The Fallacy of Favoring Gradual Replacement Mind Uploading Over Scan-and-Copy

Well, if you didn't read the paper, we can't discuss it. I have no idea what part of the argument you read and what you didn't. But it is a pretty solid demolishment of the claim that preserving a stream of consciousness is a prerequisite and requirement of preserving metaphysical personal identity during mind uploading. I guess you'll just have to take my word for it since you didn't read it.

As for the observation that identity can survive some neural damage, you've lost me as to how that is a point of disagreement. I'm not sure why you brought that up at all. No one would dispute such an obvious judgment that we all subscribe to in our daily interactions. At any rate, the paper is quite clear that preserving a stream of consciousness cannot logically be a requirement of preserving identity. Thus, when in an earlier comment you used preservation of the stream as your reason for favoring gradual replacement, that couldn't apply -- the argument presented in the stream of consciousness paper walks through how that analysis plays out.

At any rate, you opened this whole thing with a really childish insult about student essays or something. I'm sure it felt good to be jerk and it certainly played to the crowd because you got piles of applause for it. I can't deny that. But we each make our own choices about our behavior. You'll just have to own that comment now. Curiously, you became much more intellectually interactive later in the discussion. It's a shame you didn't show such maturity from the beginning.

You brought up an interesting, but I believe ultimately flawed, concern about state functions versus process or path functions. I can certainly see how people might see the notion of path functions as a point of concern in interpreting the original paper. Thanks for bringing that to light. It is, of course next to impossible to head off every possible counterargument in advance. I brought up a few in the paper, but didn't bring up that one in particular. That's true. But as I explained, it ultimately wasn't a very solid counterargument for all the reasons I explained at length in an earlier comment (no need to repeat them here). The only response you offered to my deconstruction of path functions was that the point you were trying to emphasize was that the equality of the end state doesn't prove metaphysical equality. I suppose it depends on what we mean by "proof" in the abstractions of nonphysical philosophy, but what we can conclude from my paper is that if there is a metaphysical difference between those two scenarios, it cannot possibly be grounded in physical reality -- since the end products are agreed to be identical. This is where I start to accuse disagreers of subscribing to substance dualism. If you don't believe that metaphysical personal identity has identical properties at the end of the two processes described, then you are implicitly admitting that you think the apparent difference arises from some other thing (aka some other substance). This sounds flirtingly like a soul to me. Just to do a very quick end-run of the retort I think might be inserted here, the response can't easily be the path function argument, because I already dissected that above, and frankly met no subsequent counter to it. The paths differ, yes, but the very fact that the end products have no psychological awareness of which path brought them to their ultimate state (i.e., as stated above, you can't "feel" whether the path that produced you was gradual replacement or scan-and-instantiate) proves that their metaphysics, their minds, their conscious experience does not depend on the path that produced them. If there is no difference, then there was no difference.

Take the thermodynamic example. When we say that work differs depending on the path to an equivalent endpoint, we are admitting that the endpoint was identical. It's the work of the process itself that we say differed along the path, but the final product was, in fact, the same. Applied to mind uploading, the correct interpretation, honestly, is the say that the process of uploading was different, but the upload at the end was not. But we don't care about the process! It isn't important. It's just the way we accomplished the goal. It's like saying you care whether your mechanic works on the brakes first and the windshield wipers second, or the other way around. The car is the same when you get it back either way, so getting insistent with the mechanic that he get to the same endpoint in the way that you demand of him is frankly just pedantic. BUT it might matter to him. Maybe it's just technically easier to fix a car brakes first, wipers second. That is a path function difference that matters to him, but you don't care, because your car is the same in the end no matter what.

So, I don't think path functions apply (simply because we can't consciously feel which path produced us, that is evidence enough for me). And as my stream of consciousness paper argues quite carefully, that is also a failed argument. Where does that leave us? Surely you don't subscribe to simplistic body identity (attaching identity to certain atoms, in effect) since Parfit thoroughly trashed that forty years ago. But if you also can't attach identity to gradual replacement on the reasoning of a stream of consciousness, and if path functions don't apply -- well -- there is little counterargument left at this point. It is reasonable to start wondering if the default position should that identity is preserved until proven it isn't -- instead of assuming it the other way around.

The original paper was not, despite your rude behavior, school-project-like in nature. That was rude. I admit if you want the crowd to cheer you on and give up votes, snarky digs like that work pretty well, but is that really the kind of person you want to be. The depth of your discussion after that comment suggests you are capable of much better. It is, in fact, a journal paper. Some published papers are bad. Some journals are bad, but on the whole, peer-review is a decent way to vet contributions to our collective thoughts. If you want to write to the editors and explain to them how badly they screwed up their review process, apparently letting students submit their project essays and getting through their reviewers unnoticed, you can do so. Or you might have even better luck attempting to write a paper of comparable depth and detail and care and investment that I put in, and see if you can get it past peer-review get it published. That's great. That's it's supposed to work. So go write that paper. I encourage it.

You became rather intellectual and engaging in later comments and I have appreciated the opportunity to look at this topic from some fresh angles thanks to this discussion. It's too bad you thought a better approach at the outset would be to have fun acting like troll so you could get LOLs from the mob. I'll admit, it certainly worked. But are you proud of it?

Last thought: read the stream of consciousness paper. Maybe you're missing something good. Who knows. Heck, maybe you would enjoy my book. It's up to you.

Good luck.

/r/singularity Thread Parent Link - keithwiley.com