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The Cloned-Consciousness-as-Continuous-Consciousness Fallacy

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Re: The Cloned-Consciousness-as-Continuous-Consciousness Fallacy

#81

Post by chongli »

mikelevins wrote: post #73
chongli wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What a weird question. You're always you, until you die. Even if you became totally paralyzed, blind, deaf, etc. (total sensory deprivation) you'd still be you. All that is you is just the voice in your head, the ability to ask the question, and to think about an answer. As for what happens to your body or anything else in the world? You can't ever get rid of those doubts. The only thing you can know without a doubt…

In context of the thought experiment there can be more than one person with equal claim to be the person that you believe yourself to be. For example, given the postulated copying technology there could be Two or ten or a hundred people with the same claim 91 you to be today's version of who you remember yourself to be. The only thing that makes one person's claim better than another's is a perceived continuity of ph…

My argument is that you don't really know other people, you only know yourself. Clones don't even have to be physical replicas of people, they need only be entities or systems which can pass the Turing test. The fact that a clone may think it is me makes zero difference to my friends who have no way of knowing and it makes zero difference to me because I can clearly see that it is a separate person from me.

Now, you could contrive a thought experiment where you clone me in such a way that neither I nor the clone know which one of us is the clone, but then, how is that any different in principle from babies switched at birth in a hospital?

Your memories don't define you, since they may be false. The only thing that defines you is your consciousness in the present. Everything else is I/O, and subject to interpretation and trust.

Re: The Cloned-Consciousness-as-Continuous-Consciousness Fallacy

#82

Post by dTal »

mickeypi wrote: post #30

Consider another version: An exactly similar human being to you is discovered to exist on another planet. They have your memories, your aspirations, your habits, etc. They were not created as a copy of you. This person was born to parents, just like you, and lived the same life that you did. They are reading this post on HN right now. Surely in this scenario the answer to "is it OK to kill one of you now?" is "no". S…

>Surely in this scenario the answer to "is it OK to kill one of you now?" is "no".

I don't know about that.

I'm not sure about this intuition pump. If they are truly identical to me, then the world they live in must also me identical to mine or we would have diverged. So if we discovered Earth-2, then Earth-2 would simultaneously discover us (or Earth-3 etc). No actions can cause divergence, so it's not possible for anyone on any Earth to only kill one of you. It would be like trying to kill your reflection.

If we're talking about some kind of god who is outside the mirror/chain Earth system, and has the ability to break symmetry as they see fit, it's still not clear-cut. In effect, from such a perspective, there is only one Earth (albeit with copies) until changes are made. It's not even clear that deleting one of the several identical copies of the whole Earth is wrong. Moreover, deciding to kill someone on one of several heretofore identical Earth's and seeing how they diverge is informationally the same as spawning a new Earth - an act of creation rather than destruction. Nothing is lost - that person still lives their life on an Earth somewhere - but now new lives will be led, new experiences, new sadness but also somewhere new joy.

I think it's pretty clear though that our morality of "no killing" is based pretty strongly upon the assumption that there's only one of someone, they can only be killed once, and it's forever. Start violating these assumptions and it breaks down quickly.

Re: The Cloned-Consciousness-as-Continuous-Consciousness Fallacy

#83

Post by jaxomlotus »

qbrass wrote: post #74
jaxomlotus wrote: post #4

Another similar thought experiment is what happen if we cut ourselves laterally exactly in half and then fill back in the missing half on both parts. In the case of both halves, we are continuing an existing consciousness. Would you be OK killing off one of the halves?

I've been through this a million times before. If they refuse to act with me as a single entity, they're dead to me.

Which one is "me" though? Which ever side I in my current state end up being?

Re: The Cloned-Consciousness-as-Continuous-Consciousness Fallacy

#84

Post by joeyo »

jaxomlotus wrote: post #83
qbrass wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've been through this a million times before. If they refuse to act with me as a single entity, they're dead to me.

Which one is "me" though? Which ever side I in my current state end up being?

We have some data on this from split-brain patients. These are people whose corpus callosum---a bundle of fibers linking their left and right cerebral hemispheres---is cut. Such people start to act as if they are two individuals. Each hemisphere only has access to half of the visual field, and due to a quirk of how language is lateralized (typically left hemisphere only) they can make conflicting verbal and nonverbal reports of ambiguous stimuli: saying one thing yet writing another.

So given this, it's not really fair to say that there is a unitary state to split. Each half would get a different state (perhaps "synchronized" at the time of the split), and only one half would be able to talk about the experience.

Re: The Cloned-Consciousness-as-Continuous-Consciousness Fallacy

#85

Post by exolymph »

throwawaysocks wrote: post #13

The author's "fallacy" isn't so much a fallacy as much as it is one particular (and rather unsurprising) opinion on how to answer the questions that Aaronson and Hanson have asked. In this sense, the author fundamentally misses the point of what Aaronson and Hanson have written. Aaronson and Hanson seem to be primarily interested in identifying questions and exploring the problems that arise when trying to give simpl…

I wish you'd explain why you disagree with my answer.

Re: The Cloned-Consciousness-as-Continuous-Consciousness Fallacy

#86

Post by trav4225 »

rictic wrote: post #42
trav4225 wrote: post #34

This whole discussion sheds a bit of light on the inevitable difficulties one encounters when attempting to remain unflinchingly dedicated to a purely materialistic philosophical worldview. (IMHO)

If you've got a philosophy that doesn't involve biting any counterintuitive bullets, please share.

My point is essentially to encourage open-mindedness about that which we don't (and possibly never can) fully understand from a materialist (as opposed to a philosophical) perspective. :)

Re: The Cloned-Consciousness-as-Continuous-Consciousness Fallacy

#87

Post by exolymph »

lhankbhl wrote: post #6
aappleby wrote: post #3

Imagine that I visit a cloning facility that can flawlessly duplicate a human, memories and all. The techs there put me in a medical gown and sedate me, and a while later I wake up in an empty room. Without any additional information, I have no way to determine if I am the clone or not. I know only that there is another me in the building somewhere, having the exact same thoughts as I am having right now. In fact, I…

Look at it like this: You are placed in a box. Moments later, you are told, "We have successfully made a copy of you. We are sending it home now. You must be disposed of." Will you allow them to dispose of you? This is the question being posed, not whether a copy will have no idea if it is the original. The point is that it isn't relevant if one is a copy. No one was moved, it's only that a second person now exists a…

This is exactly the question I was trying to pose. Thank you for expressing it so simply and elegantly.

Re: The Cloned-Consciousness-as-Continuous-Consciousness Fallacy

#88

Post by norea-armozel »

dTal wrote: post #82
mickeypi wrote: post #30

Consider another version: An exactly similar human being to you is discovered to exist on another planet. They have your memories, your aspirations, your habits, etc. They were not created as a copy of you. This person was born to parents, just like you, and lived the same life that you did. They are reading this post on HN right now. Surely in this scenario the answer to "is it OK to kill one of you now?" is "no". S…

>Surely in this scenario the answer to "is it OK to kill one of you now?" is "no". I don't know about that. I'm not sure about this intuition pump. If they are truly identical to me, then the world they live in must also me identical to mine or we would have diverged. So if we discovered Earth-2, then Earth-2 would simultaneously discover us (or Earth-3 etc). No actions can cause divergence, so it's not possible for…

Only if you assume the finality of death makes anything less good. If you assume every conscious being has inherent value then the entire argument has to go another way which isn't much better, but it can be characterized as a viable alternative if perfect copies of any one person could be created down to the Planck constants.

Re: The Cloned-Consciousness-as-Continuous-Consciousness Fallacy

#89

Post by glifchits »

exolymph wrote: post #85
throwawaysocks wrote: post #13

The author's "fallacy" isn't so much a fallacy as much as it is one particular (and rather unsurprising) opinion on how to answer the questions that Aaronson and Hanson have asked. In this sense, the author fundamentally misses the point of what Aaronson and Hanson have written. Aaronson and Hanson seem to be primarily interested in identifying questions and exploring the problems that arise when trying to give simpl…

I wish you'd explain why you disagree with my answer.

I think what throwawaysocks is saying is that your refutation doesn't really add value to the discussion. I agree with you, that my clone's consciousness is not my own consciousness, but what are the deeper implications?

Particularly when we start to consider AI, and its not your own human consciousness but rather an artificial one, does our notion of "murder" change? Then they question, is true "cloning" even possible? (Aaronson uses quantum uncertainty to say 'no', but Hanson claims 'yes' given total understanding of the brain.)

Thanks for your article, I'm personally on your side but this whole debate has really made me think.

Re: The Cloned-Consciousness-as-Continuous-Consciousness Fallacy

#90

Post by chr1 »

js8 wrote: post #15

I came to conclusion that torturing Sims is indeed morally wrong. Now it's not that much wrong, because they are not very self-aware, but if they were more self-aware, it would be very wrong. So yeah, killing clones or even virtual replicas willy-nilly is wrong. On the other hand, I would have no problem with teleportation-via-cloning. I don't have a problem with being unconscious every night, after all (kudos to htt…

If torturing sims is morally wrong is it also morally wrong to stop the simulation destroying their universe?
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