dm@BBN-VAX.ARPA (09/24/85)
From: dm@BBN-VAX.ARPA S.F. comes closest to philosophy when dealing with artificial minds and matter transmission. Matter transmission is one of the gedanken experiments philosophers engage in when dealing with the problem of personal identity (what is it? how does something--particularly a living, conscious being, retain it's identity over time?). Here is a famous puzzle, known as the ship of Theseus: The ship of Theseus is a wooden ship. One day, a wooden plank is replaced. The plank is removed and left on the dock. As the years go by, this happens to more and more of the planks, with each plank removed added to the pile, until one day, none of the original wood is left -- it's all in the pile on the dock. Where is the ship of Theseus? What makes that boat there the ship of Theseus, as opposed to the pile of wood on the dock? Similarly, what makes you the same person as you were when you were 12 years old? Probably almost all of the atoms in your body have been replaced in that time. Well, you REMEMBER being that 12 year old... So is it your memory of being that 12 year old that makes you the same person? Enter duplication through matter transmission. Now you have two copies (you can even arrange it so that both copies were created in the same instant, and the original ``destroyed''/``transmitted''. Both copies remember being that 12 year old. let me say it one more way. imagine that we can make the copy without damaging the original at all. according to the arguments i'm hearing, if you shoot the original through the head, it will not experience death now, since there is a copy of it. this is plainly ridiculous. Don.Provan@A.CS.CMU.EDU Well, yes, this argument is plainly ridiculous, but it isn't the argument that people have been putting forth. The copy which is shot experiences death, certainly -- they started being different people when they stepped out of the matter transmitter/duplicator. But the original ``person'' is still alive -- that is, there is still a living, conscious being who remembers being that 12 year old... The same arguement applies to recreating a person by recording their mind and playing it back -- either into a tabula rasa clone, or into an android or a computer. If the mind is software, it shouldn't matter too much what hardware it's implemented in. This is a conundrum. I suspect it might be a conundrum for a number of reasons. We don't know what identity is -- we have some intuitive ideas, but nothing rigorous that holds at the edges of our experience. Don't laugh at the philosophers because they are puzzled by these problems. Think how far you would get in a world where quantum mechanical phenomena were visible and tangible if all you had were your Newtonian intuitions to rely on. Probably in arguing about this we're making a mistake akin to dividing by zero -- that postulating matter transmission or person duplication OR personal identity as we intuit it is a fallacy. It's the role of philosophy to derive a non-fallacious concept of personal identity, just as it is the role of physics to derive a non-fallacious concept of the electron. I think it was Locke who first suggested that you might be replaced each night by an exact copy (or for that matter, manufactured from whole cloth with memories of a past which did not exist). Daniel Dennet has a highly entertaining essay which captures the issues of this problem called ``Where am I?'' in his book ``Brainstorms'' (I think it may also appear in ``The Mind's I'' by Dennet & Douglas Hofstadter). Rudy Rucker also has a novel (called ``Software'', which is excerpted in ``The Mind's I'') in which a group of sentient robots kill their creator in order to analyze his brain (his software) to reproduce his program in hardware not susceptible to the cancer and heart disease that's killing him. They build a robot that looks just like him, and which runs the same program his brain was running. He's a bit uncomfortable about the procedure, I might add, but the robot who wakes up is totally convinced he is the original. Rucker's book introduces another interesting idea: his robots have developed an aesthetic of minds -- they look on the ``patterns'' of people's minds as an art form, or at least as things of beauty. It's an interesting book, I enjoyed it a great deal, although there is a scene early on that's not for the squeamish...
polard@fortune.UUCP (Henry Polard) (10/04/85)
>..a famous puzzle, known as the ship of Theseus: >... >Similarly, what makes you the same person as you were when you were 12 >years old? Probably almost all of the atoms in your body have been >replaced in that time. Well, you REMEMBER being that 12 year old... >So is it your memory of being that 12 year old that makes you the same >person? The discussion on teleportation has assumed that we are always the "same" through time, e.g, I am the "same" person as the 12 year old I remember myself to be. But I am different (I had no beard then, and was innocent of the delights of U*ix), and can see myself changing from moment to moment as I change oxygen molecules through breathing and change mentally through new experiences (learning). For an investigation of personality from the point of view of change rather than stasis, I suggest reading in Buddhist philosophy (What the Buddha Taught by Walpola Rahula is a start), specifically the part of Buddhist philosphy called Abhidharma. I think that from the Buddhist point of view (this is an abstration; there are really many Buddhist points of view) the ship of Theseus is different with each change, but because it we think it useful to do so, out of convenience we label it as the "same" ship. Similarly, from instant to instant we are "different", but because we think it useful to do so, out of convenience, we think we are the "same" person as we remember we were. From this point of view there may be no difference between changes during teleporting and changes from one instant to the next, no matter how much we are destroyed and re-created. I, or the butterfly that may be dreaming me up, may or may not believe any of the above. -- Henry Polard (You bring the flames - I'll bring the marshmallows.) {ihnp4,cbosgd,amd}!fortune!polard N.B: The words in this posting do not necessarily express the opinions of me, my employer, or any AI project.