Are we all the same person (@noAxioms)

Philosopher123

I believe there is significant logic in that we are all the same person. I realize this seems ridiculous but I ask you to give the benefit of the doubt. I am not a lunatic (99 percent positive of that) and the theory is purely based in logic.

The entire theory is based on the presumption that 'souls' do not exist.

I will start by formulating two thought experiments. After which I will try to show that they are basically the same.

@noAxioms: Your the only guy with which I had a decent discussion about this. I'd really appreciate it if we could again pick up our discussion. I am going to answer faster, had some personal problems back then.

1 Thought experiments

1.1 The apartments thought experiment.

We have a drug which is capable to regulate to which part of the brain a person can read/write memory.
We put Bob in the following building; It consists of a central room with a bed, and surrounding it are 10 different apartments which Bob can access from the central room.

Each of these 10 apartments are different, and has different things to do in them.

We will label the apartments with numbers 1,2,3 etc.
Bob will live a day in apartment 1, then goes to sleep in the central room, after which he spends a day in apartment 2 and again sleeps in the central room.
He does this with all the apartments after which he starts again with apartment 1 and continuous this loop during the experiment.
Depending in which apartment Bob will live in the next day, he will be given the correct drug so that he can read/write the memories of that specific apartment. Memories of different apartments are not saved in the same part of the brain.
Because of this when Bob participates with the experiment, he only appears to be experiencing the life of only one apartment.
When he lives a day in apartment 1, and goes to sleep, the next thing he knows is that he once again needs to go to apartment 1.
When Bob experiences apartment 5, it seems to him that he only experiences apartment 5. When apartment 5 is boring or has bad living conditions he can say it was just bad luck that he ‘collapsed’ with apartment 5.

Also when Bob participates with the experiment, there isn’t a chance that he is going to die doing it. It is not that because there could’ve been 11 apartments, 10/11 of him will survive, and there is a 1/11 chance that Bob will die and be in some sort of ‘eternal nothingness’ because apartment 11 does not exist. In essence Bob can’t collapse with a non-existing apartment.

We can also expand the experiment:
Bob can communicate with the different apartments via email and we could give each apartment a different job, for example Bob from apartment 1 is a mailman, apartment 2 is a cashier, apartment 3 a taxi driver etc. Each will have different salaries, coworkers and friends. In essence each apartment will have their own live.

1.2 Ten persons thought experiment.

We have 10 different individuals living in the same apartment building Bob lived in. Each person has his own apartment.
At all-time 9 of them will be under narcosis and 1 of them is awake. One by one they will live a day in their apartment.

2 The experiencer.

Like I said before, the reason why the apartment thought experiment might be similar to conscious live in the universe has to do with the fact that we (likely) do not have souls.

While it is true that most secular people do not believe in the existence of the soul, it seems a lot of people –probably subconsciously-have the feeling of what Sam Harris calls the ‘experiencer’. This experiencer is in essence simply a different word for the soul.

“I’m not arguing that consciousness is a reality beyond science or beyond the brain or that it floats free of the brain at death. I’m not making any spooky claims about It’s metaphysics . What I am saying however is that the self is an illusion. The sense of being an ego, an I, a thinker of thoughts in addition to the thoughts. An experiencer in addition to the experience. The sense that we all have of riding around inside our heads as a kind of a passenger in the vehicle of the body. That’s where most people start when they think about any of these questions. Most people don’t feel identical to their bodies. They feel like they have bodies. They feel like there inside the body. And most people feel they are inside their heads. Now that sense of being a subject, a locus of consciousness inside the head is an illusion. It makes no neuro-anatomical sense. There’s no place in the brain for your ego to be hiding. We know that everything that you experience – your conscious emotions and thoughts and moods and the impulses that initiate behavior – all of these things are delivered by a myriad of different processes in the brain that are spread over the whole of the brain. They can be independently erupted. We have a changing system. We are a process and there’s not one unitary self that’s carried trough from one moment to the next unchanging. And yet we feel that we have this self that’s just this center of experience.” – Sam Harris- Neuroscientist and philosopher.

So what is an experiencer? It is literally what the word says it is, it is not the experience itself, it is what experiences the experience.

We have multiple experiences, vision, sounds, pain, etc. To keep it simple you can ignore your other senses and simply imagine the experience to be light (vision), and the experiencer is who/what sees the light.

We will approach the scenario in which experiencers exist, and the scenario in which they don’t exist.

2.1 Experiencers do not exist.

The total information about the experience itself we will call X, and the information about who experiences the experience we will call Y.

There is no reason why humans at some point aren’t capable of creating something that is conscious. Unless a God is required to add the extra ingredient of consciousness, what nature can do with the laws of physics, humans can do with the laws of physics. Even if it takes us another 500 000 years before doing so.

Humans create such a machine, one of the inputs is a camera so the experience of light can be created.

When the scientist turn on the machine, who will experience the experience? Who will see the light? There aren’t a trillion souls in the universe and one of them is chosen to experience the experience. The experience of light will simply exist. The total information about this experience is simply X

When the scientist turn the machine off overnight, and the next day they turn it back on (A), who will now see the experience of light? Again the experience will simply exist. The total information about the experience is X.

What if the hardware of the machine is in bad condition and it’s information is uploaded in the same type of machine (B). Who will experience the experiences now?
Again the experience will simply exist. It’s a nonsensical question to ask whether the same ‘person’ will experience the experiences.

To visualize:

2.2 Experiencers do exist.

The scientists turn the computer on, the information of the experience is X. Experiencer Y1 sees the experience.
When the scientist turn off the computer, and turn it back on the next morning (A), will the same person/experiencer see the experience of light? Will the information of Y be the same?
What if the scientists open up the machine and replace some parts (B)? Who will now see the light?
Visually:

The experiencer stays the same:
----------------------------------------------

The experiencer changes:
----------------------------------------------

If experiencers do exist, humans must be very careful when creating conscious machines. At which point do you kill an experiencer? The problem is we wouldn’t even be able to test whether the experiencer was killed or not. A conscious machine after (C) will always be convinced that ‘he’ experienced the machine before (C).

2.3 The information of the experiencer/soul is invisible

As far is science is concerned the information of Y is 100% invisible. A system that creates consciousness can be studied from every angle, but only the information of X can be extracted when doing so. We can’t even confirm that you are the same ‘person’ as your yesterday self . Maybe deep sleep (S) kills the experiencer and this morning when you woke up you actually got ‘born’, and this is the only day you will live. After all there doesn’t seem to be an evolutionary benefit to make sure the experiencer isn’t killed

Not only is the information of Y invisible, like Sam Harris says this ‘self’ does not make any neuro-anatomical sense. There isn’t a thinker of thoughts in addition to the thoughts. There is just the thoughts. There isn’t an experiencer that experiences the experience. There is just the experience.
There is no place in your brain for a ‘thinker of thoughts’ or ‘experiencer’ to be hiding.

Like I said before the experiencer is essence a different word for the soul. The experiencer isn’t the brain, it isn’t even the conscious experience created by the brain, it is an invisible ‘thing’ which experiences the conscious experiences created by the brain.

2.4 The apartments thought experiment/10 person experiment.

The experiences of the apartment thought experiment only differ from each other in terms of the information in X (the experience itself). When we do the same experiment but with 10 persons. We imagine the experiences of each apartment to not only differ in X information, but also in Y information

Universe with experiencers:
-------------------------------------
(P1= person 1 / Ap1= apartment 1)

As said before, the experiencer is invisible and does not make any sense from a scientific standpoint.
On top of that, a universe without experiencers works, the apartment thought experiment shows this. There isn’t a need for specific experiencers to experience specific experiences.

Universe without experiencers:
----------------------------------------

3. Time

The 10 persons thought experiment is set up so that there aren’t two people awake at the same time.
Physics tells us that time is an illusion;

“For we convinced physicists, the distinction between past, present, and future is only an illusion, however persistent.” –Albert Einstein

“The past is not gone, the future isn’t non-existent, the past the future and the present are all existing in exactly the same way” - Max Tegmark

“there is just as much reality to the future and the past, as there is to the present moment”- Sean Carroll

This means that sure you are conscious at the same time the person you are talking to is conscious. But you are also conscious at the same time your baby is conscious, and at the same time your 12 year old self is conscious.

Also note, what is the chance of having conscious experience right now in a timeless universe?

4 The illusion of the experiencer.

There are obvious reasons why we have the illusion of a personal experiencer:

1 Information
--------------------
When Bob has an experience (A) in which he thinks about what he ate yesterday (B)
This experience (A) is an experience that exists. In it is visual and other information encoded recorded by (B).
(A) also knows that the recording of this information was coupled with experience.
Naturally (A) will think it also experienced (B) and the feeling of an experiencer emerges.

2.The body
--------------------
In order for a system to create conscious experience it needs to be of high complexity. The most logical place to find the proper conditions for this to happen in a law based universe is in the form of life.
Because of this, conscious experience that share information are also always found in the same ‘body’ or evolution thereof.
Sure you might not remember your dream, but ‘you’ must have experienced it, since it happened in the same body. The same counts for your baby.

In general:
---------------------
Conscious experiences are dependent on the information encoded within the brain/machine at a specific time, and these experiences only hold information about what seems one ‘person*’ (in fact one experience) at a specific moment in time and space. Because of this the illusion of an experiencer is so strong. One that experienced your baby self ,your 12 year old self and you. But when your body dies and another baby gets born, won’t experience those experiences. They will be experienced by a different ‘person’. ‘You’ will forever experience nothing, this ‘unimaginable eternal nothingness’, as if the universe didn’t even exist.

*= see 1.Information and 2.The body

5 Another thought experiment: Are you your baby?

We have u future Mars robot which is conscious. The robot is highly intelligent, it has a bunch of sensors as input signals and multiple mechanic arms and tripod like legs as output possibility’s. Its central ‘computer’ processes the input signals and creates a proper output to guide it over Mars’s surface. Much the same way our brain logically processes its incoming signals* to generates a proper output** to guide its biological robot though the world.

We will call the original robot (A). As time goes by the robot is regularly being upgraded or changes depending on its purpose.
Some 20 years later the original robot is entirely gone and a new robot (B) is created.
Is robot (B) robot (A)? Where the experiences of robot (B) experienced by the same ‘person’ as those of robot (A)?

Asking this question is basically the same as asking whether you are your baby. Or whether you experienced you’re baby.

Woman can’t give birth to a grown up human, if that was possible, evolution had taken that direction.
Babies are biological robots that lay a foundation for a future robot yet to be build, one which can procreate.

*=our senses
**=our muscles etc.

noAxioms

↪Philosopher123

1 Apartments
This is a fair description of a computer task scheduler. One computer (Bob) and many tasks (one or more per application for instance) each run in turn but context switching so often that they all seem to run at once. You didn't really describe how this models reality. What is a typical physical person in this scenario? The drug-isolated chunk of data? The apartment? They each have their own apartment, so no, they're not the apartments. The data then. Each person is a task. Doesn't seem to correspond much to reality where I see multiple physical bodies in simultaneous existence. Like in the apartment scenario, no person could ever witness another since only one is active at once. Only passed messages can serve as communication (just like communication between computer tasks).

2 Experiencer
My idea of souls is a dualistic mind that is to persist and (if you're religious) be judged after end of the physical life to which it corresponds. Without that, it is just dualism, and there are plenty of secular people who are dualists. So sure, the experiencer is the same as a soul during life, and only differs in description outside of life. If it is something that retains identity and floats free after death, you might as well call it a soul. Sam Harris seems to avoid this afterlife opinion, so he's talking about just the dualistic experiencer that we feel, and he denies the necessity of it. He doesn't mention afterlife, so I'd hesitate to qualify his statement as being about a soul.

So sure, an experiencer is obviously what does the experiencing. The question remains: is it a separate thing that has a body, or is it just part of the processes of the body? My point here is, the word 'experiencer' does not necessarily imply dualism, but you seem to use the word that way since 2.1 title says they don't exist. You mean a non-physical experiencer.

There is no reason why humans at some point aren’t capable of creating something that is conscious. Unless a God is required to add the extra ingredient of consciousness,

I have trouble with that since 'is conscious' is very undefined. The word seems to have different meaning to people with different views and biases. The usual fallacious notion is something like "biological and aware", which I don't think humans are going to create from scratch (not by the usual way of creating a consciousness). If a God is needed to supply it to babies, then God is probably in charge of assigning one to my lab creation.

2.1 Humans create such a machine, one of the inputs is a camera so the experience of light can be created.

Eyes/cameras are not experience. They sense light. The experience is process that occurs elsewhere.

As far as I can see, a functioning machine utilizing a functioning camera experiences light. You can perhaps say that the machine is the experiencer Y, or that its processes are Y. As for the hardware switch, one can indeed ask if it is the same machine as yesterday experiencing X. In some cases it gets very fuzzy. What if the camera is simply plugged into a different USB port? What if each port has a separate video processor? At what point does Y become different. Answers seem arbitrary, and more clear with people only because we seem to have less swapable hardware.

2.2 If experiencers do exist, humans must be very careful when creating conscious machines. At which point do you kill an experiencer? The problem is we wouldn’t even be able to test whether the experiencer was killed or not.

This can be a thread unto itself. Stick with people for the time being. Under various scenarios of teleportation/cloning/merging/part-swapping, at which point has murder been done? How is murder defined given the viability of such identity scrambling games? Our current definitions only work because these things are not currently possible except some of the part-swapping to a point. Can you define murder without dependence on one's philosophy of mind?

2.3 We can’t even confirm that you are the same ‘person’ as your yesterday self .

Indeed. Numeric identity seems to be an academic exercise without necessary direct correspondence to reality. I actually found a way to assign identities to people/things without violation of branching physics or other identity scrambling scenarios. That identity is not the Y however, but it usually corresponds to Y so long as you behave.

Maybe deep sleep (S) kills the experiencer and this morning when you woke up you actually got ‘born’, and this is the only day you will live.

What would sleep have to do with this? Any argument that works here also works for identity being changed every 13 minutes. Clearly any experiencer serves no purpose under such scenarios.

2.4 On top of that, a universe without experiencers works, the apartment thought experiment shows this.

It does? I thought Bob was the experiencer.

3 The 10 persons thought experiment is set up so that there aren’t two people awake at the same time.
Physics tells us that time is an illusion;

Physics does not say that. And it certainly does not have all events occurring at the same time. The Einstein/Tegmark/Carroll quotes refer to the nature of past/present/future, that they are not different. And that is physicists saying that, not physics. The actual physics behind these assertions is there, but is quite subtle.

This means that sure you are conscious at the same time the person you are talking to is conscious. But you are also conscious at the same time your baby is conscious, and at the same time your 12 year old self is conscious.

It means no such thing. It presumes a 'you' that is the same identity in all these moments, and it incorrectly asserts that now is the same time as when you were 12. Those physicists don't state that all things happen at the same time.

Do I consider myself my baby? No, but I also don't consider myself the 12 year old version of me. I don't see out of my baby's eyes, and I don't see out of the 12YO eyes. I have memory of the latter, but my memory is not that identity.

4. Conscious experience doesn't necessarily imply complexity. Perhaps complex conscious experience does. So it comes down to how simple it can be before no longer falling under your definition of consciousness.

5. The <Mars> robot is highly intelligent, it has a bunch of sensors as input signals and multiple mechanic arms and tripod like legs as output possibility’s. Its central ‘computer’ processes the input signals and creates a proper output to guide it over Mars’s surface.

Consider also that the processor might be in a lab, and the robot part is just a remote extension with only limited capabilities. The one consciousness might have several such robot 'hands' which may or may not have built-in senses. The sensors could instead be mounted at multiple fixed points all over the place.
Or the processors might go with the robot and be a temporary consciousness that merges with the central one when it returns. Think alien here when you play such games.

Is robot (B) robot (A)?

To what would this matter? It seems a mathematical designation that has no practicality. To me, matching my altered identity with that of the version yesterday has legal practicality. This stuff is mine. Here's my job. I bear the responsibility of the acts done by that yesterday me. I draw breath not for the benefit of me, but for the benefit of a me 10 seconds from now. These relations don't exist between me and somebody else. But I have heightened interest in my baby since the baby represents a continuation of my DNA pattern, and I expend effort for the baby for the same reason I draw breath.

So think of such relations that have practical implications between robots A and B so the question can be answered.

Wayfarer

I’m not arguing that consciousness is a reality beyond science or beyond the brain or that it floats free of the brain at death. I’m not making any spooky claims about It’s metaphysics . What I am saying however is that the self is an illusion. The sense of being an ego, an I, a thinker of thoughts in addition to the thoughts. An experiencer in addition to the experience. The sense that we all have of riding around inside our heads as a kind of a passenger in the vehicle of the body. That’s where most people start when they think about any of these questions. Most people don’t feel identical to their bodies. They feel like they have bodies. They feel like there inside the body. And most people feel they are inside their heads. Now that sense of being a subject, a locus of consciousness inside the head is an illusion. — Sam Harris

I am familiar with Sam Harris' ideas on this subject, which he has adapted from Buddhism. He often refers to Tulku Urgyen Rinpoche, from whom he apparently received instructions. And indeed teaching of 'anatma', no self, is fundamental to Buddhism. But it's intepretation is a very delicate matter, because it so easily falls into the trap of nihilism, which is precisely the error of saying that 'the self doesn't exist'. (Don't underestimate the threat of nihilism; it is widespread and insidious. A lot of Buddhists unknowingly fall into it, in my view; I say that as a practising Buddhist.)

So it's not such a simple issue. Actually the teaching of anatman is not that there is no self, but that nothing is self 1. It's a subtle but crucial distinction. This means, nothing exists 'inherently' or independently of everything else; there are no atoms, for instance, or any 'true self' which exists independently of or outside of the flux of experience, nor any God, conceived of as something separate and above the whole universe.

But the anatman teaching was an argument against the then-current idea that there was a true or higher self that lived in solitary unity beyond the flux of experience ('solitary like a mountain peak or post set firm' is the typical canonical expression of the idea of 'atma' being criticised).

But I really don't think that this says there is 'no subject of experience', in practical terms.

How I understand it is that 'the subject of experience is never an object of cognition'. This is something like the idea of the 'transcendental ego' which you find in idealism and phenomenology.

So when Hume says, for instance, that no matter how hard he looks, he can see no subject of experience - it's because it is the subject that is looking! That is the 'reflexive problem of consciousness', long known to Indian philosophy, which puts it like this: the hand can grasp another, but it can't grasp itself; the eye see another, but it can't see itself 2 . This is an analogy for the way the mind constitutes the domain of experience, according to its memories, judgements, sensations, and so on, but the mind is not aware of its activities in doing that, as it is always other-directed; experience is a transitive verb. So the activities of memory, judgement, and so on, which constitute our experience of the world, are themselves largely unconscious or beneath the threshold of conscious awareness. So they're 'transcendent' in the Kantian sense of 'constituting experience while not being given in experience'.

Nevertheless the 'subjective unity of perception' is an apodictic truth to my mind. If you drop a hammer on your toe, you don't receive the information about it in the third person, even though it involves millions of separate cellular transactions. So it is something that is simple on one level, and complex on another. I don't think that to declare it merely or simply the sum of the actions of its parts does it justice; whatever approach we take has to be more holistic than that. (This is recognised in the neuro-sciences as one aspect of the 'neural binding problem', i.e. how to account for the faculty which unites all of the elements of perception, sensation and judgement.)

There's a lot in this so will leave it there for now.

andrewk

↪Wayfarer

But the anatman teaching was an argument against the then-current idea that there was a true or higher self that lived in solitary unity beyond the flux of experience

Is that idea the same as the idea in some veins of current Indian mysticism that there is atman - some sort of universal, true 'self' - and that Mokshah consists of in some sense understanding and internalizing the union of atman and brahman? Or is it some idea of atman as self that is no longer in wide use?

I am very interested in the notion that Nagarjuna's doctrines seem to be able to be interpreted either as a rejection of the current emphasis on the self, the individualist, materialist culture and all the hang-ups and anxieties that accompany it, OR as a rejection of a specific theological position that was current when he was writing in ancient India.

His aim could not have been the former, as our modern culture did not exist in his day. But I wonder about whether it is being too flexible with the interpretation of his ideas to use it as a counter the current materialist emphasis on self and individuality. I am also intrigued at the idea that a doctroine can on the one hand be interpreted as a counter to excessive materialism and on the other hand as an argument against a deeply spiritual position (which leads back to my question of the first para).

I think you know a lot more about this than me so I'd be interested in your thoughts.

Wayfarer

I am very interested in the notion that Nāgārjuna's doctrines seem to be able to be interpreted either as a rejection of the current emphasis on the self, the individualist, materialist culture and all the hang-ups and anxieties that accompany it, OR as a rejection of a specific theological position that was current when he was writing in ancient India. — "AndrewK

It was the criticism of the idea of a fixed or immutable self as something above and immune to change. In the context in which the Buddha taught, there was an acceptance of the idea that ascetics could recall their past lives, and therefore, have an expectation that the process would continue; so, 'eternalism' was the view that one could keep being reborn in perpetuity through acheiving identification with the 'unchanging ātman'. Buddhists basically said: no such thing anywhere as something that doesn't change.

So, the two 'extreme views' were on the one side, nihilism - at the break up of the body, the elements return to their sources, there are no consequences of actions - and on the other side, eternalism - that there was a self that would continue to be reborn in perpetuity. And the 'middle path' was between the 'extreme views' - that nothing persists at all (nihilism); or the self persists forever (eternalism).
The basic Buddhist teaching is 'dependent origination' wherein what persists is a process, rather than an entity (this is named in later Buddhism as the citta-santāna or 'mindsteam' 1).

In my view this is often is taken to imply that there is simply no self tout courte which I think tends towards being nihilistic. Nāgārjuna warned in many of his writings about the dangers of intepreting śūnyatā nihilistically, but nevertheless many of the early European interpreters of Buddhism (including Nietzsche) translated śūnyatā as non-being, nothingness or 'the void', as do many people to this day. It's not so simple.

Wosret

Are we all the same person (@noAxioms)

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