Does consciousness/identity need to be continuous?

Great Debates
1

A few thought experiments seem to drive people one way or another when thinking about consciousness. I would like to avoid trying to debate what consciousness is since last time I asked my qualifications (not too intuitive but not too explicit) didn’t go over well. So, if you believe consciousness exists, then we can get to the nitty gritty.

Several issues can be explored in thought experiments. One of these is the question of continuity with respect to “cloning.” Consider the following issue:

It is scientifically possible to completely scan an entire person and replicate that person somewhere else. The scan is done entirely in parallel (that is, all parts are scanned simultaneously—remember, this is a thought experiment) and the reconstruction is also done entirely in parallel.

First case: destructive scan
In this scenario the act of scanning is destructive. There is nothing left of the object being scanned. You are scanned, and then reassembled on the other side of the planet after some time lag.
Q: Is it still you?

Second case: harmless scan
In this scenario the act of scanning is non-invasive. The object being scanned is not destroyed. You are scanned and reassembled on the other side of the planet after some time lag.
Q: Is it still you?

My responses to the question
In both the first case and the second case it is still “you.” For the first case, I do not feel that consciousness needs to be continuous in order to keep its ontological identity (though I am not certain exactly what I mean by that, I am certain that my intuitive definition does not require continuity). Thus, to you—who was scanned—you felt no lapse. You were conscious at point A and then you were “suddenly” conscious at point B. Though it seemed to you that there was no lapse in time, there, in fact, was. This had no bearing on your consciousness.

The second case is somewhat perplexing (this is where physicists might take a time-travel tack and say, “It must violate some not-yet formulated laws of physics because such a thing is absurd” but I am not requiring that the universe make sense), and people have had many different views of identity in particular. I am inclined to believe that both can be identified as seperate individuals, though both would claim to be you (especially so if you had the idea that it was a destructive scan even though it wasn’t).

But in light of the second response the first response seems incorrect, doesn’t it? Should we say, in light of the second case, that the first case merely represents the creation of a you-like-clone and that, in fact, it isn’t really you? This is where people toss in the idea of continutity of identity, but in the first case it seems clear to you that it is certainly you, and it is also clear that your existence was not continuous!

Hmmm…

2

Huh?

Since identity is a construct of cognition and memory, as long as cognition and memory exist, the me exists.

If I am duplicated, we are two separate entities–why on earth wouldn’t we be?

3

Interesting question which I have wondered about myself.

Actually all of us are familiar with a comparable situation: sleep. We go to bed as one person and then lose conciousness but when we wake up we “feel” we are the same person. Of course there is physical continuity but presumably your scan ning process is equivalent to that.

4

I have pondered that exact question, erislover, and reached much the same conclusion. Until we understand much more about conciousness, individuality, and identity, I don’t think we can know for sure.

5

Why on Earth would physicists say that? The only objection from physics would be that to “completely” replicate a person, you have to know the wavefunction of every particle in their body, a staggering amount of data–but you’ve postulated that you could scan the person.

Physics (as we understand it) has little to do with the nature of consciousness (as we understand it).

My 2 cents: In both cases, upon the instant that the copy is made, the copy is you, but of course it diverges thereafter–since the person I am right now is not the person I was a millisecond ago or a millisecond later.

Perhaps an interesting question is, after what tiny but non-zero time would I and a copy become different people? I chose a millisecond for no good reason . . . would it be that as soon as I and my copy perceive the first differing sensation, we’d be different, or is consciousness affected by other varibles than the sensations we perceive? (By perceive, I don’t necessarily by consciously perceive. . . I’m thinking more about “registered by the brain”.)

The most important questions, however, are these:

  1. Which copy gets my stuff?

  2. Could this process be applied to Russell Crowe?

  3. Repeatedly?

6

:smacks forehead: ohhhhhhh

:wink:

Actually, that was a smart-ass forehead-smacking. I would ask you, andros if you are duplicated: which one is you? Kinda my point.

CyberPundit, yes, sleeping might just be equivalent to the destructive scan from my perspective (assuming that I am the one asleep and I am the one in the destructive scan) but in the non-destructive scan the case is not so clear. IMO.

7

I don’t know why they would but they did back when time-travel mathematical solutions were demonstrated. They couldn’t mathematically show it wouldn’t happen, so they said, “Hey, the universe just doesn’t work like that, ok? We don’t know why yet…” Those wacky physicists!

That quote is (possibly) at odds with:

The exact same amount of time you mention in the other one. However, the first quote makes the concept of identity over time to be, um, non-existent. Not that I haven’t mentioned something to that effect once or twice myself, just wanted to be clear that you were fundamentally destroying identity there. :slight_smile:

I can allow it, but I’ve got dibs on Sherilyn Fenn. :stuck_out_tongue:

8

I think podkayne has it right.

The duplicate, whether destructive or not, has every bit as much right to claim continuity of identity as any “me” which has not been duplicated. If the duplication is not destructive, then “we” both have the same relationship to the “me” who existed pre-duplication. Our consciousnesses diverge from the instant of duplication, though.

9

Sherilyn Fenn? She needs to be replicated a few dozen times just to add up to a real woman. For God’s sake, woman, eat a sandwich or something!

Now, where do I establish my claim on the Salma Hayek franchise.

10

CyberPundit’s thought is very insightful - or I just think so because sleeping was what I thought of as well. ;]

In any case, I say, No, it’s not the same person either time.

And, I also believe that I am indeed a slightly different person when I wake up in the morning than when I went to bed. If only because we know that your brain is doing all sorts of weird things while you sleep - commiting short-term memory to long term, and other weird neurological stuff.

So I say, neither of the above scans makes a “perfect” copy. A copy of you is never the same as the real you. Whether you continue to exist or not after the copy is made is entirely irrelevant.

This reminds me vaguely of the whole “Thesus’s Ship” debate:

http://members.aol.com/kiekeben/theseus.html

Incidentally, my answer to this is: “The ship becomes different when the first plank is replaced.”

That’s my story, and I’m sticking to it! :stuck_out_tongue:
-Ben

11

[Walrus]
I am he
as you are he
as you are me
and we are all together.
[Goo goo goo joob]

12

A good book for SF buffs on this topic is Permutation City by Greg Egan. (people are scanned and reconstructed as ‘copies’ in VR).

My feeling is that the newly-created person will be a completely plausible copy of ‘me’ and will even believe himself to be me, but that alone doesn’t make him me, but in that case maybe that doesn’t make me ‘me’. Perhaps the whole idea of our own identities is just an illusion.

In some ways, I’m not the same person that I was yesterday; in more ways I’m not the same person that I was last year and in very many ways I’m not the same person I was when I was two years old; it’s almost like multiple personality disorder, but in series not parallel.

Anyway, if the non-destructive process results in an unchanged ‘me’ and an extra one, we can’t possibly share identity, can we? (I don’t see any logical difference between the destructive and non-destructive process; either the new individual is me or it isn’t (otherwise we could start to argue that in the non-destructive scenario, the copy suddenly ‘becomes’ me if I am accidentally killed at some point after the copy is made.

I’m not sure if it’s a question that can ever be properly and easily answered; if I smash a teacup and somehow simultaneously make another exactly the same, it’s a different teacup, but if I make the new one by repositioning all of the atoms in the broken pieces back to their original positions, we enter a grey area - and that’s just for a non-sentient object.

Personally, I won’t be choosing to step into any matter transporters (unless they work like the ones Larry Niven specifies, where nothing is disassembled and rebuilt, but bits of space are inexplicably ‘switched’), and yet where lies the fear? - the fear is that the ‘current real me’ will die in the transition and the whole thing becomes a metaphysical question.

13

Erm… nope. Still sounds right to me.

If we look at the first scenario again, we do a destructive scan of someone… let’s say, you. We press the button and you are reassembled. Out you pop. You feel like you, and as far as you are concerned, you are you. Well, who am I to argue? I’m going to say you are you. All well and good.

But what if the pattern remains in the buffer, and we press the button again? Out pops another you. This new you also feels like you, and as far as the new you is concerned, the new you is also you. To me, this new you seems just as correct in claiming to be you.

Just because there are now two of you (just as there are in the case of a harmless scan) doesn’t invalidate the you-ness of either one. Both have the same perception of identity as each other at the point of re-assembly (at which point they obviosuly begin to diverge), and the same perception of identity as you would have had had you never been disassembled.

I say the second response doesn’t invalidate the first response. It just seems really weird.

But is there a difference between a “you-like-clone” and a “you”? I don’t see a difference. The matter may be different, but the identity/memory/perception/consciousness is the same, and that’s the stuff of you-ness, surely.

Wow, I love these technical terms.

Yeah, you said it.

By the way, I’m running on a very materialist view of identity - that who you are are is entirely a property of your component atoms/neurons etc. If we also have a supernatural spirit component, I’ve got no idea what happens to that when our material parts are are destroyed and/or re-assembled.

Anyway, put me down for a Russel Crowe, with a side-order of Ewan McGregor.

14

Some more thoughts on this. My main problem with the non-destructive scan is if both “versions” of me are in existence simultaneously, I can’t conceive of my conciousness being divided between the two of them. For continuity of identity it seems to me that I had have to be aware of having two bodies, two minds, being in two places at once. I can’t fathom this. It seems to me that the original would maintain continuity, and the copy would be a new person who happens to be virtually identical to me. It would have as much of a claim of being “me” as the original, but “I” would “be” the original. In other words what everyone else thinks about the copy is irrelevant, what’s important is whether “I” am still in there. In the case of a destructive scan, “I” would be vaporized and killed, in the traditional sense, and an exact copy would take my place, but my unique identity would cease to exist. It goes without saying from that hypothesis, that I don’t believe in any kind of supernatural “soul”, conciousness and identity are entirely derived from the structure and function of the human brain. Like I said above, though, we don’t really understand enough about the nature of conciousness to definitively answer the question, so I will be giving any teleporters a wide berth for the forseeable future.

15

[carlin]Thinking about stuff like this is what kept me out of the really good schools[/carlin]

By the way, send over Ewan and Russell, I want to go drinking with those two.

16

hmmm . . . nope. Sorry, erl, smart-ass or no, I’m still not getting your objections.

Since the very concept of identity is a construct, what defines “me” is purely a matter of my own solipsism. To me, I would remain “me,” and the copy would remain “him,” albeit a “him” who was a duplicate of me. To him, he’s still me, and I’m him. I don’t see any bifurcation inherent in the process.

:shrug: It’s interesting fodder for thought, I’ll grant you that. Chalker deals with the nature of self in every other book it seems, and Pohl and Williamson played with it in their “Farthest Star” books.

17

[hijack]

Is it just me or did anyone else think of forking new processes in Unix?

Essentially when u fork a new process in unix u duplicate the entire program along with nearly all the data currently being used by the program into a new process. Exactly like duplicating the conciousness.

And from the point of fork, we have 2 independent processes evolving differently.

[/hijack]

18

I understand, andros, that to you you are still you in both of the people; and I understand, Spiritus, Podkayne, et al, that after the process there are two entities. What I do not understand is: which one is you?

andros, are you saying that you are whoever you say you are? That identity is pure solipsism? Both persons would claim to be you; both persons would have a continuous conscious experience; are you saying, then, that both people are you right up until the moment when the copying was done?

I don’t have a problem with that, I don’t think I do anyway, just trying to be clear.

So in the first scenario (destructive scan), then, are you also saying the person is you, or that they cannot tell by themselves that they are not you? I mean, is there a difference, is my question.

Heh, no problem for me. The more Fenns the merrier.

ModernRonin2

Stickin’ to it, eh? :wink: Just wondering… if you lose a limb in an accident, are you still you? Since you would (no doubt) answer “no” because of the “stickin’ to the planks story” then I would wonder… why would it still seem like you were you?

The question is even more pertanent at a more pedantic level. Electrons are fundamentally indistinguishable, for example. No way to tell one electron apart from another at two different times. If I exchanged all the electrons in my body with electrons in the wall I sit next to here, I would not be any different (plus it might explain my stubbornness on a few points). But according to the ship example I would be different. In fact, this leads us back to Podkayne’s comment in the beginning where she said:

The sentence almost doesn’t make any sense… if you weren’t “you” a millisecond ago, nevermind ten minutes ago, then what does that say about identity?

Genseric, I tend to agree with you except for the sticking point that everyone else would think that the copy is you if the real you were destroyed. Think what an ontological mess Star Trek is! :smiley:

19

Both are real people whose consciousness proceeds in an apparently unbroken stream from the “me” who stepped into the duplicator. I am not sure I understand the question “which is the real ‘me’?” Both are equally “me”.

Contiuity of identity, as others have noted, cannot be tied to a specific material composition. One possiblity is that continuity of identity is an illusion, in which case no “me” is related to the “pre-X me” for any event X. The other possiblity is that continuity of identity is an organizational/compositional quality (or as Lib would say–a gestalt).

Genseric
I don’t see any need (or even potential) for consciousness to be divided between the two “mes”, certainly not if we accept the materialist framework of the OP.

If we imagine that such a duplication does result in a single consciousness split between two bodies then it would seem to be a strong argument in favor of a non-material agent of consciousness.

20

I’m gonna buck the crowd here and say that continuity is necessary for identity, but not for consciousness.

In the first scenario, the destructive scan has destroyed entity A and created another entity (A[sup]1[/sup]?), whose consciousness resembles the consciousness of A at the time of the scan in every detail, except that A’s corporeal existence has ceased and therefore A’s consciousness will not continue. The fact that the former entity and the present entity are effectively identical does not negate the fact that they are separate (and therefore different) entities, one of which is no more.

In the second scenario, entity A and entity A[sup]1[/sup] will each have their own changing individual frame of reference, so from a phenomenological standpoint their experiential divergence implies separate identities and consciousnesses as well.

This is not the same phenomenon we see in identical twins, who start their existence as a single zygote. Which twin represents the “real” zygote? My answer is that both, and neither, can claim that title. They are separate identities who diverged from one original entity. In erislover’s scenario, however, we’ve not split a developing organism, we’ve succesfully created an exact copy of an organism. The copy can neither usurp the identity of the original (“real”) entity, nor have its own separate existence denied.