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The teleportation problem generalizes. If the persistence of identity through time supervenes just on continuity of form, or of substance, or of their conjunction, then it turns out that identity simply does not persist. When Hobbes wrote about this problem in de corpore he was really worried that this would mean that it is impossible to punish a wrongdoer (and anyone being punished is innocent).GlyphGryph posted:Personally I think the conclusion most philosophers come to in their writings on the matter are dumb as gently caress, all of them ultimately boiling down to weak justifications for what they started out wanting to be true anyway (hardly surprising, since it is in keeping with classics like "Cogito Ergo Sum and therefore the god I want to be real is totally real"), but it's still usually good fun arguing about it. Cite even one.
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Apr 5, 2016 21:44
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| # ¿ May 22, 2024 05:21 |
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I have a ship, which is the very same ship that Theseus sailed from Crete. I decide to renovate it by replacing each part, piece by piece, with an indistinguishable piece. As I'm doing this, a thief is stealing the discarded pieces and putting them back together into a ship indistinguishable from mine. Which ship is now the very same ship Theseus sailed from Crete? Considerations in favor of my ship being that one: -Sameness of form Considerations in favor of the thief's ship being the one: -Sameness of form -Sameness of matter Hobbes ends up saying it's my ship because it has the right kind of causal continuity: my ship was always a ship, but there was a period of time during which the thief's ship wasn't seaworthy, and therefore wasn't a ship. If it wasn't a ship, it certainly cannot be identical to anything that is a ship. (Hidden premise: diachronic existence can't be gappy; temporal parts have to be continuous)
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Apr 5, 2016 22:51
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GreyjoyBastard posted:I am probably okay with iterative replacement of my brain with silicon or wbatever, because my consciousness is continuous. I am probably not okay with destructive teleportation, because my consciousness is probably not. I generally agree with this, but it's worth pointing out that mere causal continuity is not enough. Lots of causal relations don't preserve identity. When I die, I'll be causally continuous with my corpse. What is needed is to identify the right kind of causal relation. Most people in this thread so far have implied they think it's something to do with the operation of neurons in the brain. Which is a reasonable answer. But it ends up looking something like the counterfactual: 'identity is preserved if the causal profile of the brain is as it would have been if it had been allowed to operate normally' but that looks like it might end up being circular if we think that the persistence of identity just is the normal operation of the brain. Edit: cf: 'identity is preserved if the brain continues to operate in an identity-preserving way' looks bad
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Apr 5, 2016 23:36
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GlyphGryph posted:I am glad you pointed out his hidden premise, because it seems to be at the crux of the argument - what should we use to determine identity (esp. in this scenario), and why? Hobbes rejects the notion that an object can have temporally discontinuous parts at least partly on the basis of an analogy to spatial discontinuity: that there is an object constituted by the Eiffel tower, my left thumb, and the Andromeda galaxy is something that we intuitively don't want to grant, plausibly because we think an object has to be spatially continuous. I'm not sure what Hobbes would say about the reassembled gun, but he actually struggled with a much worse problem because the temporal continuity requirement seems to imply that a thing cannot cease to exist for a time and then come back into existence, but on some interpretations that's what the Resurrection was. The gun problem seems less fraught; he'd probably happily say that the reassembled gun was not identical to the original. As for a definition of identity, the assumption I've been working under is that identity is the relation that holds between a thing and itself. Batman and Bruce Wayne, Hesperus and Phosphorus, etc. Edit: if you don't like this, Parfit and a few others (Lewis, I think?) redefine the problem as being about 'survival' rather than identity. I don't necessarily endorse Hobbes' argument myself. I'm not personally convinced that there is anything in the world that answers to the name 'self,' in which case they're certainly not persisting through time. I think the closest we'll get is either something like what rudatron was saying, basically 'whatever cognitive science determines is the physical/functional correlate of consciousness' or something like Dan Dennett's 'center of narrative gravity.' Juffo-Wup fucked around with this message at 03:22 on Apr 6, 2016 |
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Apr 6, 2016 03:14
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GlyphGryph posted:I suppose I can understand this argument, but we, in general terms, clearly do want to grant certain objects shared identity. Does he consider these to be a different class of object for identity purposes, or does he not consider them to be objects in their own right at all, or does he not talk much about them? (A knife set, a box of crayons, a fleet of ships, a computer network, an army, a company, a country, etc. and so on) Yeah, could be. I don't know, I struggle to have opinions about mereology. Edit: better answer, he doesn't really address it in anything of his I've read. But he's working with the tools of scholasticism, so probably he'd say whatever Aristotle says about it, probably in the Metaphysics. But Aristotle's never really been my zone so I couldn't tell you, sorry. GlyphGryph posted:I've added Parfit to my reading list, anyway. Any piece in particular? Reasons and Persons, part 3. Juffo-Wup fucked around with this message at 04:23 on Apr 6, 2016 |
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Apr 6, 2016 04:07
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Okay, but then what was once a question about identity comes to be a question about reference, and theories of reference aren't really less fraught (or at least, no obviously so). For example, say you follow Kripke and give a historical-causal account of reference - in that case, in order to pin down exactly what 'my grandfather's axe' refers to is going to require telling the prior metaphysical story anyway, which means the identity problem doesn't actually go away at all. If you think speaker intent wholly determines reference then (in addition to all the weird problems that causes) the answer is going to be messily neuro-empirical, and that's assuming that 'intent' is actually a coherent concept when applied to really existing minds. More likely, you want to tell a Wittgensteinian story about public language, in which case the resolution to the reference question (i.e., what does the noun phrase 'my grandfather's axe' refer to?) is still going to be messily empirical, but the unit of study might end up being the set of all intelligible English sentences, rather than a single brain. And even then, we might still need to tell a metaphysical causal-historical story (because plausibly, if you want language to be essentially public, then it had better essentially refer to publically accessible objects). Or maybe not, maybe you have an entirely different account of reference that dodges all these problems, but we should not mistakenly think that no such account is needed, especially if we're going to go around solving philosophical problems by declaring that we just need to get clear about reference. wateroverfire posted:intentionally slide up the autism spectrum and become philosophers.  wateroverfire posted:Above this line I don't think there´s anything to discuss. We end up arguing only about ambiguities caused by imprecise language. It's the most tedious and uninteresting way to talk about what "you" means.
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May 5, 2016 16:52
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wateroverfire posted:
The mechanics of reference in this case are relevant because they determine what the object of reference is, both for a given locution and for a given concept. I'm personally inclined toward the causal-historical account of reference on which a concept (and therefore a phrase expressing that concept) refers to an object by virtue of that object's having reliably activated that concept in the past. If this is right, then to determine the referent of a given concept/phrase constitutively requires tracing that object's trajectory in space-time. Which is just what is at issue for the identity question. Just pointing out that communication is generally successful doesn't resolve this issue. That and I think we should generally avoid trying to read our metaphysics off our epistemology.
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May 5, 2016 19:58
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OwlFancier posted:Again, a thing designed to emulate me is not me, a thing which is literally indistinguishable from me save for in ways that, for example, a few days sleep or possibly an injury would make me distinguishable from myself, then that thing is me. Do you mean indistinguishable from an omniscient perspective, or indistinguishable from a limited human epistemology?
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May 7, 2016 03:39
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OwlFancier posted:I mean indistinguishable in the sense that I could not reasonably tell the difference. This is a little strange, then, since people vary greatly in their ability to perceive differences. At the limit this would imply that, if you were in a coma, everything would be identical with everything. Why should we attach any special metaphysical significance to your (or anyone's) situated perspective?
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May 7, 2016 15:27
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OwlFancier posted:But my thinking I'm OwlFancier and everyone else not disputing that, along with physiological similarities are what makes me me already. Maybe! But you can't really help yourself to this proposition (as a premise), because 'what it is that makes you you' is just exactly what is at issue. That and, like I said earlier, I think it's a bad mistake to think that metaphysics is straightforwardly given to us by epistemology. Leibniz's law applies to 'things that share all their properties,' not 'things that, for all we know, very well may share all their properties.'
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May 7, 2016 17:39
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Yeah, I get that a lot, and still I'm pretty much at a loss as to how to respond to it. So, okay, I guess.
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May 7, 2016 17:56
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Oh dear clone posted:Nor can I. Once when I was given a drug before an endoscopy, I was told that I would actually be conscious during the procedure, but I would forget all about it afterwards - and so I did, completely. I now have no fear of endoscopies, as long as I am going to be drugged. (Still don't like the starving beforehand, mind you; they should give drugs for that too.) All else equal, would you prefer a drug that eliminated the pain to the one that just makes your forget it afterward?
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May 8, 2016 16:29
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Oh dear me posted:The pain eliminator, of course, because anyone's pain is bad. But that proves nothing about identity being more than the mind. But the pain still accrues to a person, and isn't simply free-floating, yeah? So there was a point, or a duration of time during which the person who experienced the pain ceased to be, and another person ('you') came to be. So there are three relevant persons here, call them A, B, and C. A: the person who experienced all your memories up to the lapse caused by the drug a.k.a the person who was told about the drug. B: the person who experienced the pain. This person ceases to be at some point. C: the person who experienced all memories since the lapse a.k.a you now. A couple of possible answers to the identity question: Case 1: A and B are identical, and are not identical to C. I think this road ends with denying that identity persists at all, but maybe not; if this is your view feel free to disagree with me. Case 2: A and C are identical, and are not identical to B. I think this involves backward causation, which is generally seen as a bad result for metaphysics, but I've known people to bite the bullet on this one. Case 3: Neither A nor B nor C are identical. This, even more clearly than case 1, is just a denial of diachronic identity. Case 4/5: B = C != A and A = B = C are denied ex hypothesi so they don't matter.
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May 9, 2016 17:32
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Oh dear me posted:Hm. Doesn't this rely on thinking of people as atomic entities? Unless one is using 'identical' in an unusual and misleading way, 'identical' and 'identity' are rather different concepts. I would happily call all three of them versions of me, though I see myself now as having differences from myself then. But I do not now contain version B's unique mental content, which has ceased to be. If by 'atomic' you mean 'having no parts,' then no, I don't think it relies on that. It relies on thinking that people are the sorts of things that can be the subject of determinate reference over time. Obviously this is a contentious view, there are definitely people who deny that persons as such are not part of the ontological furniture of our universe. But this again seems to solve the problem of the persistence of identity over time by saying that identity doesn't persist so there's no problem. As for 'identity,' at this point I'm just using it sort of naively to indicate the logical relation that holds just between a thing and itself. So in this case, to say that A and B are identical is just to say that A and B co-refer to some concrete thing. The notion could use some sharpening, especially since Leibniz' law doesn't seem to apply here (clearly A, B, and C don't share all their properties), but I think what I've said holds for any possible extension of that notion of identity on which it can apply to things at different times. But maybe not? I'm not sure - what do you see as the difference between 'identical' and 'identity'? OwlFancier posted:Alternatively, someone experiences pain while the procedure is being performed, that they do not remember it does not undo the experience. Thus regardless of the existence or similarity of any of those posited individuals, it is preferable to avoid pain being experienced. Yes, and this answers the normative question, but any one of cases 1-5 will yield that conclusion. But cases 1-4 yield additional weird conclusions, and cases 4 and 5 contradict the theory of identity in question. So even if we think the normative conclusion is explanatorily prior, the metaphysics of identity are undetermined by it.
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May 9, 2016 19:50
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| # ¿ May 22, 2024 05:21 |
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Oh dear me posted:Identical means the same in every respect. Identity variously means either the same reference or the same person, with 'person' meaning some vague collection of attributes but not including all possible respects. So it makes perfect sense to point at a photo of a baby and say 'That's me', without thinking that baby is identical to me (who would think that?). It also makes perfect sense to say 'She was a different person after the accident', while at the same time being willing to sign her passport photo declaring that she is the same person she always was. In your example, for passport purposes A = B = C, and I do not know why you excluded that ex hypothesi if you are really using identity just as a reference. Well, I took the following exchange: Oh dear clone posted:Nor can I. Once when I was given a drug before an endoscopy, I was told that I would actually be conscious during the procedure, but I would forget all about it afterwards - and so I did, completely. I now have no fear of endoscopies, as long as I am going to be drugged. (Still don't like the starving beforehand, mind you; they should give drugs for that too.) Juffo-Wup posted:All else equal, would you prefer a drug that eliminated the pain to the one that just makes your forget it afterward? Oh dear me posted:The pain eliminator, of course, because anyone's pain is bad. But that proves nothing about identity being more than the mind. to mean that, for whatever relation is important for you to be able to identify with a past person, that relation does not hold between you now and you who experienced pain. So I took it to be your view that any account of identity persistence (whether we're talking about the logical identity relation, or the mental/social identity relation you are interested in above, as long as it's reflexive and transitive) that entails B = C is a non-starter. But now I see maybe not? So let me ask: whatever reasons there are to prefer the painkiller over the amnesia drug, are they essentially egoistic or are they altruistic?
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May 10, 2016 01:14
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