A person's name is a misnomer

Place open for new posts — threads with fresh content will be moved to either Real-life Discussion or ESOC Talk sub-forums, where you can create new topics.
No Flag deleted_user
Ninja
Posts: 14364
Joined: Mar 26, 2015

A person's name is a misnomer

Post by deleted_user »

"That person, who will have your name in the very far future, will be connected only very tenuously to the present you. The person will remember very few of your current experiences, will be psychologically quite different, will have a body that resembles your present one only a bit and contains almost none of the same matter. So it seems that this person is the future you only to a small degree. In way, in terms of memories and experiences in history, you have more in common with a stranger today than you do with yourself 10 or 20 years ago. Why be afraid of death if the future you who dies will resemble you today so little?" -Robert M. Martin from his book "There are Two Errors in the the Title of This Book*"

Discuss.
User avatar
Netherland Antilles Laurence Drake
Jaeger
Posts: 2687
Joined: Dec 25, 2015

Re: A person's name is a misnomer

Post by Laurence Drake »

When I'm asleep I may remember nothing about myself and be psychologically quite different, but it's absurd to say that this causes me to become a different person. Intuitively, I'm still the same person whether I'm awake or asleep. I don't have to remember anything about who I was in the past to be the same person. What makes me the same person is that there is a causal link between my successive mental states, which causes identity to become transitive between my past and future selves.

An interesting problem for personal identity arises from split-hemisphere cases, in which the hemispheres of a person's brain are divided and the person continues to be able to function (mostly) normally:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZMLzP1VCANo

What if we could take each hemisphere of your brain and transplant it into a different body? We can assume that this would result in the creation of two persons, who both share the same memories and personalities, and whose lives are equally the outcome of the same causally linked succession of mental states. Which of these persons is you? It can't be one or the other, since their mental states at the time of separation are identical. It can't be both, because that's logically impossible. Nor can it be neither, since their mental states are identical with your own. So how are we supposed to answer this question of identity?
Top quality poster.
United States of America Metis
Howdah
Posts: 1661
Joined: Mar 28, 2015

Re: A person's name is a misnomer

Post by Metis »

The us that awakens each morning is an epiphenomenal entity that arises from the electrochemical processes of the cognitive part of the brain, which, in turn, are dependent on its anatomy and physiology. To use a computer analogy, we are a program that gets rebooted each morning. However, the entity that becomes aware from sleep is sufficiently identical to the one of the previous day that, for all intents and purposes, it is the same person (at least once the brain fully develops).

When damage occurs to the structure or metabolism of the brain a person can actually become someone else. The body may look the same but the program that gets booted up can be quite different. When someone says of an accident or stroke victim, or someone under the influence of mind-altering drugs that "he is not himself" they are speaking the truth, that person is not the one they knew.

If I could create an artificial brain that was neurologically identical to my own, it would essentially boot up "me." Just as there can be many of the same program running on many systems, there could be more than one copy of "me." It would take time and differing experience for these cloned entities to diverge into recognizably different minds. If a transfer connection could be established between them, so that the ideas and memories were synced, they would continue to remain the same mind, just in multiple locations.
User avatar
Netherland Antilles Laurence Drake
Jaeger
Posts: 2687
Joined: Dec 25, 2015

Re: A person's name is a misnomer

Post by Laurence Drake »

Metis wrote:If I could create an artificial brain that was neurologically identical to my own, it would essentially boot up "me." Just as there can be many of the same program running on many systems, there could be more than one copy of "me." It would take time and differing experience for these cloned entities to diverge into recognizably different minds. If a transfer connection could be established between them, so that the ideas and memories were synced, they would continue to remain the same mind, just in multiple locations.

It's not possible to have multiple persons with the same identity existing at the same time, since it leads to contradictions. If x and y were identical with you in all relevant respects, and if x was in London and y was in Paris, it follows that you both are and are not in London at the same time, which is a contradiction.
Top quality poster.
User avatar
New Zealand JakeyBoyTH
Howdah
Posts: 1744
Joined: Oct 15, 2016
ESO: Ex-Contributor
Location: New Zealand

Re: A person's name is a misnomer

Post by JakeyBoyTH »

Metis wrote:The us that awakens each morning is an epiphenomenal entity that arises from the electrochemical processes of the cognitive part of the brain, which, in turn, are dependent on its anatomy and physiology. To use a computer analogy, we are a program that gets rebooted each morning. However, the entity that becomes aware from sleep is sufficiently identical to the one of the previous day that, for all intents and purposes, it is the same person (at least once the brain fully develops).

When damage occurs to the structure or metabolism of the brain a person can actually become someone else. The body may look the same but the program that gets booted up can be quite different. When someone says of an accident or stroke victim, or someone under the influence of mind-altering drugs that "he is not himself" they are speaking the truth, that person is not the one they knew.

If I could create an artificial brain that was neurologically identical to my own, it would essentially boot up "me." Just as there can be many of the same program running on many systems, there could be more than one copy of "me." It would take time and differing experience for these cloned entities to diverge into recognizably different minds. If a transfer connection could be established between them, so that the ideas and memories were synced, they would continue to remain the same mind, just in multiple locations.


Essentially this is correct, however the differences are too much to have a continously similar experience for an amount of time, simply due to the information our minds take in at a point.
Advanced Wonders suck

- Aizamk

Ugh Advanced Wonders suck

- Aizamk
No Flag deleted_user0
Ninja
Posts: 13004
Joined: Apr 28, 2020

Re: A person's name is a misnomer

Post by deleted_user0 »

I think very few people are actually very afraid of their death in a distant future. More are afraid of their death in the near future but usually in an abstract way. I wager most people dont think much about their own death daily

The rest is just ship and planks identity paradox. And if you believe in determinismn its not that complicated
User avatar
Netherland Antilles Laurence Drake
Jaeger
Posts: 2687
Joined: Dec 25, 2015

Re: A person's name is a misnomer

Post by Laurence Drake »

umeu wrote:I think very few people are actually very afraid of their death in a distant future. More are afraid of their death in the near future but usually in an abstract way. I wager most people dont think much about their own death daily

The rest is just ship and planks identity paradox. And if you believe in determinismn its not that complicated

Why is it not complicated, umeo?
Top quality poster.
No Flag deleted_user0
Ninja
Posts: 13004
Joined: Apr 28, 2020

Re: A person's name is a misnomer

Post by deleted_user0 »

Because when you are conceived it is already determined who you will be in 50 years.
No Flag deleted_user
Ninja
Posts: 14364
Joined: Mar 26, 2015

Re: A person's name is a misnomer

Post by deleted_user »

umeu wrote:Because when you are conceived it is already determined who you will be in 50 years.


I can see this being plausible but in such a convoluted thought process that it seems almost impossible for me to actually grasp it in a manner with definite details.
No Flag deleted_user0
Ninja
Posts: 13004
Joined: Apr 28, 2020

Re: A person's name is a misnomer

Post by deleted_user0 »

Well the paradox is like this, you have a ship. You replace one plank, you'd say its still the same ship? Replace two, still the same? Replace all planks, still the same? In case of humans its even more complicated, not only the plank change all the time, but the ship grows, its appearance changes, only it name really stays the same.

So it seems weird to say something is the same when everything which it is now was not present 50 years ago. But from a deterministic pov you can say that what it is now was already contained in what it was before, and you can deduce what it was before from what it is now. So the andwer would be something like the identity exists in the causal relation between past and present.

You can take a similar approach without determinism and anchor it in a social narrative, which opens up space for your idea of identity not overlapping with reality, because basically you tell yourself or you are told a different story than your senses perceive.

Or you can simply admit that you are not the same person you were 50 years ago. That there is no such thing as a uniform identity but its just one other trick of our cognition to make sense and order of a world thats chaotic. Just like the idea that universals exist, while in fact there are only individual entities.
User avatar
Netherland Antilles Laurence Drake
Jaeger
Posts: 2687
Joined: Dec 25, 2015

Re: A person's name is a misnomer

Post by Laurence Drake »

umeu wrote:Or you can simply admit that you are not the same person you were 50 years ago. That there is no such thing as a uniform identity but its just one other trick of our cognition to make sense and order of a world thats chaotic. Just like the idea that universals exist, while in fact there are only individual entities.

There are too many problems with this kind of reasoning. What if you're a Nazi war criminal and are caught by the authorities after living in hiding for fifty years? Do you tell the court that you're no longer the same person and therefore don't deserve to be punished? Is the court supposed to accept this and let you walk free? What would this mean to the families who were persecuted under Nazi rule? What if you earned a qualification fifty years ago and tried to use it to apply to a job now? Would you be happy if your prospective employer rejected the qualification because it was earned by someone else?
Top quality poster.
No Flag deleted_user0
Ninja
Posts: 13004
Joined: Apr 28, 2020

Re: A person's name is a misnomer

Post by deleted_user0 »

Well it's a complicated issue. Each of the approaches has problems, I'm not advocating one over the other. Although I am kinda leaning towards the narrative one with elements of the other 2, and no doubt there are many more ways to look at it. Let's take another example then the war criminal, let's say you were 15 yo, and you stole something, or you tortured a dog to death. 20 years later someone finds out about this and confronts you with it, would it be fair to say that you were a different person 20 years ago and would never do anything like that again, so to punish you for something you did 20 years ago, would be rather weird? Intuitively it's not so weird to claim what the nazi criminal claims, assuming he did actually change his ideas and has remorse. At the same time its ofcourse an easy way to cop out. Could even take it a step further and say because you are not the same person as you were 50 years ago, the court cant even legally charge you for crimes committed by someone else :P So yeah, this approach would lead to big problems in our society, but that is in part also because our society is built around a different concept of identity that clashes with this.

The latter example isn't the best one imo, because if both you 50 years ago and you in the present can prove you still have the same skills, then it doesnt really matter who earned what, because the qualification applies to both equally.
User avatar
Netherland Antilles Laurence Drake
Jaeger
Posts: 2687
Joined: Dec 25, 2015

Re: A person's name is a misnomer

Post by Laurence Drake »

The point about the fifteen year old boy is a bad example since we can claim that he was too young to take full responsibility for his actions, which makes it possible for him to distance himself from those actions when he becomes older. This is different from his doing the same by claiming that he is no longer the same person.

The Nazi war criminal made a mature and rational decision to commit his crimes, and there's a sense of injustice in allowing him to walk free simply because those crimes were committed a long time ago and he is no longer the 'same person'. You can't justify that kind of acquittal to the families who were the victims. It goes beyond being a societal problem. It's plain wrong. Our intuitive ideas about justice aren't compatible with a conception of identity that allows us to claim that we become different people every few years.
Top quality poster.
No Flag deleted_user0
Ninja
Posts: 13004
Joined: Apr 28, 2020

Re: A person's name is a misnomer

Post by deleted_user0 »

I'm not trying to justify anything lol, I merely outlined a few possibilities. It may go against your sense of justice, it goes against mine as well. So? It's not so much that it's a societal problem, it's merely that our institutions are built around the idea that we are rational agents with free will. If either of these two assumptions fail to hold true (we aren't agents or atleast not the same agent over time or we don't have free will), many of our customs will seem ridiculous. And surely from our ethical point of view, the 3rd option seems evil and indeed incompatible with our ideas of justice, but from an ontological point of view it makes sense (not saying its right or true, but there is definitely merit to the argument, which btw i didnt fully outline in this thread).

And though our justice system doesnt recognize the concept of our identity changing over time, it does have some notion of us not being ourself at some moment in time, for example being under influence of substance or having some mental disorder. While this usually doesnt entirely release of us responsibility, it does create more lenient circumstances at times.
United States of America Metis
Howdah
Posts: 1661
Joined: Mar 28, 2015

Re: A person's name is a misnomer

Post by Metis »

umeu wrote:Well the paradox is like this, you have a ship. You replace one plank, you'd say its still the same ship? Replace two, still the same? Replace all planks, still the same? In case of humans its even more complicated, not only the plank change all the time, but the ship grows, its appearance changes, only it name really stays the same.


On a chemical level, our bodies pretty much replace all of the molecules we are made of over a lifetime. The human being is, thus, not the physical body or even its parts per se but the living, thinking system.
United States of America Metis
Howdah
Posts: 1661
Joined: Mar 28, 2015

Re: A person's name is a misnomer

Post by Metis »

Another example can be found in evolution. A population of reptiles accrues traits over time that more resemble a dinosaur than a reptile so we call them dinosaurs. Over more time, a population grows feathers of such a type that enables it to glide, then to fly. Finally a human domesticates a population and speeds up natural selection by allowing only those members with desirable traits to reproduce. Now we have a bunch of farm chickens but most of their DNA is still that of their dinosaur ancestors. In fact, almost all the genes for non-avian dinosaurs are still found somewhere in today's bird populations and it will not be too far down the road that someone will combine them and hatch out a ground-dwelling, toothed dinosaur.

[video]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mWD5IJGM7D0[/video]
User avatar
Netherland Antilles Laurence Drake
Jaeger
Posts: 2687
Joined: Dec 25, 2015

Re: A person's name is a misnomer

Post by Laurence Drake »

Sorry metis, but double posting isn't allowed in these forums. I'm afraid I'm going to have to report you for spamming. Please control your behaviour next time!
Top quality poster.
Netherlands momuuu
Ninja
Posts: 14237
Joined: Jun 7, 2015
ESO: Jerom_

Re: A person's name is a misnomer

Post by momuuu »

Metis wrote:
umeu wrote:Well the paradox is like this, you have a ship. You replace one plank, you'd say its still the same ship? Replace two, still the same? Replace all planks, still the same? In case of humans its even more complicated, not only the plank change all the time, but the ship grows, its appearance changes, only it name really stays the same.


On a chemical level, our bodies pretty much replace all of the molecules we are made of over a lifetime. The human being is, thus, not the physical body or even its parts per se but the living, thinking system.

Except that many structures in our brain, which is the closest to what we define as our identity, barely change at all.

Its just a case of a person being ill-defined. Its not the body that makes a person, as losing a limb for example doesnt make you lose your identity. Id possibly argue that if you could transfer your brain to a computer that computer would, in the first instances at least, be you.

The easiest way to solve this paradox is to argue a soul exists. Im not going to do that though :p
United States of America Metis
Howdah
Posts: 1661
Joined: Mar 28, 2015

Re: A person's name is a misnomer

Post by Metis »

I have a couple of identical twin cousins who, for much of their young life, were indistinguishable to the rest of the family. Even their parents couldn't tell them apart. In fact, my aunt once told me that she wasn't entirely sure that their names were even correct as she had no idea which was which until about the time they entered school. It wasn't until they got jobs in different cities and stopped seeing so much of each other that their personalities began to diverge.

To the extent that most people pay attention, multiple copies of a cloned mind would seem to be the the same person for quite a number of years. The clones would still perceive themselves as the original entity because to them they simply went to sleep one day and awoke the next.

To paraphrase Heinlein, "I know who I am but who are all you zombies?"

Who is online

Users browsing this forum: No registered users and 3 guests

Which top 10 players do you wish to see listed?

All-time

Active last two weeks

Active last month

Supremacy

Treaty

Official

ESOC Patch

Treaty Patch

1v1 Elo

2v2 Elo

3v3 Elo

Power Rating

Which streams do you wish to see listed?

Twitch

Age of Empires III

Age of Empires IV