A lot here depends upon whether you take the R-relation to build in some causal connection (or counterfactual dependency) between psychologically "connected" and/or "continuous" states, or if mere qualitative similarity is enough!
Although, I guess all I need is that the R-related doesn’t *require* causal connection/CF-dependency. It can still be a factor in determining the strength of the relation.
>We can imagine a full series of possible people, starting with pure Parfit, then Parfit with a hint of Garbo, through various mixes of the two, until we reach Garbo with a hint of Parfit, and finally pure Garbo.
This is a great example of how thought experiments about the mind go wrong. In fact, you do not see a gradual transition from the Parfait to the Garbo personality. Instead, you get Parfait with increasing amounts of brain (and other organ) damage, until hes dead on arrival, then it stays dead for a long time, until you get Garbo with loads of brain damage that gradually becomes healthier. Having a few Garbo brain cells does not give you a bit of Garbo mind, it triggers the immune system.
I think it was supposed to be about both at once, but lets look at psychological only.
In that case, hes not giving us a recipe for such a continuous path, and Im not sure why we would expect one to exist. The mind has its own complexities, just like biology does, e.g: https://www.lesswrong.com/s/d3WgHDBAPYYScp5Em/p/QZs4vkC7cbyjL9XA9 I dont think the set of possible minds is continuously connected, just like that of living organisms isnt.
Now most of those mental complexities are hazy and difficult to have proofs about like in the physical case, but I can try. Consider for example a mirror-inverted copy of myself. Is there someone with no mental content related to chirality between us? If so, he certainly seems much further away from us psychologically than we are from each other.
I’ve been writing an article on this same topic but have been slow to publish, mostly because I’m not sure how much I should go into the particular view of personal identity before arguing about it’s implications… Being scooped by you has given me some impetus to publish it faster, so thanks for the inspiration. :)
I think it’s pretty much unavoidable to declare that if someone is sufficiently dissimilar to you, they have literally zero weight unless you want to give some moral weight to random collections of rocks that could be more dissimilar to you, but are certainly not very similar at all. Consider the fact that under most peoples intuition and amoeba is more similar to you then a drop of water. Does this mean the amoeba should be given moral weight? The discontinuity doesn’t have to be very sharp. Maybe when you cross the threshold to be similar enough to start receiving moral considerations, you start out with a tiny amount of moral consideration. I expect it to look like a sigmoid graph if you wanted to draw it. You could of course argue that the amoeba or that matter dead bodies aren’t persons and so don’t count, but I expect even the boundary of what is a person is similarly unclear. Basically, in these situations, the boundary of a concept is unclear, but there are clearly central cases where something is or is not covered by the concept with pretty much zero ambiguity.
Hmm I’m not so sure because the R-relation is about psychological and physical connectedness. Rocks and amoeba are unambiguously not conscious (panpsychism aside). So they could plausibly said to have an R-relation of strength 0 relative to you. Not so for people in Africa.
I get that, but whether or not you have a mind is again, one of those things that does not have a sharp cut off and an amoeba definitely behaves more like it has a mind compare to a rock, even though I would be shocked if it was conscious. Similarly, you are definitely not me while I am definitely me and while they are definitely border cases, I think it’s obvious that most people motivated by self interest are being perfectly consistent as long as they realise that there are possible minds in between which are in the border land of Personal identity. At the end of the day, what matters is what people motivated by self interest consider the self since you can’t change their values by redefining the self. I think given the values of pretty much all humans, whether or not, you are the same person as them is similar to the question of whether or not you’re conscious. There are border cases, but their utility function definitely does not treat other people, they meet on the street as themselves, the same way they wouldn’t consider a rock conscious and there is nothing inconsistent in that.
Love the article. I'm a moral antirealist but I suspect self interest can ground a moral theory (beyond just not getting arrested or having people like you or other surface level self benefits). This is a really cool way to do this.
Thank you! I agree, and I think generally this shows that those who want to ground morality in rationality/prudence should think deep and hard about the nature of personal identity too.
A lot here depends upon whether you take the R-relation to build in some causal connection (or counterfactual dependency) between psychologically "connected" and/or "continuous" states, or if mere qualitative similarity is enough!
True! I am assuming the latter
Although, I guess all I need is that the R-related doesn’t *require* causal connection/CF-dependency. It can still be a factor in determining the strength of the relation.
>We can imagine a full series of possible people, starting with pure Parfit, then Parfit with a hint of Garbo, through various mixes of the two, until we reach Garbo with a hint of Parfit, and finally pure Garbo.
This is a great example of how thought experiments about the mind go wrong. In fact, you do not see a gradual transition from the Parfait to the Garbo personality. Instead, you get Parfait with increasing amounts of brain (and other organ) damage, until hes dead on arrival, then it stays dead for a long time, until you get Garbo with loads of brain damage that gradually becomes healthier. Having a few Garbo brain cells does not give you a bit of Garbo mind, it triggers the immune system.
The idea there is more so about *psychological* similarity, not physical.
I think it was supposed to be about both at once, but lets look at psychological only.
In that case, hes not giving us a recipe for such a continuous path, and Im not sure why we would expect one to exist. The mind has its own complexities, just like biology does, e.g: https://www.lesswrong.com/s/d3WgHDBAPYYScp5Em/p/QZs4vkC7cbyjL9XA9 I dont think the set of possible minds is continuously connected, just like that of living organisms isnt.
Now most of those mental complexities are hazy and difficult to have proofs about like in the physical case, but I can try. Consider for example a mirror-inverted copy of myself. Is there someone with no mental content related to chirality between us? If so, he certainly seems much further away from us psychologically than we are from each other.
This is great!
I’ve been writing an article on this same topic but have been slow to publish, mostly because I’m not sure how much I should go into the particular view of personal identity before arguing about it’s implications… Being scooped by you has given me some impetus to publish it faster, so thanks for the inspiration. :)
Great minds … :) Go ahead and write it!!!
I think it’s pretty much unavoidable to declare that if someone is sufficiently dissimilar to you, they have literally zero weight unless you want to give some moral weight to random collections of rocks that could be more dissimilar to you, but are certainly not very similar at all. Consider the fact that under most peoples intuition and amoeba is more similar to you then a drop of water. Does this mean the amoeba should be given moral weight? The discontinuity doesn’t have to be very sharp. Maybe when you cross the threshold to be similar enough to start receiving moral considerations, you start out with a tiny amount of moral consideration. I expect it to look like a sigmoid graph if you wanted to draw it. You could of course argue that the amoeba or that matter dead bodies aren’t persons and so don’t count, but I expect even the boundary of what is a person is similarly unclear. Basically, in these situations, the boundary of a concept is unclear, but there are clearly central cases where something is or is not covered by the concept with pretty much zero ambiguity.
Hmm I’m not so sure because the R-relation is about psychological and physical connectedness. Rocks and amoeba are unambiguously not conscious (panpsychism aside). So they could plausibly said to have an R-relation of strength 0 relative to you. Not so for people in Africa.
I get that, but whether or not you have a mind is again, one of those things that does not have a sharp cut off and an amoeba definitely behaves more like it has a mind compare to a rock, even though I would be shocked if it was conscious. Similarly, you are definitely not me while I am definitely me and while they are definitely border cases, I think it’s obvious that most people motivated by self interest are being perfectly consistent as long as they realise that there are possible minds in between which are in the border land of Personal identity. At the end of the day, what matters is what people motivated by self interest consider the self since you can’t change their values by redefining the self. I think given the values of pretty much all humans, whether or not, you are the same person as them is similar to the question of whether or not you’re conscious. There are border cases, but their utility function definitely does not treat other people, they meet on the street as themselves, the same way they wouldn’t consider a rock conscious and there is nothing inconsistent in that.
Love the article. I'm a moral antirealist but I suspect self interest can ground a moral theory (beyond just not getting arrested or having people like you or other surface level self benefits). This is a really cool way to do this.
Thank you! I agree, and I think generally this shows that those who want to ground morality in rationality/prudence should think deep and hard about the nature of personal identity too.