Subject: Re: [extropy-chat] Personal Identity Bis

From: Eugen Leitl <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 11 Apr 2007 14:19:20 +0200

On Wed, Apr 11, 2007 at 09:59:23PM +1000, Stathis Papaioannou wrote:

>    A flat EEG that *stays* flat permanently means death. Patients can
>    have a flat EEG due to eg. hypothermia and still recover fully. Would
>    you say that these people have died and should attend their erstwhile
>    selves' funeral?

Yes, Slawomir is religious that way. The world is full of zombies.

-- 
Eugen* Leitl <a href="http://leitl.org">leitl</a> http://leitl.org
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From: Eugen Leitl <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 11 Apr 2007 15:35:16 +0200

On Wed, Apr 11, 2007 at 09:20:27AM -0400, Heartland wrote:

> I'm not the one believing in afterlife here, Eugen. I don't believe in existence of 

But you're the one seeing dead people.  

Walking around like regular people. They don't see each other. 
They only see what they want to see. They don't know they're dead.
All the time. They're everywhere.

> a soul that consists of a holy collection of static data specifying person's 
> memories, beliefs and values. I don't believe that installing this soul into some 
> hardware brings back people to life. Now, that would be an example of a faith-based 
> view. :)

---

From: "Stathis Papaioannou" <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 11 Apr 2007 23:45:28 +1000

On 4/11/07, Heartland <[email-masked]> wrote:

> Stathis:
> >> Well, I partly agree with you. I consider that ordinary life
> >> (without the interfering aliens) is exactly equivalent to dying not
> >> just every second, but every moment. The Stathis-type persists while
> >> the Stathis-instance lives only transiently: the observer moments.
> >> (Bernard Williams' "token" as discussed in Derek Parfit's "Reasons
> >> and Persons" is roughly equivalent to what you are calling an
> >> instance.) Each instance is defined by a particular collection of
> >> matter in space-time, the next instance in sequence having at least
> >> different space-time coordinates and usually different matter in a
> >> different configuration.
>
> I would say that each instance refers to a process; a spatiotemporal
> energy
> configuration.
>
> I'm not sure what you mean by "observer moments" here or why you think
> instances
> could be delineated from moment to moment and that they occur in
> sequences. While
> each instance has a beginning and end, there's no limit on how long it
> should last,
> is there?
>

An observer moment, sometimes hyphenated as observer-moment or abbreviated
as OM, is the smallest possible unit of experience. I believe the term was
originated by Nick Bostrom. You can make it more concrete by talking about
observer seconds or observer days or whatever. It eliminates ambiguity in
these discussions about personal identity because we can always point to a
specific collection of matter and say, "that's the entity with
Heartland-type memories in New York at 5:15 PM on March 5 2006" and "that's
the entity with Heartland-type memories in London at 3:02 AM on April 5
2006", and then argue about whether they are "the same person" or whether
"Heartland has survived" during the intervening month. This is not to say
that there are necessarily physiological distinctions between different
OM's; the scale is arbitrary, like any scale of time or distance. However,
just thinking about the different stages of a person's life this way raises
questions about the meaning of death and continuity of identity.

Now, I must admit I am a little confused about your notion of instance and
type. If a person undergoes destructive teleportation, would you say that
the procedure creates two separate instances of the one type? I would say
that ordinary life consists of many, many instances merging seamlessly into
one type, and introducing a discontinuity such as teleportation doesn't make
any difference.

Stathis Papaioannou

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From: "Russell Wallace" <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 11 Apr 2007 19:20:04 +0100

On 4/11/07, John K Clark <[email-masked]> wrote:
>
> Russell Wallace
>
> > We're programmed to believe personal power confers selective advantage,
> > because it was true in the conditions in which we evolved - but even
> > though we still believe it because we're programmed to, it's no longer
> > true.
>
> No longer true?! It I'm more powerful than you that means I can do things
> you can't, and that gives me an advantage over you.

But not an evolutionary advantage. What's your evolutionary fitness?

People who have a
> superstition against radical upgrades are going to get hammered by those
> who
> don't have that prejudice.

So if you acquire the wherewithal, are you planning to go around "hammering"
people who hold the belief in question? What are you planning to do, beat
them up? Machine gun them to death? Gas them? Zap them with unobtainium?

Yes it is a story, but what is your point? Stories are a good thing, stories
> are how we understand the way the world works.

Sure. My point is merely that there are times when it's important to remind
ourselves of the difference between stories and reality.

So we're back to that "friendly AI" nonsense. The AI is going to do what it
> wants to do and it will not care if you "tolerate" it or not. You won't be
> able to command it and you won't be able to trick it because you can't
> outthink something smarter than you are.
>

Except that AI doesn't presently exist, it isn't going to exist unless
people build it, and nobody rational enough to be capable of contributing to
the field is going to build an AI that can't be controlled and whose motives
are destructive.
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From: Eugen Leitl <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 11 Apr 2007 20:39:59 +0200

On Wed, Apr 11, 2007 at 11:17:56AM -0700, Lee Corbin wrote:

> Here, however, your definition of death is very interesting, and is not all

Calling it interesting is being charitable. Believing in dead people
walking the earth is rather strange.

> in keeping with medical practice. Sometimes people's EEGs do go quiet
> for a few seconds, but then the system gets kickstarted again.  At least

Try minutes, or half a day in a controlled setting. With cryonics,
the lacune is effectively infinite.

> that's what I've heard.  In cryonics, a boy was once rescued who had
> been underwater for 45 minutes, with heart stopped (and probably with
> flat EEG). But he came to.

---

From: Eugen Leitl <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 11 Apr 2007 20:54:09 +0200

>    But not an evolutionary advantage. What's your evolutionary fitness?

The fitness delta of machine-phase systems to biology is so large it's
a qualitative difference. 
 
>    So if you acquire the wherewithal, are you planning to go around
>    "hammering" people who hold the belief in question? What are you
>    planning to do, beat them up? Machine gun them to death? Gas them? Zap
>    them with unobtainium?

Do you know what your successors in 3000 years will do? Will you vouch
for them?
 
>    Sure. My point is merely that there are times when it's important to
>    remind ourselves of the difference between stories and reality.

Going to the Moon was just a story once.
 
>    people build it, and nobody rational enough to be capable of

Evolution is not especially rational, but rather capable.

>    contributing to the field is going to build an AI that can't be
>    controlled and whose motives are destructive.

You can't control persons. Destructive is in the eye of the observer,
would you prefer Earth would have been mothballed at the prebiotic stage?

We primate bauplan people do not play in the same league of what
will come after us. The future is strange and wild. Human it is not.

---

From: Eugen Leitl <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 11 Apr 2007 21:08:33 +0200

On Wed, Apr 11, 2007 at 06:25:56PM +0100, BillK wrote:

> Depends on whether you think that a transhumanist list should be a
> marketing vehicle for commercial companies selling cryonics.

There is no money in cryonics. 
There is no money in cryonics.
There is no money in cryonics.

---

From: Eugen Leitl <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 11 Apr 2007 21:34:38 +0200

On Wed, Apr 11, 2007 at 04:50:07PM +0100, Russell Wallace wrote:

>    Selection? Look at the statistics: selection favors those who eschew
>    this geek stuff completely. We're programmed to believe personal power

Tools are irrelevant?! Why are we exterminating the gorilla then, and
not gorilla us?

>    confers selective advantage, because it was true in the conditions in
>    which we evolved - but even though we still believe it because we're
>    programmed to, it's no longer true.

It doesn't matter what we believe, the great fitness function evaluates
us all.

>    As for why it's not worth considering: it's a story. We make up
>    stories for ourselves for our own reasons. Sometimes we set them in
>    "the future", but when the actual future comes around, it practically
>    never resembles our stories; once you go beyond such predictions as
>    "computers will be more powerful in ten years than they are today",
>    futurology has a lower track record of success than you'd expect from
>    random chance. As soon as someone says "the future will be like X",
>    it's a reasonably safe bet that whatever the future actually ends up
>    like, it won't be X.

"Evolution will still apply in future". That's completely reasonable,
and a powerful source of constraints.

>    In this case it's not even a particularly plausible story: if you get
>    "IQ 12000" (scare quotes because the phrase doesn't actually mean
>    anything, IQ isn't defined much past 200 or so), are you going to go
>    berserk and start massacring everyone? (That, after all, is what the

A diverse population of postbiological beings could very well be terminal
to conventional ecosystems. Pretending it never can be is not good risk
evaluation, given the magnitude of the outcome. 

>    elimination of other viewpoints in a timescale as short as a century
>    implies.) Are you even going to tolerate such behavior in others? Even

Kiloyears are overnight wall clock.

>    if you are, nobody else is. Nobody with any political power wants the
>    existence of a handful of people a zillion times smarter than anyone

Not necessarily smarter, DIVERSE and FIT.

>    else. The world isn't going to tolerate the creation or existence of
>    superintelligent entities unless they behave like respectable
>    citizens.

The world isn't a homogenous entity.
 
>      "If we have matter duplicators, will each of us be a sovereign
>        and possess a hydrogen bomb?" -- Jerry Pournelle

Of course. But just having a bunch of nukes doesn't make you a souvereign
in the posthuman world.
 
>    Leaving aside the lack of evidence that matter duplicators are
>    possible, stop and think about this for a moment: conventional

Do you have a problem with machine-phase? I'm all ears. Tell me why it
wouldn't work. 

>    manufacturing technology is perfectly adequate to build hydrogen
>    bombs, has been for decades. Why are we not each a sovereign

Not in your cellar.

>    possessing a hydrogen bomb today? Once you look at that question, it
>    becomes clear that the "matter duplicators" are a smokescreen,
>    something to aid suspension of disbelief by distracting the mind from
>    the real-life reasons why this scenario doesn't happen.

You could build quite a few megatons in your cellar with machine-phase.

>    For Pournelle is after all a storyteller: he has earned a living

He is a writer. We're not writers, selling some plausible claptrap is
incompatible with my training as a scientist.

>    making up stories, which are selected in the marketplace based on the
>    same fitness criterion: that people enjoy reading them. This is fine
>    provided we understand that it is not at all related to the
>    hypothetical fitness criterion of correspondence to what will actually
>    happen in real life.

Real life defines fitness.