Pride: it’s an interesting character trait. Some might even call it a character flaw. And I, like many here at ImmInst, and possessed of it to some degree or another.
As such, when one tries defend proposition A, and someone else attacks a closely related proposition A*, we are sometimes found defending A* with much zeal, because we feel that failing to do so would somehow give ground in our stance on proposition A. It may not even matter whether we really believe that A* is true.
Of course, we may also defend proposition B, and an attack on B* may also spur us to a similar defense. And then again, there may be a proposition C which we hold to be true, and an attack on C* will compel us to defend C*. And it gets really thorny when A and C don’t seem to have much in common, but A* and C* both seem to imply a proposition D, so that we end up defending proposition D from attack, and ironically we’re not even sure if we’re defending it because of our stance on proposition A or proposition C.
My Dilemma
Thus, we turn to the current drama, where I have been found making statements that express a serious lack of belief in the future chances of cryonics to revive “me”. I’ve even made statements that the potentiality of personhood, frozen or vitrified in a block of chemical soup, doesn’t have the inherent “human rights” we so gladly give to every living human being, and hence that flippant or even intentional destruction of such potential persons is no more a murder than refusing to procreate with one’s significant other. In the eyes of God, perhaps, but not in the eyes of man (unless the man is a prophet and knows the will of God…).
The Worth of Data
Note that I have conceded that there’s great worth in such a block of chemical soup, much as the Louvre in Paris has much worth: not because the Louvre is the humans whose art it contains, but merely because of the information about such persons it preserves, and for the value that we derive from that art. Destruction of a cryonics patient (in the absence of permission to do so) might not be “murder”, then, but it would certainly be just as wrong and detestable as a sociopath’s intentionally burning down the Louvre and all the priceless treasures contained therein.
For example, a person cryonically preserved in the 1980’s, who may have been born in the 1920’s or earlier, and who may have fought in World War II, is a person who will be of great worth to the world of 2060 or 2090, or whenever the technology exists to revive a copy of that person. While a few rare people born in the same year may still be alive, at 140 or 160 or 180 years of age, such people will be products of the intervening century of political and social and cultural events and influences that such a person would have experienced, while the cryonics patient would retain the actual character of a person from the 1980’s. Such a person would be very unique, and add much value to the society he or she were revived in.
How Did We Get Here?
Anyway, how this whole drama got started is something I’ve been pondering lately, and I’ve reached some rather startling conclusions. First of all, I had gut reactions to various hypothetical scenarios, reactions which prevented me from really addressing each scenario rationally. Second, however, I’ve found that my gut reactions were in fact based not on my own mystical beliefs, but on my disdain for the mystical beliefs of others, beliefs that the other people didn’t realize were mystical. In other words, it was not I that was guilty of introducing mysticism to these debates, it was the others, those who accused me of mysticism, who introduced it. My feisty defensiveness was not an attempt to redeem myself (though it probably looked that way), but an expression of my unconscious dissatisfaction with the mystical beliefs of others. A fairly ironic turn of events, but one that does not excuse my stance on cryonics.
First, I should be clear that the duplication problem I’ve raised with respect to cryonics isn’t a problem with cryonics per se, though it does apply to every, or at least, almost every person cryonically preserved during the 20th century. Brian Wowk was quite correct in pointing this out, and at some point in the last eight months, I’d all but let myself forget this distinction. Should we eventually perfect a cryonics/revival technique that doesn’t require technologies so sophisticated that they could be used to create copies, then my problems with duplication become non-issues. Other issues remain, but those are the subject of another lengthy monologue.
Second, it will become clear that most of my problems with duplication have been based not on the problems inherent in duplication, but on the mystical ways that people think duplication can be achieved. In retrospect, my objections to these absurd means of duplication ended up being justified, but more importantly, my objections weren’t to duplication proper, but to these bastardized forms of duplication. Hence the duplication problem remains largely untackled. It’s like attempting to assassinate a ruthless dictator, only to discover that you in fact killed a body double. There’s a certain visceral satisfaction in the successful kill, in overcoming the defenses around the double that were supposedly as good as those around the original. But there’s still a latent feeling of dissatisfaction for having failed to get the real target, and an appreciation that the real target is not as weakly defended as once supposed.
Jay’s Inconsistent Philosophy
Without further ado, then, let us begin a journey into the mind of a Jay D. Fox.
At the end of last year, I entered into some philosophical debates here at ImmInst. I suppose, before I get to those, I should lay some background about me.
As a teenager, I was your typical cybergeek: very strong in math and physics, as well as a decent computer programmer. By the age of 12, I had studied and fairly well absorbed the equivalents of both first-semester college calculus and college physics (classical mechanics), as well as a few books on particle physics, special and general relativity, etc., and even some more speculative works on wormholes and FTL physics and time travel.
(To be honest, I didn’t understand more than the mere concepts of general relativity, since I didn’t learn how the tensor calculus worked until I was in college. But as for particle physics, down to what we knew of quarks at the time (this was a little over 15 years ago), I was about as well-versed as your typical freshmen or sophomore in college taking a physics major.)
So, at the age of 12, 13, etc., I had this strong understanding of math and physics, and being a programmer, I had a very analytical, information-driven view of the world and how it worked. I was thus into the whole sci-fi genre of uploading and virtual reality, etc. (and of course, space travel and exploration as well…)
Doubts and Religion
Of course, at some point near the end of my high school career, I began to have doubts about uploading and the general cyberpunk genre. Although there was something rather cool about the thought that a cyberhacker would somehow be “in the machine”, so that, for example, countermeasures could capture him, torture him, destroy him, etc., I began to realize that this was rather silly. What more could someone do as a security measure, but to terminate one’s connection to wherever they were in the network. It’s not like someone could actually become trapped in cyberspace and cut off from his physical body. It’s not like the connection could be cut, and the person’s consciousness would be stuck in cyberspace, while the empty husk of their body fell limp and dead, devoid of memories or life. In other words, the person’s mind must still be operating in their brain, and at best, they are simply using remote sensory information to make it “seem” like they are in the machine. But they’re not.
Besides, what more would an uploaded version of someone be but a copy? For that matter, if a “backup” was made of someone, would someone really be revived when they are blown up and someone restores the backup? What if it turned out the original wasn’t killed in the explosion?
Note: This was before I had seen so-called gradual or slow uploading scenarios, where neuron after neuron would be replaced by a synthetic (hardware and/or software version) that was functionally the same, so that at no point would the objective nature of one’s consciousness be altered (and we’ll leave the subjective nature for another day). Admittedly, these gradual scenarios held some fascination for me, until I realized that there was something very disturbing to me about software “consciousness”, a topic I’ll address in a separate thread, for it involves much of the same mysticism as duplication scenarios, and then some.
At any rate, these doubts came at a time when I was friends with several Christians, and I even began to date one, and in the process of exploring my doubts, I found myself yearning for something that could explain what I thought at the time was unexplainable by science.
(It is unfortunate that where I found doubts in science's ability to explain certain fundamental philosophical questions, I in reality was finding justifiable doubts in the mystical views that other people were passing off as materialism. Hence my journey into religion was spawned not by a failure of science, but by a failure of people calling themselves scientists and atheists.)
And so it was that I converted to Christianity. It was a painful process, as you can well imagine, because I was not versed in the language of prayer. I felt like I was talking to myself, and felt rather hypocritical for the first year or two.
And yet, I felt that atheism was just as lacking in answers, and materialism was just as irrational (since I hadn't been introduced to a consistent, non-mystical view of materialism with respect to consciousness), so I persevered and eventually quelled most of my doubts about Christianity. A few months ago, this world view finally fell apart, and quite rapidly at that, though the holes in the dyke had been growing more numerous for a year or two. For the curious, I no longer consider myself a Christian, but more of an agnostic, leaning atheist.
This ten-year journey into religion has given me new insights into the hypocritical worldview of those who attack and denigrate Christians and other religionists, and thus I am fairly well prepared, even if only at a subconscious level, to detect the mystical beliefs of others. After detecting such mystical beliefs in self-professed atheists and materialists, I unfortunately end up expressing a fair amount of disdain for their silly beliefs, and this disdain comes across as quite a bit of a rant. And ranting does not a good argument make. Thus, even when I detect these absurd and silly beliefs, I am still ill-equipped to present rational arguments that might convince these people of the mystical beliefs they cling to like religion itself. For all my grasp of math and physics, the games of philosophy and logic (and chess) still elude my skillset.
Cryonics
Moving along to the current debates: Up until I came to ImmInst, I had had only the smallest of introductions to the idea of cryonics, and at the time, I thought the whole thing was rather stupid. Of course, regardless of how much I knew about information theory, I was looking at the problem from a rather straightforward point of view: how do you thaw and revive someone with extensive freezing damage?
My answer? You don’t. I mean, duh!
I was looking at it from the point of view of creating the necessary cryoprotectants and rapid cooling procedures necessary to avoid the freezing damage, and the equally or more challenging detoxification process during thawing. I knew we weren’t anywhere near there yet, so that everyone frozen to date was essentially dead, with no hope of resuscitation.
After coming to ImmInst, I learned about the more advanced things that nanotechnology would eventually (probably) be able to do, such as repair of every cell and cellular organelle and macromolecule (e.g. DNA) in the body. I had known about nanotech before, but never put the two ideas together. Suddenly, I saw cryonics as a very real and powerful technology to preserve a person prior to death, and to eventually bring them back!
Revival?
But then, I entered into some debates about the “soul” and “what constitutes ‘me’”, etc., and in the process, I quickly began to be disillusioned by the prospects of cryonics. Perhaps it was just the tone of the debates, with people talking about using nanotech to scan the original block of organic chemicals, frozen or vitrified in ice or glassy water. From this scan, a simulation could be used to bring the brain back to life in a virtual world, one probably much like the world the person left behind at their clinical death. The person would be brought up to speed on the modern world, by a very slow process, perhaps even by simply reliving history at the pace it actually happened, perhaps slightly accelerated (two years for every one, or three for one, etc.). In other words, if someone was cryonically preserved in the year 1985, and then revived in 2070, the person would relive 85 years of subjective time, or at least 10 or 20, seeing the changes in society, the wars and conflicts and plagues and accidents, the rise of nanotech and the Singularity and whatever else happens between now and 2070. This subjective time would be used to acclimate the person to the modern world. Of course, the computer running this simulation would be extremely fast, so while this re-education might take 10 or 85 years of subjective time to the person being revived, it would only take maybe a year, or a month, or a day, or an hour, of objective time in the real world.
After being brought up to speed, the person in the simulation would then be transferred—if he or she wishes, anyway; the person could also just ask to stay in “cybserspace”—into a physical body, and hence the person would be revived in the physical world, ready to assimilate into the modern culture and society.
This process almost appealed to me, until I realized that this was very much unlike going to sleep and waking up, or even waking from a coma. This was an entirely new copy of the original person.
Well then, I thought, in order for this to work, we don’t need to think about cryonics or advanced nanotech at all. We just need to consider the problem of duplicates. Can creating a duplicate of me preserve “me”? If not, cryonics in its current form won’t work, so there’s no point thinking about it. I mean, it’ll be great for others, because if I can’t objectively tell the difference, then it won’t bother me if someone else is a copy. But as a way for me to cheat death, it wouldn’t work.
Perhaps this is where my idea of cryonics diverged from Brian Wowk’s. Brian is concerned with improving the techniques of cryonics sufficiently to make unnecessary advanced nanotech of the variety mentioned above (i.e. the scan-and-copy variety).
Should we get to that stage in cryonics technology, which I think is quite likely but not a foregone conclusion, then the debate will change focus. But in considering the current state of the art, or worse yet, the state of cryonics ten or twenty or thirty years ago, we’re not really talking about cryonics: revival would boil down to the question of duplicates.
Duplication
In the debates we had last year, the duplication problem was taken up in earnest. There were those who argued that if you created an exact copy of someone, down to the last atom, then that copy would subjectively remain the same person. Not just objectively, but subjectively. In other words, if Brian somehow created a copy of me in the next room over, my stream of consciousness could literally “jump” to that copy. If Brian sat me down in a white room in an office in Atlanta, and then made a copy of me in an identical white room in Paris, I could walk into the room in Atlanta, and walk out in Paris, and not have any clue what was going on. My subjective awareness could quite literally jump to my doppelganger in Paris. Of course, being in Paris, perhaps Brian could take me to see the Louvre!
I’ll leave this atom-for-atom copy for a few minutes, because in looking back over where these various debates have gone, I realize that this issue is still the thorniest, and is probably unsolvable at this time, neither by any of today’s philosophical paradigms, nor by the best theories of physics and psychology. Unless, of course, we can prove the quantum nature of consciousness, in which case we can prove it’s not duplicable (since quantum states aren’t duplicable: the act of copying destroys the original quantum state), and in any case, we'd still need to answer the question of what happens in deep sleep (i.e., if there are quantum states involved in consciousness, are they preserved in some way during sleep, or do they effectively come undone due to the lack of many types of brain activity?). But we’re a long way from having a plausible quantum theory of consciousness (though I’ve read some fun theories from the 1980’s or 1990’s that apparently must not have panned out).
Whatever pride we may take in trying to solve this problem, the best we can come up with is opinions. Brian has an opinion that an atomic copy of me must still be “me”. I have a different opinion. Osiris has yet another opinion, fairly similar to mine, and Don has an opinion similar to Brian’s. None of us is “right”, in the sense that none of us can physically or logically prove our own position, nor disprove the others’.
Bastardized Forms of Duplication
However, there were some who felt that far less-than-exact duplicates were necessary to maintain one’s subjectivity, and this is where some very mystical, new age sort of views came into play. I say “new age”, because these views rather reminded me of crystal worshippers and Gaia worshippers, etc. Rather fun points of view, with an inherent attractiveness based on beauty and mysticism, but, um, not really belonging in a rational debate.
The first was the notion that if I copied someone else’s memories, and their personality traits, their beliefs, behavioral patterns, and preferences, their cognitive abilities, and emotional response system, etc., that I would somehow subjectively “become” that person. This is actually one of the original ideas that turned me off to “materialism” in my youth, and I was surprised to see it espoused by people here at Imminst.
As I said, there's this notion that if I copied someone else's memories, etc., that the person would subjectively live on in the copy. The idea being, of course, that you could clone a person, and then teach that clone everything we know about the original person’s life, and then that person will somehow subjectively live on in the clone, even if already dead. Not just objectively, but subjectively.
The idea is utter nonsense, or at least my gut told me so, and yet these people told me this with a rather straight face. Well, I assume they had on a straight face, because of course, we’re communicating via a form of delayed text chat. But metaphorically speaking, they said it with a straight face.
Between this, and the duplicates problem in general, I was left with a rather bad taste in my mouth regarding cryonics. And this is rather unfortunate, because it has left me with a knee-jerk reaction to anything cryonics- or duplicates-related. It has left me in a position where I have a certain amount of trouble debating various things rationally, because my reactions are so tainted by the memories of these people who argued very seriously that just copying the memories of someone’s life would be sufficient to allow that person to subjectively live again.
Bainbridge and Personality Capture
My shock was thus pushed to its limits when I read the essay by William Sims Bainbridge in ImmInst’s first book, The Scientific Conquest of Death. This was only a couple weeks ago, and it’s a shame I wasn’t able to get my hands on a copy of the book much sooner than late June or Early July of this year.
At any rate, here was Bainbridge, basically arguing that we could simply make a lot of observations about someone’s life, and then use this information to create a copy of that person’s personality. This itself doesn’t really bother me, and it’s actually quite a fascinating idea, to tell the truth: fascinating, that is, as long as we're being clear that the copy will be just that, a copy, with no real connection to the original.
But what did bother me, and rather vehemently, was that he argued that this personality could basically be used to continue a person’s existence, whether in a new human body, or more likely, in one or more robotic bodies. Objectively speaking, I don’t even really have a problem with this, and it’s a pretty neat idea.
But from my reading of this essay, he seemed to be implying that one would literally, or that is to say, subjectively live on in the new body. He doesn’t use the word subjective, not until he’s describing the possibility of having one’s experiences through a robotic body, and at this point, he’s speaking of the fact that, subjectively speaking, one is “located” where the sensory data is collected, not where one’s consciousness is being processed. So when he did bring up subjectivity, he did it in a way I agree with, and which has nothing to do with the personality copies he’s suggesting.
Having failed to mention subjectivity in direct relation to the personality copies he’s suggesting, perhaps he harmlessly means these copies to be objective duplicates, wherein the original truly can “die” subjectively and be lost to oblivion, regardless of whether the duplicate lives on. However, the context of the essay very strongly implies the opposite, that he is very seriously offering a method to preserve one’s subjective life in the face of possible death.
And here it was again, then: this idea that a copy of one’s memories and personality is enough for one to subjectively live on, regardless of the condition of the original.
Memories and Subjective Awareness
This brought me to make my analogy of the Black Knight, to point out that the Black Knight could be played by different actors, and hence, just because we can know with some degree of objective certainty that the Black Knight is still the Black Knight, that doesn’t mean that the same actor is playing him, i.e. that the Black Knight is still subjectively the same.
Of course, the actor in the Black Knight is an actor, and the most we can say for sure about our subjective awareness is that we have an observer. We’ll leave the issue of classical free will aside for another day.
Perhaps a better analogy, then, to the Black Knight, is a movie. I can go watch a movie, and someone else can go watch the same movie. Does that make us the same exact person at the moments we’re each watching the same movie? Is our subjective experience of that movie the same? No, that’s nonsense.
Taken a step further, we could record 30 seconds of my experiences, including my reminiscing on my own memories, and my awareness and experience of my own thoughts, and then take another person’s brain, and wire up a hundred million or a billion or ten billions nanowires to various places in her brain, and temporarily inhibit a similar number of neurons and/or synapses, and then play back the 30-second sequence of my life. (This actually reminds me of the movie Strange Days, though I’m sure the concept predates the movie by at least a couple decades.) Admittedly, that person’s observer may not be wired properly to handle the full gamut of my experiences: for example, a female might be unable to fully experience anything specific to the male anatomy, although she can probably at least get a pretty close sensory experience to “get a feel for it”, so to speak. After all, I can imagine feeling a phantom “thumb” extending from the inside edge of my foot (it has itched for years!), so why can’t she feel a phantom penis?
Is it subjectively “me” observing this movie of my life? No, it’s the other person. She’s experiencing it. After unhooking the nanowires, and uninhibiting the neurons we hijacked, the person may or may not even remember having experienced my life (depending on whether we had to hijack the most or all of the short-term memory centers of the brain), but it won’t be “me” that experienced it. Assuming the person’s short-term memory was uninhibited, she would have this 30-second memory of not only the things I saw and heard and tasted, etc., but whatever memories I relived, and whatever thoughts I experienced, perhaps even in a language she doesn’t understand, yet she would have understood at the time because I understood the language. And depending on how well the short-term memory could sort out all these details, these details could even get incorporated into this person’s long-term memory.
Nevertheless, it was this other person, and not “me”, that experienced this 30-second recording of my experiences.
Our memories do not make our subjective observers. At most, memories are used by our brains as part of the models used in creating thoughts, the thoughts we then observe, so that there’s the illusion that the memories make the observer because the memories affect our thoughts about what we experience. Reflexive changes in the observation machinery, which may have occurred during events that laid down memories, could also affect our observations, such that we correlate the changes in the observation machinery with the memories, and then make the extrapolation that the memories are part of the observation machinery. But no, the changes in the observation machinery happened as a result of the neural inputs that also laid down memories, so that (using A for our observer, and B for our memories) A doesn’t cause B, neither does B cause A, but A and B were caused by C (some past neural event or observation), and B isn’t necessary for A. Memories don’t make the observer. They at most act as a lens, affecting certain qualities of observation, but this filtering of data prior to observation doesn’t change the underlying observer, only limits what the observer can and can’t observe.
Memories, in and of themselves, are nothing more than a few bits of information (few being a relative term here, since I don’t know how many bits we’re really talking about, whether its hundreds, thousands, millions, or billions…). A memory of the color red isn’t even “stored redness”. It’s not like there’s a set of neurons that captured the very qualia of redness itself. No, it’s just a few bits of information, which, like the bits of information that travel down our optic nerves, can be re-experienced in the moment. The memories don’t make our observer. The observer is separate from the memories.
Copy the memories, and play them through a different observer, and it’s not the same person subjectively. Objectively, to the rest of the world, it might seem like it’s the same person, but subjectively, it’s not.
And this is where I began to realize that the atomic copy point of view might have some merit after all. You see, if the atomic copy point of view were based on the mere copying of memories, skills, emotions, etc., then yes, the atomic copy would not subjectively be the original. Why? Because a different observer is quite capable of observing the old memories, and yet remaining a distinct, different entity.
Thus, creating a clone and teaching it everything we know about the original will never suffice to copy the subjective awareness (I apologize to those who plan on doing this, but you’re not going to survive death this way, no more than I will survive death through my daughter, or through a random stranger, for that matter), no more than identical twins will have the same fingerprints. In fact, even in the case of a genetic clone, the idea that the internal observer is the same as the original’s is orders of magnitude less likely than a clone having the same fingerprints (given the larger size and complexity of the observation machinery), and we already know that twins, and hence clones, don’t have the same fingerprints, and hence it is overwhelmingly unlikely that they would have the same “observation” machinery, at least at the atomic level, but most likely not even at the neuronal-interneuronal level either.
Can the “Observer” Be Copied?
Thus, having satisfied my disdain for the utterly absurd mysticism of those who believe they can subjectively continue their own lives through clones, even clones that have been trained to have the same memories, I began to lose one of those knee-jerk reactions I had to cryonics.
Here it was that I found a proposition A (You can’t subjectively survive by transferring all your memories, personality traits, beliefs, etc., into a clone, or worse yet, a computer), which led to my defending a related proposition A* (You can’t preserve your subjective identity by performing an atomic-resolution copy, regardless of the fact that your memories, personality traits, beliefs, etc., are maintained), which led to my defending a further removed proposition D (cryonics can’t work, because revival requires making a duplicate of you, so the revived person is not you). The aforementioned propositions C and C* aren’t relevant to the current discussion, but since I mentioned them before, I’ll mention them again: the duplication problem isn’t the only problem I have with cryonics.
Where does that leave me now? The duplication problem is still a problem, but part of my distaste for it was the idea that copying memories would somehow copy the subjective awareness. Now that I can see how clearly false (and quite silly, you have to admit) this idea is, I can address the problem of the observer. What if it wasn’t the memories, but the machinery of observation itself, that was copied?
Ah, now here’s an interesting problem, and one which I admit that, from a materialism point of view, there isn’t a good argument against, at least not that I’ve hit yet. I mean, there is, but it requires appealing to quantum mechanics, and this is speculation at this point, speculation which is further compounded by a need to deal with what happens during deep sleep (leaving aside comas and hypothermic surgery, etc., since these aren't things that natural selection had much pressure to deal with, so they don't really fit into an evolutionarily created system of consciousness). And besides, while I still believe that observation itself is a quantum act, and hence requires quantum mechanics, I’m not as convinced that it’s not duplicable.
Why? Quantum states aren’t duplicable, or else new quantum cryptography systems would be pointless. So how could they be duplicated? Well, perhaps not the exact state is what needs to be copied, but just the general “type” of state, is all that’s needed.
“Emergence” and other Mystical Ideas
Consider a solar system. Given a certain arrangement of planets and a star, there will be a certain set of gravitational forces at work within the system. However, it should be clear that the arrangement of the planets is not the gravitational forces involved in the system. However, it should also be clear that the gravitational forces involved in the system could not exist without that physical arrangement of the planets.
My biggest hangup with the idea that qualia are physical is the rather pointed insistence by mystics that the arrangement of matter is the qualia. To me, that would be like saying that the arrangement of the planets and the sun is the gravity. Sorry, but it’s not. Maybe metaphorically, but not physically, not really. Metaphors are neat, and I like using them as much as the next guy, but we should be careful not to start taking them too seriously.
But perhaps the qualia are actual (as opposed to “emergent”, another mystical word) physical phenomena, whether quantum or electromagnetic or something like that, that exist because of the arrangement and motion of matter and the physical forces involved as time passes (since qualia are a process, we need the passage of time).
In this case, the qualia might not be the arrangement of the atoms, but perhaps they could not exist in the absence of that particular arrangement of the atoms. Hence, the idea of the “neural correlate”. This idea never sat well with me in the past, and I should explain this, because my view has only very recently changed.
The problem with correlates is nicely summed up in a classic example: “Whenever the clock in the Presbyterian church tower points to 3:00, the clock in the Baptist church tower rings 3 times. The Presbyterians control the Baptist chimes!” In other words, the only thing you need to know to explain the ringing of the bells is what time is displayed on the Presbyterian church tower’s clock. That is the explanation of the ringing of the bells. There’s no underlying explanation, no need to imagine silly things like a pendulum and escapement and gears and striking hammers and bells and such. When the Presbyterian clock shows 3:00, the clock in the Baptist church rings thrice. Cause and effect.
And thus I am pummeled with the repetitious “The neural correlates are the explanation of the qualia”, and I must be stupid that I don’t understand that, because it seems like no matter how many clever ways somebody explains it to me, I still don’t seem to grasp the concept that the Presbyterians control the Baptist chimes! Er, I mean, that neural correlates are the qualia, and there’s nothing left to explain!
Anyway, starting with neural correlates: do they imply causation? Proponents of neural correlates, for the most part, say yes. In fact, most proponents of the neural correlate idea have, at least that I’ve seen here at ImmInst, consistently either pushed the idea that the neural correlate itself is the qualia (like the arrangement of the planets actually being gravity), or that the qualia are “emergent”, i.e. much like saying that somehow gravity “emerges” from an arrangement of planets. You know, as opposed to their being an actual force called gravity. Gravity doesn’t really exist, silly, it’s just “emergent” from the fact that the planets don’t follow linear paths in space, and so to explain the curved path, we invoke this “emergent” property called gravity. Gravity is just the nonlinear path that objects take in the presence of other massive objects. But a real, actual, physical force? Nonsense. Or horses***, as Don Spanton would say. Yes, qualia and gravity are both horse hooey.
Either idea—that qualia are the same as their neural correlates, or that they are “emergent”—is so absurd that I’ve had another one of those knee-jerk reactions against people who push the idea of neural correlates. And unfortunately, this has unfairly prevented me from giving the idea serious attention. Because even though the ideas that qualia are the neural correlates, or that they are emergent, are mystical bulls***, that doesn’t make the correlation go away. The correlation is still there, and still needs to be explained, and perhaps there is a physical phenomenon there that explains qualia, just like gravity explains the paths of the planets.
Duplication Reconsidered
Of course, having now realized that neural correlates are a serious issue—and that most supporters of neural correlates are just, um, mystics, I guess is the best word for them (“Dude… like, gravity, like, is the position and motion of the planets… Whoa… Pass the bud, man…”)—I am now in a position to consider an interesting scenario.
I can see now that “neural correlates” may in fact always correlate with specific qualia, and hence there’s something that needs explaining; and I can see now that memories don’t make one’s internal observer, but that there must be some machinery separate from the memories that allows us to observe. Therefore, I must now consider the case: what if we could make an exact copy of the physical machinery that gives rise to the qualia that I experience? Not the portions of the neural network that encode memories (though it wouldn’t hurt to copy them), but the portions that encode our observers? Assuming, of course, that the observers are encoded in the neural network, but this seems likely, or at least it’s likely there’s a “correlate” of the observer encoded in the network.
Given this new person, this copy, and the experiences he would have: would those qualia be experienced by “me”? I’d like to say no, but I no longer have gut reactions to absurd, mystical ideas to fall back on. I can’t say, “You’re kidding, right? There’s no way that just copying your memories into another body will allow you to subjectively continue your existence,” and I can’t say, “Yeah, but come on! You’re telling me the arrangement and motion of the atoms is the qualia? And you think I’ve got mystical views!?”
Yep, without those two types of objections—knee-jerk reactions to things I knew all along were mystical and silly, but hadn’t quite figured out why I felt that way—I am now forced to face the duplication problem head-on. And the truth is, I don’t have an answer, either way. My gut still tells me that duplication can’t be done, at least not unless it’s done at the same level as splits in the many-worlds interpretation of quantum mechanics, i.e. creating a quantum copy. Of course, doing so excludes the possibility of duplication, so we’re back to the idea that duplication isn’t possible.
But that’s just my gut reaction. Admittedly, a certain arrangement and motion of atoms should have the same electromagnetic forces involved, and quite similar quantum properties (but not identical, since we can’t know for certain that the arrangement and motion of atoms is identical, only very similar), so it’s tempting to think that the observer must be the same. Especially if it’s merely the electromagnetic, and not the quantum, physical properties that matter (no pun intended).
Thus Vindicated, Do I Become the Mystic?
So what is this remaining gut reaction of mine? I’ve now identified the previous two gut reactions, and much to my satisfaction, they’ve proven not to be mystical religious fallacies held by me, accusations to that effect notwithstanding. I’ve always liked to consider myself a rational and well-educated person, especially in math and physics, so it was rather discomforting to think I might be letting mystical, religious beliefs get in the way. Having satisfied myself that these two gut reactions were based on mystical beliefs in other people’s points of view, and not my own, I’m left to wonder about my remaining gut reactions against duplication. Is it now I who am being mystical in my remaining objection?
As much as I’d like to believe that I’ll find a third mystical view held by proponents of duplication, one to explain my remaining objections, I’m far less certain. Perhaps my remaining gut reaction is just the ingrained egotistical sense that I was right and “they were wrong”. Having identified and removed those two objections, are my remaining objections to duplication based on nothing more than mystical beliefs, beliefs I’ve long held without serious rational attempts to study them because I was dealing with other issues? Perhaps, perhaps not.
In sum, then, I’ve identified two gut reactions against duplication and “materialism” and the reasons I held those reactions. Having laid them out and exposed the absurd mystical ideas they represented, I’m in a better position to appreciate the ideas of duplication and of qualia under materialism, stripped of two of my strongest inherent biases. I’m also aware now that, in attacking the duplication idea, I’ve actually been attacking bastardized forms of the duplication idea, and in attacking materialism, I've been attacking a bastardized form of materialism, and the actual problems of duplication and materialism lie largely unscathed.
I’m now much more agnostic on the idea of duplication, giving much more plausibility to the idea than to the idea that a pig might suddenly erupt from my anus in the next five seconds and fly away. (Which is, of course, about how much plausibility I gave the idea of duplication about three weeks ago.)
I still consider duplication of my subjective awareness unlikely, but not overwhelmingly so, and I can now appreciate the possibility, via copying my observation machinery (which is mostly if not entirely distinct from my memories and personality), and explore with more seriousness what issues it raises.
Freed from the absurd belief that memories alone are what make the copy retain subjective awareness, I can actually explore some more interesting ideas, such as replacing my memories with those of a “better” or more adventurous life, but still having it be “me” that experiences this new life.
Sure, I might be wrong. But I've uncovered a few rather silly mystical beliefs held by self-proclaimed materialists, and there's a certain visceral satisfaction in that. I've still got the atomic-level duplication issue to deal with, and in time I may find myself agreeing with Brian. At the least, I realize now that my vehement opposition to the duplication problem was based on a horrendously incomplete view of what duplication would be duplicating, and sadly this has left me attacking a problem that wasn't the real issue. Let's see where things go in the future, once I've had more than my current couple weeks to think about the implications of something about which I no longer have sound gut reactions to guide me.
PS: Given the length of this post, I will freely admit that it probably is inconsistent. The editing process found me adding and editing nearly every section multiple times, and as such, I lost track of all the ideas I had presented. Re-reading the completed post would probably have prevented any errors, grammatical or logical, but with each re-reading, I just kept editing, so that there was no way to ensure the whole thing was coherent. I apologize for any incoherency (or repitition, for that matter, because I noticed a fair amount of it on my last couple passes, but I was too lazy to eliminate the repititious material).
