. Take my hand. I remember that time we [insert your secretest of secrets]".

"Of course that's what a Gabrielle duplicate would say," you reply, sadly. "The duplication process is so perfect! Understand that I have nothing against you. I'm sure you're every bit as wonderful as my deceased friend."

You part ways. Maybe you befriend Gabrielle-duplicate-2 (so very similar to your deceased friend) or maybe the memory of Gabrielle is too painful.

Suppose that teleportation, so-called, becomes even more common -- a fast, economical alternative to jet travel. Maybe it costs $100. (Organic materials are cheap and there are economies of scale; maybe it's also subsidized by the government because it is energy efficient.) Your friends and colleagues teleport to Europe and back, to New York and back, bopping around. You follow slowly and painfully behind, sometimes, in planes. Increasingly, though, plane travel becomes a rare and expensive novelty. You can no longer afford it. People pity you for your old-fashioned ways. For $100, you could see China, Naples, Venus, Mars, the rings of Saturn!

You'll envy them, of course. You'll try to pity them. "Of course, they're all dead, or will be soon, as soon as they take the next 'teleporter trip'. Such pitifully short lives they have. It's sad!" Your heart will not be in this as you say it, though. Their perspective, the experiences they relate, their obvious joy and unconcern, will be too powerfully vivid for you to sustain your metaphysically manufactured pity for any length of time.

Eventually, you'll hop in a teleporter yourself. Maybe part of you will even think it is suicide to do so; but if so, maybe not such a bad suicide? Once you emerge on the other end, you'll think thoughts like "Yesterday, I..." and "When I was a child, I...". Part of you will correct yourself: "That's not correct. I was manufactured just recently!" But it will be hard not to have such self-refential thoughts about the past, and everyone else speaks that way. It will be far more practical to just go along with that way of thinking.

If a few stubborn old metaphysicians are never converted, eventually they'll die off -- like people who used to refuse to be photographed on the grounds that photographs steal away one's soul. Could the anti-photographers have been correct? Does everyone's first baby picture steal away their soul, though no one notices? It makes approximately as much sense to stubbornly insist on to the teleportation-is-death view in the society I've imagined.

If this view makes the metaphysics of survival and personal identity partly about what people think constitutes personal identity and survival -- yes, yes, precisely so!

Am I a Type or a Token? (guest post by Henry Shevlin)

guest post by Henry Shevlin

Eric has previously argued that almost any answer to the problem of consciousness involves “crazyism” – that is, a commitment to one or another hypotheses that might reasonably be considered bizarre. So it’s in this spirit of openness to wild ideas I’d like to throw out one of my own longstanding “crazy” ideas concerning our identity as conscious subjects.

To set the scene, imagine that we have one hundred supercomputers, each separately running a conscious simulation of the same human life. We’re also going to assume that these simulations are all causally coupled together so that they’re in identical functional states at any one time – if a particular mental state type is being realized in one at a given time, it’s also being realized in all the others.

The question I want to ask now is: how many conscious subjects – subjective points of view – exist in this setup? A natural response is “one hundred, obviously!” After all, there are one hundred computers all running their own simulations. But the alternate crazy hypothesis I’d like to suggest is that there’s just one subject in this scenario. Specifically, I want to claim that insofar as two physical realizations of consciousness give rise to a qualitatively identical sequence of experiences, they give rise to a single numerically identical subject of experience.

Call this hypothesis the Identity of Phenomenal Duplicates, or IPD for short. Why would anyone think such a crazy thing? In short, I’m attracted by the idea that the only factors relevant to the identity and individuation of a conscious subject are subjective: crudely, what makes me me is just the way the world seems to me and my conscious reactions to it. As a subject of phenomenal experience, in other words, my numerical identity is fixed just by those factors that are part of my experience, and factors that lie outside my phenomenal awareness (for example, which of many possible computers are running the simulation that underpins my consciousness) are thus irrelevant to my identity.

Putting things another way, I’d suggest that maybe my identity qua conscious subject is more like a type than a token, meaning that a single conscious subject could be multiply instantiated. As a helpful analogy, think about the ontology of something like a song, a novel, or a movie. The Empire Strikes Back has been screened billions of times over the years, but all of these were instantiations of one individual thing, namely the movie itself. If the IPD thesis is correct, then the same might be true for a conscious subject – that I myself (not merely duplicates of me!) could be multiply instantiated across a host of different biological or artificial bodies, even at a single moment. What *I* am, then, on this view, is a kind of subjective pattern or concatenation of such patterns, rather than a single spatiotemporally located object.

Here’s an example that might make the view seem (marginally!) more plausible. Thinking back to the one hundred simulations scenario above, imagine that we pick one simulation at random to be hooked up to a robot body, so that it can send motor outputs to the body and receive its sensory inputs. (Note that because we’re keeping all the simulations coupled together, they’ll remain in ‘phenomenal sync’ with whichever sim we choose to be embodied as a robot). The robot wakes up, looks around, and is fascinated to learn it’s suddenly in the real world, having previously spent its life in a simulation. But now it asks us: which of the Sims am I? Am I the Sim running on the mainframe in Tokyo, or the one in London, or the one in Sao Paolo?

One natural response would be that it was identical to whichever Sim we uploaded the relevant data from. But I think this neglects the fact that all one hundred Sims are causally coupled with one another, so in a sense, we uploaded the data from all of them – we just used one specific access point to get to it. To illustrate this, note that in transferring the relevant information from our Sims to the robot, we might wish (perhaps for reasons of efficiency) to grab the data from all over the place – there’s no reason we’d have to confine ourselves to copying the data over from just one Sim. So here’s an alternate hypothesis: the robot was identical to all of them, because they were all identical to one another – there was just one conscious subject all along! (Readers familiar with Dennett’s Where Am I? may see clear parallels here.)

I find something very intuitive about the response IPD provides in this case. I realize, though, that what I’ve provided here isn’t much of an argument, and invites a slew of questions and objections. For example, even if you’re sympathetic to the reading of the example above, I haven’t established the stronger claim of IPD, which makes no reference to causal coupling. This leaves it open to say, for example, that had the simulations been qualitatively identical by coincidence (for example, via being a cluster of Boltzmann brains) rather than being causally coupled, their subjects wouldn’t have been numerically identical. We might also wonder about beings whose lives are subjectively identical up to a particular point in time, and afterwards diverge. Are they the same conscious subject up until the point of divergence, or were they distinct all along? Finally, there’s also some tricky issues concerning what it means for me to survive in this framework – if I’m a phenomenal type rather than a particular token instantiation of that type, it might seem like I could still exist in some sense even if all my token instances were destroyed (although would Star Wars still exist in some relevant sense if every copy of it was lost?).

Setting aside these worries for now, I’d like to quickly explore how the truth or falsity of IPD might actually matter – in fact, might matter a great deal! Consider a scenario in which some future utilitarian society decides that the best way to maximize happiness in the universe is by running a bunch of simulations of perfectly happy lives. Further, let’s imagine that their strategy for doing this involves simulating the same single exquisitely happy life a billion times over.

If IPD is right, then they’ve just made a terrible mistake: rather than creating a billion happy conscious subjects, they’ve just made one exquisitely happy subject with a billion (hedonically redundant) instantiations! To rectify this situation, however, all they’d need to do would be to introduce an element of variation into their Sims – some small phenomenal or psychological difference that meant that each of the billion simulations was subjectively unique. If IPD is right, this simple change would increase the happiness in the universe a billion-fold.

There are other potential interesting applications of IPD. For example, coupled with a multiverse theory, it might have the consequence that you currently inhabit multiple distinct worlds, namely all those in which there exist entities that realize subjectively and psychologically identical mental states. Similarly, it might mean that you straddle multiple non-continuous areas of space and time: if the same identical simulation is run at time t1 and time t2 a billion years apart, then IPD would suggest that a single subject cohabits both instantiations.

Anyway, while I doubt I’ve convinced anyone (yet!) of this particular crazyism of mine, I hope at least it might provide the basis for some interesting metaphysical arguments and speculations.

[Image credit: Paolo Tonon]

Under What Conditions Would You Upload into a Simulated World?

I have a new science fiction story out in Clarkesworld (text version, audiocast). One of my philosophical aims in that story is to reflect about the conditions under which it would make sense to upload into a simulated world.

"Mind uploading" is the hypothetical process of copying your mind into a computational device. If futurists such as Ray Kurzweil are correct, we might be only a few decades away from mind uploading as a real technological option.

When mind uploading is presented in science fiction, usually the following are assumed:

(1.) The uploaded mind retains all the important psychological features of the original mind (including, of course, a genuine stream of conscious experiences).

(2.) The uploaded mind experiences a world as rich as the world of the original mind. If the mind is uploaded into a robot, that world might just be the same world as the world of the original mind. If the mind is uploaded into a Sim or a Matrix world -- that is, an artificial environment of some sort -- that artificial environment is usually assumed to be as rich and interesting as the mundane environment of everyday Earth for normally embodied humans.

Under these conditions, if we also assume that uploading has substantial advantages in improving longevity, allowing backups, improving one's cognitive powers, or giving oneself access to a new rich vein of experiences and possibilities, then it probably makes sense to upload, unless one is strongly committed to traditional human embodiment or to projects or relationships that would no longer be possible post-upload.

However, it seems natural to suppose that if uploading does someday become possible the first uploads will not have features (1) and (2). The first uploaded people (or "people"), even if genuinely conscious, might be seriously psychologically impaired and unable to access a full, rich world of experiences.

There might, however, still be advantages of uploading in terms of longevity and experienced pleasure.

In "Fish Dance", the narrator is presented with the option of uploading his mind under these conditions:

(a.) the world is tiny: a single dance floor, with no input from the larger world outside;
(b.) his mind is limited: he will have some memories from his pre-uploaded self, but he won't fully understand them, and furthermore he won't be able to lay down new memories that last for more than an hour or so;
(c.) his dance-floor experiences will be extremely pleasurable: ideal experiences of dancing ecstasy;
(d.) he will experience this extreme pleasure for a billion years.

Also relevant, of course, are the relationships and projects that he would be leaving behind. (In our narrator's case, a recently deceased child, a living teenage child who wants him to upload, a stale marriage, and an okay but not inspiring career as a professor.)

I say the relationships and projects "he" will leave behind, but of course one interesting question is whether it makes sense to call the uploaded being "him", that is, the same "him" as the narrator.

If it seems obvious to you what one should do under such conditions, the parameters are of course adjustable: We can increase or decrease psychological function, psychological similarity, and quality of memory. We can increase or decrease the size of the world and the range of available input. We can increase or decrease the pleasure and longevity. We can modify the relationships and projects that would be left behind.

You or your descendants might actually face some version of this decision.

----------------------------------------------

"Fish Dance" (Clarkesworld #118, July 2016)

Related blogpost: Goldfish Pool Immortality (May 30, 2014)

[image source]

The Journal of Unlikely Academia

A month ago, Unlikely Story published my story "The Dauphin's Metaphysics" in their themed issue The Journal of Unlikely Academia.

Some updates:

Lois Tilton -- perhaps the best-known speculative fiction reviewer in the English language -- gave the story one of her "recommended" ratings, and also what is probably one of her longest write-ups in recent years. She concludes:

Speculative fiction and philosophy have more in common than many people might suppose, largely because contemporary philosophy isn't widely known. Issues of mind, identity and memory [the notion of the brain in the vat, for example] have long been shared by both disciplines [if we can consider SF to be disciplined]. I'm quite happy to have found this story here.

I've now had a chance to read the other stories in the themed issue. They are also well written and philosophically interesting.

"Follow Me Down" by Nicolette Barischoff. The story of a midwife of monstrous babies and the incubus who is one of her rebellious favorites. Monsters deserve affection no less than the rest of us, don't they? (interview with Barischoff)

"Minotaur: An Analysis of the Species" by Sean Robinson. Based on interviews with actual minotaurs! E.g. the Stack Beast (Respondent 7): "Look. It’s finals week. Is it my fault that some thesis-fried post-grad takes a wrong turn and finds themselves somewhere that shouldn’t exist? They think they’re looking for reference materials for botany, and the stacks start twisting around them." (interview with Robinson; Appendix C: questionnaires)

"The Librarian's Dilemma" by E. Saxey. There are radical librarians, secretly fighting the system, setting free even books that... well, no spoilers here! (interview with Saxey; other reflections by Saxey)

Soteriology and Stephen Greenwood by Julia August. A mysterious woman approaches an Oxford medievalist with a fragment of a lost Latin prophecy -- academic listservs, snarky politics, suspicions of museum theft, and maybe something darker.... (Stop the Apocalypse; Who's Saving the World?; tumblrweed across the end of the universe)

"And Other Definitions of Family" by Abra Staffin-Wiebe. A prostitute servicing aliens takes xeno-anthropology participant observation to new levels of risk and intimacy. (reflections from Staffin-Wiebe)

"Candidate 45, Pensri Suesat" by Pear Nuallak. A transgender art student in alternative Thailand struggling to fit in with, or maybe escape, the art-school system.

"The Shapes of Us, Translucent to Your Eye" by Rose Lemberg. How corrupt is the academic system at Middlestate U.? So corrupt that Warda's students are becoming translucent. (I'm unsure how common this effect is, since translucent students are systematically undercounted in the administrative rolls.)

My Unlikely Interview came out today. August, Staffin-Wiebe, Nuallak, and Lemberg will presumably have interviews rolled out in coming weeks.

From my interview:

Q.: The Dauphin’s Metaphysics explores a classic and very interesting question -- if you replicate a person’s experiences exactly, can you replicate the person? What makes a person who they are, nature or nurture? It’s a story about characters reinventing themselves in multiple ways. What drew you to this particular question, and to taking the approach to it that you did in this story?

A.: I’d been thinking about “singularity upload” stories, like Greg Egan’s Diaspora, where characters destroy their biological bodies to have their mental patterns instantiated in a computational device. These stories raise fascinating questions about personal identity, but they have an air of unreality about them because they aren’t currently technologically possible, and who knows if they ever will be. (One of the best known skeptics about computer consciousness is John Searle, who was one of my PhD supervisors at Berkeley.)

So I wanted to write an upload story that didn’t require magic or future technology. My father was (among many other things) a licensed hypnotist, and there’s a large psychological literature on how easy it is to implant false childhood memories into people even without hypnosis, so that seemed a natural direction to develop the idea.

The center of the story is the Dauphin’s upload – but I thought it would be interesting to contrast the case of the Dauphin’s putatively being one person across two bodies with another case arguably interpretable as two different identities in a single body. Hence the story of Fu Hao’s radical break from her childhood self. Chemistry Professor Zeng, though not as fully explored, presents a more ordinary case of slow character change over time.

[continued here]

If Memories and Personality Make You "You", Here's How You Could Transfer into Another Body (Maybe)

... with no high technology required!

Step 1: Write extensive memoirs, and have servants constantly follow you around, recording every detail of your life, in painting, story, and song.

Step 2: Drink some hemlock to kill your present body.

Step 3A: Have your servants find a newborn baby. Your servants will be experts in hypnosis, in the induction of "false" memories, and in psychological training. They will induce in the child, as she grows, memories from your past -- not false memories, but veridical, accurate memories! Memories at least as accurate and complete as other people's normal memories of three or ten years ago. With proper suggestion, the growing child will experience the memories from the first-person perspective and think of them as her own.

Step 3B (simultaneous with 3A): Surround the child with institutions designed to convince her -- I mean you -- that she/you really is just the continuation of you in a new body. She will look on all of her induced memories as memories of the old days from her previous body. She will share your name, "remember" your friends and attitudes as her own, be personally proud of your past accomplishments and personally embarrassed by your past failures, identify with your old goals, projects, debts, and obligations. With some luck and good psychological training, the child will grow into an adult who shares the values and attitudes of your old self -- perhaps about as much as normal people retain their values and attitudes over the course of a decade or two.

If she and all of society then say that she really is the re-embodiment of you -- that is, a continuation of the same person over time (only in a new body), as much as your 40-year-old self is normally thought to be a continuation of your 20-year-old self -- would she and all her society be factually, philosophically, metaphysically mistaken? If she isn't really a metaphysically legitimate continuer of you, why not? What would be missing, exactly?

You might say they aren't real memories, because they're the memories of a different person -- but to say that is just to beg the question, assuming the falsity of the very view in dispute.

You might say that personal identity requires strict continuity of body, which she doesn't have with you. But that's to move away from psychological criteria for personal identity, which many people find attractive in hypothetical upload cases, brain transplant cases, and teleporter cases.

This is the topic of my latest science fiction story, "The Dauphin's Metaphysics", now out in the latest issue of Unlikely Story.

Related Posts:

A Somewhat Impractical Plan for Immortality (Apr. 22, 2013)

The Mnemonists (Apr. 22, 2013)

Choosing to Be That Fellow Back Then: Voluntarism about Personal Identity

I have bad news: You're Swampman.

Remember that hike you took last week by the swamp during the electrical storm? Well, one biological organism went in, but a different one came out. The "[your name here]" who went in was struck and killed by lightning. Simultaneously, through freak quantum chance, a molecule-for-molecule similar being randomly congealed from the swamp. Soon after, the recently congealed being ran to a certain parked car, pulling key-shaped pieces of metal from its pocket that by amazing coincidence fit the car's ignition, and drove away. Later that evening, sounds came out of its mouth that its nearby "friends" interpreted as meaning "Wow, that lightning bolt almost hit me in the swamp. How lucky I was!" Lucky indeed, but a much stranger kind of luck than they supposed!

So you're Swampman. Should you care?

Should you think: I came into existence only a week ago. I never had the childhood I thought I had, never did all those things I thought I did, hardly know any of the people I thought I knew! All that is delusion! How horrible!

Or should you think: Meh, whatevs.

[apologies if this doesn't look much like you]

Option 1: Yes, you should care. If it turns out that certain philosophers are correct and you (now) are not metaphysically the same person as that being who first parked the car by the swamp, then O. M. G.!

Option 2a: No, you shouldn't care, because that was just a fun little body exchange last week. The same person went into the swamp as came out. Disappointingly, the procedure didn't seem to clear your acne, though.

Option 2b: No, you shouldn't care, because even if technically you're not the same person as the one who first drove to the swamp, you and that earlier person share everything that matters. Same friends, same job, same values, same (seeming-)memories....

Option 3: Your call. If you choose to regard yourself as one week old, then you are correct in doing so. If you choose to regard yourself as much older than that, then you are equally correct in doing so.

Let's call that third option voluntarism about personal identity. Across a certain range of cases, you are who you choose to be.

Social identities are to a certain extent voluntaristic. You can choose to identify as a political conservative or a political liberal. You can choose to identify, or not identify, with a piece of your ethnic heritage. You can choose to identify, or not identify, as a philosopher or as a Christian. There are limits: If you have no Pakistani heritage or upbringing, you can't just one day suddenly decide to be Pakistani and thereby make it true that you are. Similarly if your heritage and upbringing have been entirely Pakistani to this day, you probably can't just instantly shed your Pakistanihood. But in vague, in-betweenish cases, there's room for choice and making it so.

I propose taking the same approach to personal identity in the stricter metaphysical sense: What makes you the same being, or not, in philosophical puzzle cases where intuitions pull both ways, depends to a substantial extent on how you choose to view the matter; and different people could legitimately arrive at different choices, thus shaping the metaphysical facts (the actual metaphysical facts) to suit them.

Consider some other stock cases from the literature on personal identity:

Teleporter: On Earth there is a device that will destroy your body and beam detailed information about it to Mars. On Mars another device will use that information to create a duplicate body from local materials. Is this harmless teleportation or terrible death-and-duplication? On a voluntaristic view, that would depend on how it is viewed by the participant(s). Also: How similar must the duplicate body be for it a qualify as a successful teleportation? That too, could depend on participant attitude.

Fission: Your brain will be extracted, cut into two, and housed in two new bodies. The procedure, though damaging and traumatic, is such that if only one half of your brain were to be extracted, and the other half destroyed, everyone would agree that you survived. But instead, there will now be two beings, presumably distinct, who both see themselves as "you". Perhaps whether this should count as death or instead as fissioning-with-survival depends on your attitude going in and the attitudes of the beings coming out.

Amnesia: Longevity treatments are developed so that your body won't die, but in four hundred years the resulting being will have no memory whatsoever of anything that happened in your lifetime so far, and if she has similar values and attitudes it will only be by chance. Is that being still "you"? How much amnesia and change can "you" survive without becoming strictly and literally (and not just metaphorically or loosely) a different person? Again, this might depend on the various attitudes about amnesia and identity of the person(s) at different temporal stages.

Here are two thoughts in support of voluntarism about personal identity:

(1.) If I try to imagine these cases as actual, I don't find myself urgently wondering about the resolution of these metaphysical debates, thinking of my very death or survival as turning upon how the metaphysical arguments play out. It's not like being told that if a just-tossed die has landed on 6 then tomorrow I will be shot, which will make me desperately curious about whether the die did land on 6. It seems to me that I can, to some extent, choose how to conceptualize these cases.

(2.) "Person" is an ordinary, folk concept arising from a context lacking Swampman, teleporter, fission, and (that type of) amensia cases, so the concept of personhood might be expected to be somewhat indeterminate in its application to such cases. And since important features of personhood depend in part on the person in question thinking of the past or future self as "me" -- feeling regrets about the past, planning prudently for the future -- such indeterminacy might be partly resolved by the person's own decisions about the boundaries of her regrets, prudential planning, etc.

Even accepting all this, I'm not sure how far I can go with it. I don't think I can decide to be a coffee mug and thereby make it true that I am a coffee mug, nor that I can decide to be one of my students and thereby make it so. Can I decide that I am not that 15-year-old named "Eric" who wore the funny shirts in the 1980s, thereby making it true that I am not really metaphysically the same person, while my sister just as legitimately decides the opposite, that she is the same person as her 15-year-old self? Can the Dalai Lama and some future child (together, but at a temporal distance) decide that they are metaphysically the same person, if enough else goes along with that?

(For a version of that last scenario, see "A Somewhat Impractical Plan for Immortality" (Apr. 22, 2013) and my forthcoming story "The Dauphin's Metaphysics" (available on request).)

Goldfish-Pool Immortality

Must an infinitely continued life inevitably become boring? Bernard William famously answers yes; John Fischer no. Fischer's case is perhaps even more easily made than he suggests -- but its very ease opens up new issues.

Consider Neil Gaiman's story "The Goldfish Pool and Other Stories" (yes, that's the name of one story):

He nodded and grinned. "Ornamental carp. Brought here all the way from China."

We watched them swim around the little pool."I wonder if they get bored."

He shook his head. "My grandson, he's an ichthyologist, you know what that is?"

"Studies fishes."

"Uh-huh. He says they only got a memory that's like thirty seconds long. So they swim around the pool, it's always a surprise to them, going 'I've never been here before.' They meet another fish they known for a hundred years, they say, 'Who are you, stranger?'"

The problem of immortal boredom solved: Just have a bad memory! Then even seemingly un-repeatable pleasures (meeting someone for the first time) become repeatable.

Now you might say, wait, when I was thinking about immortality I wasn't thinking about forgetting everything and doing it again like a stupid goldfish.

To this I answer: Weren't you?

If you were imagining that you were continuing life as a human, you were imagining, presumably, that you had a finite brain capacity. And there's only so much memory you can fit into eighty billion neurons. So of course you're going to forget things, at some point almost everything, and things sufficiently well forgotten could presumably be experienced as fresh again. This is always what is going on with us anyway, to some extent. And this forgetting needn't involve any loss of personal identity, it seems: one's personality and some core memories could always stay the same.

Immortality as an angel or transhuman super-intellect raises the same issues, as long as one's memory is finite.

A new question arises perhaps more vividly now: Is repeating and forgetting the same types of experiences over and over again, infinitely, preferable to doing them once, or twenty times, or a googolplex times? The answer to that question isn't, I think, entirely clear (and maybe even faces metaphysical problems concerning the identity of indiscernibles). My guess, though, is that if you stopped one of the goldfish and said, "Do you want to keep going?", the fish would say, "Yes, this is totally cool, I wonder what's around the corner? Oh, hi, glad to meet you!" Maybe that's a consideration in favor.

Alternatively, you might imagine an infinite memory. But how would that work? What would that be like? Would one become overwhelmed like Funes the Memorious? Would there be a workable search algorithm? Would there be some tagging system to distinguish each memory from infinitely many qualitatively identical other memories? Or maybe you were imagining retaining your humanity but somehow existing non-temporally? I find that even harder to conceive. To evaluate such possibilities, we need a better sense of the cognitive architecture of the immortal mind.

Supposing goldfish-pool immortality would be desirable, would it be better to have, as it were, a large pool -- a wide diversity of experiences before forgetting -- or a small, more selective pool, perhaps one peak experience, repeated infinitely? Would it be better to have small, unremembered variations each time, or would detail-by-detail qualitative identity be just as good?

I've started to lose my grip on what might ground such judgments. However, it's possible that technology will someday make this a matter of practical urgency. Suppose it turns out, someday, that people can "upload" into artificial environments in which our longevity vastly outruns our memorial capacity. What should be the size and shape of our pool?

Update July 4, 2016:

See my new short story on this topic: Fish Dance (Clarkesworld #118, July 2016).

[image source]

Our Moral Duties to Monsters

We might soon be creating monsters, so we'd better figure out our duties to them.

Robert Nozick's Utility Monster derives 100 units of pleasure from each cookie she eats. Normal people derive only 1 unit of pleasure. So if our aim is to maximize world happiness, we should give all our cookies to the monster. Lots of people would lose out on a little bit of pleasure, but the Utility Monster would be really happy!

Of course this argument generalizes beyond cookies. If there were a being in the world vastly more capable of pleasure and pain than are ordinary human beings, then on simple versions of happiness-maximizing utilitarian ethics, the rest of us ought to immiserate ourselves to push it up to superhuman pinnacles of joy.

Now, if artificial consciousness is possible, then maybe it will turn out that we can create Utility Monsters on our hard drives. (Maybe this is what happens in R. Scott Bakker's and my story Reinstalling Eden.)

Two questions arise:

(1.) Should we work to create artificially conscious beings who are capable of superhuman heights of pleasure? On the face of it, it seems like a good thing to do, to bring beings capable of great pleasure into the world! On the other hand, maybe we have no general obligation to bring happy beings into the world. (Compare: Many people think we have no obligation to increase the number of human children even if we think they would be happy.)

(2.) If we do create such beings, ought we immiserate ourselves for their happiness? It seems unintuitive to say that we should, but I can also imagine a perspective on which it makes sense to sacrifice ourselves for superhumanly great descendants.

The Utility Monster can be crafted in different ways, possibly generating different answers to (1) and (2). For example, maybe simple sensory pleasure (a superhumanly orgasmic delight in cookies) wouldn't be enough to compel either (1) creation or (2) if creation sacrifice. But maybe "higher" pleasures, such as great aesthetic appreciation or great intellectual insight, would. Indeed, if artificial intelligence plays out right, then maybe whatever it is about us that we think gives our lives value, we can artificially duplicate it a hundredfold inside machines of the right type (maybe biological machines, if digital computers won't do).

You might think, as Nozick did, and as Kantian critics of utilitarianism sometimes do, that we can dodge utility monster concerns by focusing on the rights of individuals. Even if the Monster would get 100 times as much pleasure from my cookie as I would, it's my cookie; I have a right to it and no moral obligation to give it to her.

But similar issues arise if we allow Fission/Fusion Monsters. If we say "one conscious intelligence, one vote", then what happens when I create a hundred million conscious intelligences in my computer? If we say "one unemployed consciousness, one cookie from the dole", then what happens if my Fission/Fusion Monster splits into a hundred million separate individual unemployed conscious beings, collects its cookies, and then in the next tax year merges back into a single cookie-rich being? A Fission/Fusion Monster could divide at will into many separate individuals, each with a separate claim to rights and privileges as an individual; and then whenever convenient, if the group so chose (or alternatively via some external trigger), fuse back together into a single massively complex individual with first-person memories from all its predecessors.

(See also: Our Possible Imminent Divinity.)

[image source]

Skepticism, Godzilla, and the Artificial Computerized Many-Branching You

Nick Bostrom has argued that we might be sims. A technologically advanced society might use hugely powerful computers, he says, to run "ancestor simulations" containing actually conscious people who think they are living, say, on Earth in the early 21st century but who in fact live entirely inside an advanced computational system. David Chalmers has considered a similar possibility in his well-known commentary on the movie The Matrix.

Neither Bostrom nor Chalmers is inclined to draw skeptical conclusions from this possibility. If we are living in a giant sim, they suggest, that sim is simply our reality: All the people we know still exist (they're sims just like us) and the objects we interact with still exist (fundamentally constructed from computational resources, but still predictable, manipulable, interactive with other such objects, and experienced by us in all their sensory glory). However, it seems quite possible to me that if we are living in a sim, it might well be a small sim -- one run by a child, say, for entertainment. We might live for three hours' time on a game clock, existing mainly as citizens who will give entertaining reactions when, to their surprise, Godzilla tromps through. Or it might be just me and my computer and my room, in an hour-long sim run by a scientist interested in human cognition about philosophical problems.

Bostrom has responded that to really evaluate the case we need a better sense of what are more likely vs. less likely simulation scenarios. One large-sim-friendly thought is this: Maybe the most efficient way to create simulated people is to evolve up a large scale society over a long period of (sim-clock) time. Another is this: Maybe we should expect a technologically advanced society capable of running sims to have enforceable ethical standards against running small sims that contain actually conscious people.

However, I don't see compelling reason to accept such (relatively) comfortable thoughts. Consider the possibility I will call the Many-Branching Sim.

Suppose it turns out the best way to create actually conscious simulated people is to run a whole simulated universe forward billions of years (sim-years on the simulation clock) from a Big Bang, or millions of years on an Earth plus stars, or thousands of years from the formation of human agriculture -- a large-sim scenario. And suppose that some group of researchers actually does this. Consider, now, a second group of researchers who also want to host a society of simulated people. It seems they have a choice: Either they could run a new sim from the ground up, starting at the beginning and clocking forward, or they could take a snapshot of one stage of the first group's sim and make a copy. Which would be more efficient? It's not clear: It depends on how easy it is to take and store a snapshot and implement it on another device. But on the face of it, I don't see why we ought to suppose that copying would take more time or more computational resources than evolving a sim up from ground.

Consider the 21st century game Sim City. If you want a bustling metropolis, you can either grow one from scratch or you can use one of the many copies created by the programmers or users. Or you could grow one from scratch and then save stages of it on your computer, shutting the thing down when things don't go the way you like and starting again from a save point; or you could make copied variants of the same city that grow in different directions.

The Many-Branching Sim scenario is the possibility that there is a root sim that is large and stable, starting from some point in the deep past, and then this root sim was copied into one or more branch sims that start from a save point. If there are many branch sims, it might be that I am in one of them, rather than in a root sim or a non-branching sim. Maybe one company made the root sim for Earth, took a snapshot in November 2013 on the sim clock, then sold thousands or millions of copies to researchers and computer gamers who now run short-term branch sims for whatever purposes they might have. In such a scenario, the future of the branch sim in which I am living might be rather short -- a few minutes or hours or years. The past might be conceptualized either as short or as long, depending on whether the past in the root sim counts as "this world's" past.

Issues of personal identity arise. If the snapshot of the root sim was taken at root sim clock time November 1, 2013, then the root sim contains an "Eric Schwitzgebel" who was 45 years old at the time. The branch sims would also contain many other "Eric Schwitzgebels" developing forward from that point, of which I would be one. How should I think of my relationship to those other Erics? Should I take comfort in the fact that some of them will continue on to full and interesting lives (perhaps of very different sorts) even if most of them, including probably this particular instantiation of me, now in a hotel in New York City, will soon be stopped and deleted? Or to the extent I am interested in my own future rather than merely the future of people similar to me, should I be concerned primarily about what is happening in this particular branch sim? As Godzilla steps down on me, shall I try to take comfort in the possibility that the kid running the show will delete this copy of the sim after he has enjoyed viewing the rampage, then restart from a save point with New York intact? Or would deleting this branch be the destruction of my whole world?

Being Two People at Once, with the Help of Linda Nagata

In the world of Linda Nagata's Nanotech Succession, you can be two people at once. And whether you are in fact two people at once, I'd suggest, depends on the attitude each part takes toward the splitting-fusing process.

"Two people at once" isn't how Nagata puts it. In her terminology, one being, the original person, continues in standard embodied form, while another being, a "ghost" -- inhabits some other location, typically someone else's "atrium". Suppose you want to have an intimate conversation long-distance. In Nagata's world, you can do it like this: Create a duplicate of your entire psychology (memories, personality traits, etc. -- for the sake of argument, let's allow that this can be done) and transfer that information to someone else. The recipient then implements your psychology in a dedicated processing space, her atrium. At the same time, your physical appearance is overlaid upon the recipient's sensory inputs. To her (though to no one else around) it will look like you are in the room. The person hosting you in her atrium will then interact with you, for example by saying "Hi, long time no see!" Her speech will be received as inputs to the virtual ghost-you in her atrium, and this ghost-you will react in just the same way you would react, for example by saying "You haven't aged a bit!" and stepping forward for a hug. Your host will then experience that speech overlaid on her auditory inputs, your bodily movement overlaid on her visual inputs, and the warmth of your hug overlaid on her tactile inputs. She will react accordingly, and so forth.

The ghost in the atrium will, of course, consciously experience all this (no Searlean skepticism about conscious AI here). When the conversation is over, the atrium will be emptied and the full memory of these experiences will be messaged back to the original you. The original you -- which meanwhile has been having its own stream of experiences -- will accept the received memories as autobiographical. The newly re-merged you, on Earth, will remember that conversation you had on Mars, which occurred on the same day you were also busy doing lots of other things on Earth.

If you know the personal identity literature in philosophy, you might think of instantiating the ghost as a "fission" case -- a case in which one person splits into two different people, similar to the case of having each hemisphere of your brain is transplanted separately into a different body, or the case of stepping into a transporter on Earth and having copies of you emerge simultaneously on Mars and Venus to go their separate ways ever after. Philosophers usually suppose that such fissions produce two distinct identities.

The Nagata case is different. You fission, and both of the resulting fission products know they are going to merge back together again; and then once they do merge, both strands of the history are regarded equally as part of your autobiography. The merged entity regards itself as being responsible for the actions of the split-off ghost -- can be embarrassed by its gaffes, held to its promises, and prosecuted for its crimes, and it will act out the ghost's decisions without needing to rethink them.

Contrast assimilation into the Borg of the Star Trek universe. The Borg, a large group entity, absorbs the memories of various assimilated beings (like individual human beings). But the Borg treats the personal history of the assimilated being non-autobiographically -- for example without accepting responsibility for the assimilated entity's past actions and plans.

What makes the difference between an identity-preserving fission-and-merge and an identity-breaking fission-and-merge is, I propose, the entities' implicit and explicit attitudes about the merge. If pre-fission I think "I am going to be Eric Schwitzgebel, in two places", and then in the fissioned state I think "I am here but another copy of me is also running elsewhere", and then after fusion I think "Both of those Eric Schwitzgebels are equally part of my own past" -- and if I also implicitly accept all this, e.g., by not feeling compelled to rethink one Eric Schwitzgebel's decisions more than the other's -- and perhaps especially if the rest of society shares my view of these matters, then I have been one entity in two places.

To see that this is really about the content of the relevant attitudes and not about, say, the kind of continuity of memory, values, and personality usually emphasized in psychological approaches to personal identity, consider what would happen if I had a very different attitude toward ghosts. If I saw the ghost as a mere slave distinct from me, then during the split my ghost might be thinking "damn, I'm only a ghost and my life will expire at the end of this conversation"; and after the merge, I'll tend to think of my ghost's behaviors as not really having been my own, despite my memories of those behaviors from a first-person point of view. The ghost will not bothered having made decisions or promises intending to bind me, knowing I would not accept them as my own if he did. And I'll be embarrassed by the ghost's behavior not in the same way I would be embarrassed by my own behavior but instead in something like the way I would be embarrassed by a child's or employee's behavior -- especially, perhaps, if the ghost does something that I wouldn't have done in light of its knowledge that, being merely a ghost, it would imminently die. The metaphysics of identity will thus turn upon the participant beings' attitudes about what preserves identity.

Synchronized Movement and the Self-Other Boundary

I'm traveling around Britain. (Oxford, Bristol, Birmingham, Edinburgh, and St Andrews so far, Sheffield and Bristol again tomorrow and the day after.) I have some post ideas, but I'm too worn out to trust my judgment that I'll do them right, so I'm going to exert the long-time blogger's privilege of reposting something from ancient days -- 2007! Jonathan Haidt and the rubber hand illusion aren't as cutting-edge in 2013 as they were in 2007, but still....

.......................................

I've been reading The Happiness Hypothesis, by Jonathan Haidt -- one of those delightful books pitched to the non-specialist, yet accurate and meaty enough to be of interest to the specialist -- and I was struck by Haidt's description of historian William McNeill's work on synchronized movement among soliders and dancers:

Words are inadequate to describe the emotion aroused by the prolonged movement in unison that [military] drilling involved. A sense of pervasive well-being is what I recall; more specifically, a strange sense of personal enlargement; a sort of swelling out, becoming bigger than life, thanks to participation in collective ritual (McNeill 1997, p. 2).

Who'd have thought endless marching on the parade-grounds could be so fulfilling?

I am reminded of work by V.S. Ramachandran on the ease with which experimenters can distort the perceived boundaries of a subject's body. For example:

Another striking instance of a 'displaced' body part can be demonstrated by using a dummy rubber hand. The dummy hand is placed in front of a vertical partition on a table. The subject places his hand behind the partition so he cannot see it. The experimenter now uses his left hand to stroke the dummy hand while at the same time using his right hand to stroke the subject's real hand (hidden from view) in perfect synchrony. The subject soon begins to experience the sensations as arising from the dummy hand (Blotvinick and Cohen 1998) (Ramachandran and Hirstein 1998, p. 1623).

Also:

The subject sits in a chair blindfolded, with an accomplice sitting in front of him, facing the same direction. The experimenter then stands near the subject, and with his left hand takes hold of the subject's left index finger and uses it to repeatedly and randomly to [sic] tap and stroke the nose of the accomplice while at the same time, using his right hand, he taps and strokes the subject's nose in precisely the same manner, and in perfect synchrony. After a few seconds of this procedure, the subject develops the uncanny illusion that his nose has either been dislocated or has been stretched out several feet forwards, demonstrating the striking plasticity or malleability of our body image (p. 1622).

So here's my thought: Maybe synchronized movement distorts body boundaries in a similar way: One feels the ground strike one's feet, repeatedly and in perfect synchrony with seeing other people's feet striking the ground. One does not see one's own feet. If Ramachandran's model applies, repeatedly receiving such feedback might bring one to (at least start to) see those other people's feet as one's own -- explaining, in turn, the phenomenology McNeill reports. Perhaps then it is no accident that armies and sports teams and dancing lovers practice moving in synchrony, causing a blurring of the experienced boundary between self and other?

My Boltzmann Continuants

Lightning strikes me and I die. Fortunately (let's suppose), the universe is infinite and consciousness supervenes on the arrangement of molecules in one's body. So somewhere in my forward light cone -- maybe in about a double-boggle years [note 1], arises an enduring, Earthly, Boltzmann continuant of me.

A Boltzmann continuant for Person X at time T is, I stipulate, any being that, at time T-prime, arises suddenly from disorganized chaos, into a entity particle-for-particle identical to Person X at time T, within an error range of a thousandth of a Planck length. [note 2] A Boltzmann continuant is enduring just in case it survives in human-like form for at least one day. A Boltzmann continuant is Earthly just in case it exists in an environment that, at time T-prime, is particle-for-particle similar to Earth at T, within a range of 10,000 light years, and obeys the same laws of nature -- except allowing for minor differences in features that had not been observed before time T but would be plausible epistemic possibilities to human observers, such as the unobserved top of a cloud twisting one way rather than another, an unobserved flower in the Sierra being one centimeter to the left, differences in the details of how storms play out on distant planets, etc.

According to mainstream physics (back to Ludwig Boltzmann), there is an extremely tiny but finite chance that such an enduring, Earthly, Boltzmann continuant of me could arise. So if the universe exists long enough and doesn't settle into some inescapable loop, presumably I will eventually have a Boltzmann continuant.

By hypothesis, my Boltzmann continuant is not killed by the lightning strike; he survives at least one day. Maybe he survives a near miss with lightning. By hypothesis, my Boltzmann continuant will have the same arrangement of molecules in his body at time T-prime as I do at time T; and since the environment is Earthly, presumably things will proceed fairly normally from time T-prime forward, despite the chaos before time T-prime. By hypothesis, consciousness supervenes on the arrangement of molecules, so presumably my Boltzmann continuant will have conscious experiences very much like the ones I would have had if I had not been struck by the lightning. Maybe my continuant will have an episode of thinking to himself something like "Wow, that lightning struck close! I'd better get inside!" [note 3]

Earth is a pretty safe and stable place. So too, then, is continuant-Earth. My continuant returns "home", greets the continuant versions of his family, comes to the continuant version of his office, works on a post for the continuant version of The Splintered Mind. I have no future. He has no past. But we hook together seamlessly into one "Eric Schwitzgebel" with an undetectable double-boggle-year gap between us. Call the entity or quasi-entity composed of these two parts gappy-Eric.

In a way, it would be odd to think it mattered hugely that there is such a gap between these two half-Eric Schwitzgebels. From the inside, gappy-Eric will feel just like he's a continuous, Earthly Eric Schwitzgebel. From the outside, too, at least through the next 10,000 years, no one on continuant-Earth will have cause to suspect a gap in Eric or in the world. Gappy-Eric's family life, his professional life, the whole planet -- all would seem the same, all would seem to continue unabated. Continuant-existence would seem to be survival enough.

Of course, I needn't be struck by lightning for there to be enduring, Earthly, Boltzmann continuants of me. If we accept the that the universe is infinite, diverse, and subject to Boltzmannian chances, then every time slice of me will have an infinite number of enduring, Earthly, Boltzmann continuants somewhere in the future. So I needn't fear any early, chancy death: Some appropriate Boltzmann continuant of me will launch at precisely the right subjective moment to continue me seamlessly. Gappy-Eric lives! In some cases, going back a few seconds might be necessary to find an appropriate time T from which my death was not inevitable in any Earthly environment, but it seems like quibbling to think those few seconds make a huge ontological difference.

With infinitely many continuants of me, sprouting off from every moment of my life, whose continuant-bodies on continuant-Earth are for practical purposes as good a continuation of me as is my own body on Earth, maybe I shouldn't care about my individual death at all, in any circumstances -- or rather maybe I should care about it only as the loss of one soldier in an infinite army of me.

Yes, this is entirely bonkers.

[revised Nov. 19, 2014]

-----------------------------------------------------

[note 1]: The number of particles in the observable universe is estimated at about 10^80. Maybe 10^75-ish of those are within 10,000 light years of us. To have enough particles suddenly conform to the structure described in the next paragraph from a previous state of chaos (rather than in some more normal-seeming way) might require a very long time -- longer, perhaps, than the Poincare recurrence time of the observable universe. If 10^100 is a googol and 10^10^100 is a googolplex, let's call a "boggle" 10^10^... [repeated a googolplex times] ...^100. A "double-boggle", then, could be 10^10^... [repeated a boggle times] ...^100. I'm hoping that's big enough.

[note 2]: I assume that differences of less than a thousandth of a Planck length don't matter to consciousness. If necessary, we can narrow the error range. If we use an ontology of fields, presumably an error measure similiar in spirit could be developed. There will also be an issue about temporal spread -- perhaps more serious if consciousness spreads across a specious present. If necessary, there could be a brief period during which consciousness slips into the Boltzmann continuant before full supervenience takes hold.

[note 3]: The question arises whether the continuant's thoughts would have that meaning, if the meaning of words depends on facts about learning history; but given our stipulations, at least the continuant's conscious experience of that episode of inner speech will be like mine would have been, even if it doesn't tack down its reference in the external world in quite the right way.

SarahAbraham

Through a harmony of dendrites, Sarah came to feel touch upon Abraham’s skin. They were waltzing upon the beach, Ishbak on the immutable piano, and a frond brushed Abraham’s back. Sarah felt the frond as though on her own back. She caressed Abraham’s left shoulder and felt the caress as though upon her own shoulder. Abraham’s right hand was touching the skin under Sarah’s arm, and Sarah felt not only his fingers there in the usual way, but also a new complement: the smoothness of her ribs upon her own right hand. She had been feeling that smoothness for a while, she realized, intermingled with the more familiar touch of Abraham’s left hand upon her right as they danced.

They danced three songs in this manner, then lay together upon the sand. Sarah touched the back of her neck with a twig and saw Abraham scratch his own neck. They made love in a new way.

Sarah gazed upon Abraham as he observed the sky. She called to Ishbak and Midian. Sarah and Abraham lay face down upon blankets while the sons of Keturah touched their backs, and Sarah learned to distinguish Abraham’s sensations from her own. She now had two backs, two bodies.

Through a harmony of retinas, Sarah came to see through Abraham’s eyes. At first, it was a faint tint upon her field of view – her own form, maybe, bent toward the fire pit, as Abraham watched her from the side, her figure like a wraith upon the fire that she more vividly saw. The wraith was jumpy, unpredictable; she could not fully guess Abraham’s saccades as his eyes gathered the scene. Over days, the visions livened and settled. Sarah did not know if she merely learned better to anticipate Abraham’s eye movements or if she instead also gained partial control.

[for the second half of this story, email me at eschwitz at domain: ucr.edu]

The Tyrant's Headache

When the doctors couldn’t cure the Tyrant’s headache, he called upon the philosophers. “Show me some necessary condition for having a headache, which I can defeat!”

The philosophers sent forth the great David K. Lewis in magician’s robes....

[See the remainder of this story here. Hint: It doesn't have a happy ending.]

A Somewhat Impractical Plan for Immortality

... and arguably evil, too, though let's set that aside.

My plan requires the truth of a psychological theory of personal identity, a "vehicle externalist" account of memory, and some radical social changes. But it requires no magic or computer technology, and arguably we could actually implement it.

Psychological theory of personal identity. Most philosophers think that personal identity over time is grounded by something psychological . Twenty-year-old you and forty-year-old you are (or will be) the same person because of some psychological linkage over time -- maybe continuity of memory, maybe some other sort of counterfactual-supporting causal connectedness between psychological states over time. Maybe traits, values, plans, and projects come into the picture, too. In practice, people don't have the right kind of psychological connectedness without having biological bodily continuity. But that, perhaps, is merely a contingent fact about us.

Vehicle externalism about memory. What is memory? If a madman thinks he is Napoleon remembering Waterloo, he does not remember Waterloo, even if by chance he happens upon exactly the same memory images as Napoleon himself had later in life. Memory requires, it seems, the right kind of causal connectedness to the original event. But need the relevant causal connectedness be entirely interior to the skull? Vehicle externalists about memory say no, there is nothing sacred about the brain-environment boundary. External objects can hold, or partly hold, our memories, if they are hooked up to us with the right kind of reliable causal chains. Consider Andy Clark's and David Chalmers's delightful short paper on Otto, whose ever-available notebook serves as part of his mind; or consider a science-fiction case in which part one's memory is temporarily transferred onto a computer chip and then later recovered.

Implementation. Could one's temporary memory reservoir be another person? I don't see why not, on a vehicle externalist account. And could the memories -- and the values and projects and whatever else is essential to personal identity -- then be transferred into another human body, for example, over the course of a decade or two into the body of a newborn baby as she grows up? I don't see why not, if we accept at least somewhat liberal versions of all the premises so far, and if we assume the most excellent possible shaping of that child.

By formatting a new child with your memories, your personality, your values, your projects, your loves, your hopes and regrets, you could thus continue into a new body. Presumably, you could continue this process indefinitely, taking a new body every fifty years or so.

As I said, a madman's dream of being Napoleon is no continuation of Napoleon. But the situation would be very different from that. There would be no madness. The memories would have well-preserved causal traces back to the original events; the crucial functional role of memory, to save those traces, would be perserved; everything would be held steadily in place by the person or people implementing this plan on your behalf, as a stable network of correctly functioning cognitive processes. And the result would be not just something on paper or in a memory chip but a consciously experienced memory image, felt by its owner to be a real authentic memory of the original event.

This could, it seems, be done with existing technology, using clever mnemonic and psychological techniques. One would need mnemonists who knew everything possible about you, who observed the same events and shared your same memories, and who were exceptionally skilled at preserving this information and transferring it to the child. The question then would be whether it would be true that the child, when she grew up, would really be you, with your authentic memories, instead of a mad Napoleon. And the answer to that question depends when whether certain theories of personal identity and memory are true. If the right theories are indeed true, then immortality -- or rather, longevity potentially in perpetuity -- would be possible for sufficiently wealthy and powerful people now, if they only chose to implement it.

I have written a story about this: The Mnemonists.

The Mnemonists

[This is a draft of a short story. See here for explicit discussion of the philosophical idea behind the story.]

[Revised April 23]

When he was four years old, my Oligarch wandered away from his caretakers to gaze into an oval fountain. At sixteen, he blushingly refused the kiss he had so desperately longed for. A week before his death, he made plans (which must now be postponed) to visit an old friend in Lak-Blilin. I, his mnemonist, have internalized all this. I remember it just as he does, see the same images, feel the same emotions as he does in remembering those things. I have adopted his attitudes, absorbed his personality. My whole life is arranged to know him as perfectly as one person can know another. My first twenty years I learned the required arts. Since then, I have concentrated on nothing but the Oligarch.

My Oligarch knows that to hide from me is to obliterate part of himself. He whispers to me his most shameful thoughts. I memorize the strain on his face as he defecates; I lay my hands on his tensing stomach. When my Oligarch forces himself on his friend’s daughter, I press against him in the dark. I feel the girl’s breasts as he does. I forget my sex and hallucinate his ejaculation.

At my fiftieth birthday, my Oligarch toasts me, raising and then drinking down his fine crystal cup of hemlock. As he dies, I study his face. I mimic his last breath. A newborn baby boy is brought and my second task begins.

By age three, the boy has absorbed enough of the Oligarch’s identity to know that he is the Oligarch now again, in a new body. A new apprentice mnemonist joins us now, waiting in the shadows. At age four, the Oligarch finally visits his friend in Lak-Blilin, apologizing for the long delay. He begins to berate his advisors as he always had, at first clumsily, in a young child’s vocal register. He comes to take the same political stands, comes to dispense the same advice. I am ever at his side helping in all this, the apprentice mnemonist behind me; his trust in us is instant and absolute. At age eight, the Oligarch understands enough to try to apologize to his friend’s daughter – though he also notices her hair again in the same way, so good am I.

My Oligarch boy does not intentionally memorize his old life. He recalls it with assistance. Just as I might suggest to you a memory image, wholly fake, of a certain view of the sea with ragged mountains and gulls, which you then later mistake for a real memory image from your own direct experience, so also are my suggestions adopted by the Oligarch, but uncritically and with absolutely rigorous sincerity on both sides. The most crucial memory images I paint and voice and verbally elaborate. Sometimes I brush my fingers or body against him to better convey the feel, or flex his limbs, or ride atop him, narrating. I give him again the oval fountain. I give him again the refused kiss.

A madman’s dream of being Napoleon is no continuation of Napoleon. But here there is no madness. My Oligarch’s memories have continuous properly-caused traces back to the original events, his whole psychology continued by a stable network of processes, as he well knows. His plans and passions, commitments and obligations, legal contracts, attitudes and resolutions, vengeances, thank-yous and regrets – all are continued without fail, if temporarily set aside through infancy as though through sleep.

The boy, now eleven, is only middling bold, though in previous form, my Oligarch had been among the boldest in the land. I renew my stories of bold heroes, remind him of his long habit of boldness, subtly condition and reinforce him. I push the boundaries of acceptable technique. Though I feel the dissonance sharply, the boy does not. He knows who he is. He feels he has only changed his mind.

[continued here]