[mikk14]

I don't know if this is discussed by actual serious philosophers, but consider the issue of "mind uploading." I have seen very staunch monists seriously discussing that, if you were to produce a complete digital copy of your brain -- copying any possible information to the most minute synapse -- then you effectively "uploaded" yourself into a computer and can live a digital life.

These people believe this while at the same time considering dualism so ridiculous as to laugh dualists out of the room. The evident problem being that "mind uploading" is the most dualistic possible position to take. A real monist would easily see that by doing mind uploading you have just created a clone that is a whole separate entity from yourself and it is not yourself.

[energy123]

But you are taking an opinionated view of the resolution to the Ship of Theseus paradox. If you are a computational functionalist, then it really is "you" afterwards (or rather there's now two identical "you" until the original "you" is destroyed). A monist could also point to your hypocrisy of believing that you are still your child self despite every atom in your body having been replaced between then and now.

[chongli]

believing that you are still your child self despite every atom in your body having been replaced between then and now.

Oft-repeated but not true. Neurons, for the most part, are never replaced. If a neuron dies, it's gone forever. Repeated head traumas (leading to CTE) are known to cause personality changes as the brain has been permanently altered due to neuron losses.

[mikk14]

A true monist would realize that any experience of the uploaded being that received a copy of the brain is not felt by the original brain that has been copied. This is a fact and it is elementary to see it as true, as well as supporting the view that the copy is not the same being at all. If your description of computation functionalists is accurate, then they simply are dualists and would do good in admitting this to themselves.

Invoking the Ship of Theseus is a distraction. The Ship of Theseus paradox does not involve a full copy at the atomic level while the original still stands. If it did, the paradox would not even exists. The paradox exists because there is the key element that you do not have in mind copying/uploading: _continuity_.

[innin]

There is no prove that continuity really matters. In fact who goes to say that your current conscious self is the same as your self from five minutes ago. After all you do not feel what they felt. The only thing that makes you think that the two are related or even the same is your state (memories, emotions). Why would we even think about whether cloning is able to transmit consciousness when we don’t even know if consciousness is transmitted over time?

Edit: Just to clarify my opinion: This means that the relationship between my self from five seconds ago and my current self and the relationship between my self from five seconds ago and a clone of that self that aged the same amount would be equivalent. Both of us would _not_ be the same as my past self

[prmph]

In that case you don't exist, since there is no such thing as "current". Every moment in time is either past or future, assuming time is continuous. The reals are infinitely infinite.

[pixl97]

Hey, looks like you're finally starting to catch on to the trick the consciousness plays on you.

consciousness always exists in the past of reality around you. It is a physical process with an execution time. Light takes nanoseconds to get to your eyes. The chemical reactions in your eyes take milliseconds. Then you have that signal getting to your visual cortex. Then your brain takes a while and shoves a bunch of shit it assumes is there from pattern matching taking its own number of milliseconds. Eventually this is passed up to your consciousness to interpret 'long' after it actually happened.

But you can make it even more screwy from that point that totally screw with your perception of time. Even more fun are drugs that keep you conscious but keep you from recording short term memories so it's like that time never existed.

You are but a chemical dream upon meat hardware.

[soopypoos]

if time is continuous, there are no moments

[amanaplanacanal]

Isn't continuity just an implementation detail? Suppose your brain was replaced a bit at a time with mechanical hardware, the end result is an uploaded mind while maintaining continuity.

[mikk14]

I admit that this is a troubling problem with the position that I stated, but I don't think it's a complete takedown.

The easiest rebuttal would be to simply say that continuity is not a mere implementation detail. If you give up continuity, you can make a copy without altering the original, you just have to read it.

But if you need to ensure continuity you have to alter the original. This seems to me a very fundamental part of the process, making it qualitatively different.

[energy123]

Imagine you are destroyed in your sleep by aliens and replaced by an atomically identical duplicate. Would you call this "you"?

If not, what if the aliens recycled the atoms from your original body to make the new body, putting each original atom into the same original spot with the same position and momentum (ignoring quantum and uncertainty principle).

What if they recycled 99% of the atoms from your original body, but swapped 1% of them for different atoms?

What if they only destroyed 5% of your brain and reassembled that destroyed portion, leaving the rest of you untouched? What about 50%?

What if they waited 1 planck moment before reassembling you versus 5 seconds?

Where is your dividing line in this scenario space between "that's really me" versus "that's just a copy and is not really me" ?

The functionalist answer, as I understand it, is fungibility across time and copies when arriving at definitions of words like "you".

The functionalist answer is not that > 1 copy can communicate telepathically or supernaturally share experiences is a dualist sense. They are still causally independent physical entities.

[mikk14]

None of these scenarios would result in "me" from a monist perspective. The destruction is a discontinuity point, I died there and then, and then the next planck moment a new being was created with all my memories. But "I" died.

The functionalist answer, as you understand it, is dualist. It says "something" survived the utter complete destruction of the physical body and was "put back in it" once it was reassembled. If "it" survived the complete physical destruction of the body, it must be somewhere else, detached from the body.

And, you know, there's really nothing wrong being dualist. I do not mean to denigrate that specific worldview. What is problematic is claiming to be a staunch monist while holding dualist positions.

[energy123]

What if they destroyed and reassembled only 0.5% of your brain? What's your dividing line? 0.36%? 0.0188%?

> The functionalist answer, as you understand it, is dualist.

I think you're misunderstanding that words are social constructs which can point to abstract categories rather than necessarily single concrete objects at a particular moment in time (although words can also do that).

Like if you have multiple tennis balls, each ball is still a tennis ball, despite each ball being different, because "tennis ball" is a social construct and an abstraction that's an indirection to a certain concept. In the worldview I am talking about, the word "you" is an indirection to a mind that is indistinguishable in content and experience from the one you have right now, with the property of fungibility across modalities, time and space.

[mikk14]

> What if they destroyed and reassembled only 0.5% of your brain? What's your dividing line? 0.36%? 0.0188%?

Apologies, I read too quickly and skipped over this. See one of my sibling comments. I concede this is problematic for my position and I need to think harder on how to solve it, but I don't think it's unsolvable. The placeholder answer is that there must be a certain level of damage -- the precise % probably doesn't matter as much as exactly which parts you destroy -- that is incompatible with keeping continuity.

For the rest, as a social construct, if we incinerate me to create a clone of me that is identical to the original at the subatomic level I agree that, for everyone else in society, it is me. But my self has still died and whatever replaced it is having its own experiences. And it matters very little what everybody else thinks: if tomorrow an imposter convinces everybody else that they are me, they aren't me for me. Their experiences aren't magically beamed to my brain.

Your tennis ball example is again a textbook dualist position. You can have a tennis match with different balls which is functionally identical to have it with the same ball, because the ball in the game is an abstraction that lives _outside_ the ball itself. But, assuming balls can feel when they are hit by the racket, the ball you used in the previous point and now is lying on the sideline does not feel being hit when the next point starts with another ball.

[alexwebb2]

As a monist who holds the view that you’re claiming monists can’t legitimately hold, I don’t see any difficulty at all in squaring these ideas:

- there is no separate “stuff” that minds are made out of, no privileged plane of existence specific to minds; minds are just patterns like everything else

- destroying an instantiation of a pattern != destroying the pattern

And speaking of squaring ideas – if I draw a square on a piece of paper, and then light that paper on fire, I haven’t destroyed the concept of a square. I can always draw an identical square on another sheet of paper. If the square had consciousness, it’d be none the wiser.

[prmph]

> If the square had consciousness, it’d be none the wiser.

This is exactly what don't know, and is interesting to explore.

> there is no separate “stuff” that minds are made out of, no privileged plane of existence specific to minds; minds are just patterns like everything else

So if your brain was somehow cloned, you'd exist in two places at the same time? It seems possible for two separate consciousness to have the same memories and be identical in all respects, and yet still not be the same.

To illustrate, two instances of a programs can share the exact same binary code (the "pattern") and yet they are separate instances.

[mikk14]

> if I draw a square on a piece of paper, and then light that paper on fire, I haven’t destroyed the concept of a square. I can always draw an identical square on another sheet of paper. If the square had consciousness, it’d be none the wiser.

If you have a son and you kill him, you haven't destroyed the concept of a son. You can always make a new son. If the son had consciousness, it’d be none the wiser.

Is that the same son? Do you not go to prison for murder?

[gpderetta]

If this actually happened, would the 'I' that replaced you be any wiser. How do you know this hasn't happened to you already? Maybe multiple times per second?

> It says "something" survived the utter complete destruction of the physical body and was "put back in it" once it was reassembled. If "it" survived the complete physical destruction of the body, it must be somewhere else, detached from the body.

The information of how to put your body and mind back must have survived somewhere, in the alien mind for example or the machine they used. But the information would still be in (a medium in) this universe and bound to this universe physical laws. I would say this is still a monist position.

A true dualist believes that consciousness survives outside of a medium in this universe.

[mikk14]

> If this actually happened, would the 'I' that replaced you be any wiser. How do you know this hasn't happened to you already? Maybe multiple times per second?

If this is true, that the body dies every planck time and the mind survives it, then it simply means the dualist position is true.

> The information of how to put your body and mind back must have survived somewhere, in the alien mind for example or the machine they used. But the information would still be in (a medium in) this universe and bound to this universe physical laws. I would say this is still a monist position.

I'm sorry, but you're circling back to the first message I wrote. You are giving to information magical properties that it cannot have, because they lead to a contradiction. With the same information you can make multiple copies of me at the same time. But if you make two, the experiences of one do not get magically transmitted to the brain of the other. So those are two distinct selves, even if they are made with the exact same information. This clearly does not work. It's the same issue of mind uploading that I initially argued about.

[taneq]

The ‘you’ that wakes up tomorrow is a whole separate entity from you right now, unless you want to concede that identity is a path variable and that whether the exact same physical/mental/emotional entity is you or not depends on how those particles got there.

[mikk14]

Just because the brain doesn't form memories while you sleep, doesn't mean you have ceased to exist. You have probably forgot many things that have happened to you today: does that mean you didn't exist in those moments you forgot? Am I misunderstanding your point?

[GoblinSlayer]

If the universe was created 5 minutes ago, then you didn't exist before that, but it doesn't matter, because past and present don't interact.

[delecti]

Are there people who say that digitizing one's conscious moves their mind? If I upload a file from my computer to to a server, the file still exists on my computer (until deleted). I've never thought that a mind upload would work any differently.

I think that many who talk about consciousness digitization handwave away what happens to their body/brain afterwards, but I don't necessarily think that means they think they'll move into the computer.

[kodt]

depends if you do a copy paste or cut and paste

[delecti]

My point is that the word "upload", without context indicating otherwise, does not imply that the original is changed in any way.

[card_zero]

I think reasonably faithful clones would be mes. We could live my life, from multiple perspectives, some of them quite separate. It might be necessary to distinguish them with numbers, or claim that one of them has become too different to really count as a me, but those are details and semantic matters.

[psychoslave]

> copying any possible information to the most minute synapse

That's reducing an individual to, I assume, the sum of its neural network. So like considering everything else happening in the fleshy body matters to what a human is, nor how they relate to the rest of cosmos as such a body.