I am happy to see you think deeply about questions of personal identity. I’ve been thinking about the same for many years (e.g. see “Ontological Qualia: The Future of Personal Identity”), and I think that addressing such questions is critical for any consistent theory of consciousness and ethics.
I broadly agree with your view, but here are some things that stand out as worth pointing out:
First, I prefer Daniel Kolak’s factorization of “views of personal identity”. Namely, Closed Individualism (common sense—we are each a “timeline of experience”), Empty Individualism (we are all only individual moments of experience, perhaps most similar to Parfit’s reductionist view as well as yours), and Open Individualism (we are all the same subject of experience).
I think that if Open Individualism is true a lot of ethics could be drastically simplified: caring about all sentient beings is not only kind, but in fact rational. While I think that Empty Individualism is a really strong candidate, I don’t discard Open Individualism. If you do assume that you are the same subject of experience over time (which I know you discard, but many don’t), I think it follows that Open Individualism is the only way to reconcile that with the fact that each moment of experience generated by your brain is different. In other words, if there is no identity carrier we can point to that connects every moment of experience generated by e.g. my brain, then we might infer that the very source of identity is the fact of consciousness per se. Just something to think about.
The other key thing I’d highlight is that you don’t seem to pay much attention to the mystery of why each snapshot of your brain is unified. Parfit also seems have some sort of neglect around this puzzle, for I don’t see it addressed anywhere in his writings despite its central importance to the problem of personal identity.
Synchrony is not a good criteria: there is no universal frame of reference. Plus, even if we could use synchrony as an approximate “unifier” of physical states, we then further have the problem that we would need a natural ground truth boundary to arise that would make your brain generate a moment of experience that is numerically distinct from those generated by other brains at the same time.
I do think that there is in fact a way to solve this. To do so, rather than thinking in terms of “binding” (i.e. why do these two atoms contribute to the same experience but not these two atoms?), we should think in terms of “boundaries” (i.e. what makes this region of reality have a natural boundary that separates it from the rest?). In particular, my solution uses topological segmentation, and IMO solves all of the classic problems. It results in a strong case for Empty Individualism, since topological boundaries in the fields of physics would be objective, causally significant, and frame-invariant (all highly desirable properties for the mechanism of individuation so that e.g. natural selection would have a way of recruiting moments of experience for computational purposes). Additionally, the topological pockets that define individual moments of experience would be spatiotemporal in nature. We don’t need to worry about infinitesimal partitions and a lack of objective frames of reference for simultaneity because the topological pockets have definite spatial and temporal depth. There would, in fact, be a definite and objective answer to “how many experiences are there in this volume of spacetime?” and similar questions.
Hi Holden!
I am happy to see you think deeply about questions of personal identity. I’ve been thinking about the same for many years (e.g. see “Ontological Qualia: The Future of Personal Identity”), and I think that addressing such questions is critical for any consistent theory of consciousness and ethics.
I broadly agree with your view, but here are some things that stand out as worth pointing out:
First, I prefer Daniel Kolak’s factorization of “views of personal identity”. Namely, Closed Individualism (common sense—we are each a “timeline of experience”), Empty Individualism (we are all only individual moments of experience, perhaps most similar to Parfit’s reductionist view as well as yours), and Open Individualism (we are all the same subject of experience).
I think that if Open Individualism is true a lot of ethics could be drastically simplified: caring about all sentient beings is not only kind, but in fact rational. While I think that Empty Individualism is a really strong candidate, I don’t discard Open Individualism. If you do assume that you are the same subject of experience over time (which I know you discard, but many don’t), I think it follows that Open Individualism is the only way to reconcile that with the fact that each moment of experience generated by your brain is different. In other words, if there is no identity carrier we can point to that connects every moment of experience generated by e.g. my brain, then we might infer that the very source of identity is the fact of consciousness per se. Just something to think about.
The other key thing I’d highlight is that you don’t seem to pay much attention to the mystery of why each snapshot of your brain is unified. Parfit also seems have some sort of neglect around this puzzle, for I don’t see it addressed anywhere in his writings despite its central importance to the problem of personal identity.
Synchrony is not a good criteria: there is no universal frame of reference. Plus, even if we could use synchrony as an approximate “unifier” of physical states, we then further have the problem that we would need a natural ground truth boundary to arise that would make your brain generate a moment of experience that is numerically distinct from those generated by other brains at the same time.
I do think that there is in fact a way to solve this. To do so, rather than thinking in terms of “binding” (i.e. why do these two atoms contribute to the same experience but not these two atoms?), we should think in terms of “boundaries” (i.e. what makes this region of reality have a natural boundary that separates it from the rest?). In particular, my solution uses topological segmentation, and IMO solves all of the classic problems. It results in a strong case for Empty Individualism, since topological boundaries in the fields of physics would be objective, causally significant, and frame-invariant (all highly desirable properties for the mechanism of individuation so that e.g. natural selection would have a way of recruiting moments of experience for computational purposes). Additionally, the topological pockets that define individual moments of experience would be spatiotemporal in nature. We don’t need to worry about infinitesimal partitions and a lack of objective frames of reference for simultaneity because the topological pockets have definite spatial and temporal depth. There would, in fact, be a definite and objective answer to “how many experiences are there in this volume of spacetime?” and similar questions.
If interested, I recommend watching my video about my solution to the binding problem here: Solving the Phenomenal Binding Problem: Topological Segmentation as the Correct Explanation Space. Even just reading the video description goes a long way :-) Let me know your thoughts if you get to it.
All the best!