May 20, 2015 05:42 PM
Daniel Dennett’s “brain in a vat,” Derek Parfit’s teleportation: Philosophers of consciousness love a good thought experiment. Now it’s the “ultimate simulation machine”....
http://lareviewofbooks.org/review/self-w...ut-selfies
EXCERPT: [...] Having established a notion of person, however arguable, [John] Locke raises the related issue known as the “problem of personal identity over time.” How do I know that I’m the same person now as I was at some earlier time? For Locke, as [Barry] Dainton puts it, “What is needed for an earlier and a later person to be one and the same is for that later person to be mentally continuous with the earlier person ... Mental continuity makes for sameness of person irrespective of what else occurs.” Locke, like other philosophers, also proposes thought experiments about body swaps and soul swaps, but we can skip most of that here.
[...] Dainton invokes one more thought experiment to show how Neo-Lockeans deal with a final difficulty. If an exact replica of you pops into existence, and has all your memories and psychology, “does this mean your replica really remembers” all your experiences? Of course not, so the Neo-Lockeans stipulate that “your memories are genuine by virtue of being causally dependent on your earlier experiences.” Your replica’s memories are not causally dependent on your experiences and that’s why they are illusory.
[...] As you might anticipate, Dainton doesn’t think psychological continuity is sufficient as an account of mental continuity. Yet again, there’s a thought experiment. This time, Dainton once more proposes something in the future, but it’s a more proximate future than teleportation. The what if is based on video games. Dainton imagines an “ultimate” game or simulation device. Current gaming devices provide “a simulation of your external environment, but they leave you unchanged.” In the imaginary U-Sim (or ultimate simulation machine), “The machine would temporarily remove (and store) your psychology... and replace it with copies of...”, say, Napoleon’s psychology. The machine would give you, from the inside, so to speak, Napoleon’s experience at the Battle of Waterloo; you’d be equipped with his beliefs while your psychology would be parked until the game is over, at which time your psychology would be returned to you, and would now include your memory of the experience of being Napoleon.
The point of this thought experiment for Dainton is to show how there can be a real break in psychological continuity but not a break in consciousness or experiential continuty. While you’re simulating being Napoleon, your psychological continuity is wiped out, but not your consciosness, your experiential continuity.
[...] My own sense of what to do with the question of self is to pay more attention to the remarkable mediation or interface provided by language between brain and “you,” and between you and others. We and our biological brain particles gradually acquire language, personhood, self, and the rest. [...] In any case, the process of becoming a self is developmental and occurs in the course of your interactions with the world and the other things and beings in it. I’m equally attracted to the self-reflexive features of brain and self. At a certain take-off point, the mental entity we think of as a self seems to make decisions about what to do with that self.
[...] Dainton, to my mind, doesn’t say much about language, self-reflexivity, or free will, or not as much as I’d like, though he does offer a chapter on “mind in the world” and is committed, as I’ve noted earlier, to the notion that “how we conceive of ourselves is of profound importance to how we live and how we relate to others and the world around us.” In the end, the surfeit of thought experiments is distracting and Dainton’s fanciful speculations often left me with the sense that we had drifted away from talking about selves as we know them.
[...] As I’ve suggested throughout this discussion, I think that language, self-reflexiveness and free will are tightly bound up with our approach to interpreting reality. I’m fond of Hilary Putnam’s view in Realism with a Human Face (Harvard, 1990) that “elements of what we call ‘language’ or ‘mind’ penetrate so deeply into what we call ‘reality’ that the very prospect of representing ourselves as being ‘mappers’ of something ‘language-independent’ is fatally compromised from the start.” I’d apply the same thought to the self as I would to the world....
http://lareviewofbooks.org/review/self-w...ut-selfies
EXCERPT: [...] Having established a notion of person, however arguable, [John] Locke raises the related issue known as the “problem of personal identity over time.” How do I know that I’m the same person now as I was at some earlier time? For Locke, as [Barry] Dainton puts it, “What is needed for an earlier and a later person to be one and the same is for that later person to be mentally continuous with the earlier person ... Mental continuity makes for sameness of person irrespective of what else occurs.” Locke, like other philosophers, also proposes thought experiments about body swaps and soul swaps, but we can skip most of that here.
[...] Dainton invokes one more thought experiment to show how Neo-Lockeans deal with a final difficulty. If an exact replica of you pops into existence, and has all your memories and psychology, “does this mean your replica really remembers” all your experiences? Of course not, so the Neo-Lockeans stipulate that “your memories are genuine by virtue of being causally dependent on your earlier experiences.” Your replica’s memories are not causally dependent on your experiences and that’s why they are illusory.
[...] As you might anticipate, Dainton doesn’t think psychological continuity is sufficient as an account of mental continuity. Yet again, there’s a thought experiment. This time, Dainton once more proposes something in the future, but it’s a more proximate future than teleportation. The what if is based on video games. Dainton imagines an “ultimate” game or simulation device. Current gaming devices provide “a simulation of your external environment, but they leave you unchanged.” In the imaginary U-Sim (or ultimate simulation machine), “The machine would temporarily remove (and store) your psychology... and replace it with copies of...”, say, Napoleon’s psychology. The machine would give you, from the inside, so to speak, Napoleon’s experience at the Battle of Waterloo; you’d be equipped with his beliefs while your psychology would be parked until the game is over, at which time your psychology would be returned to you, and would now include your memory of the experience of being Napoleon.
The point of this thought experiment for Dainton is to show how there can be a real break in psychological continuity but not a break in consciousness or experiential continuty. While you’re simulating being Napoleon, your psychological continuity is wiped out, but not your consciosness, your experiential continuity.
[...] My own sense of what to do with the question of self is to pay more attention to the remarkable mediation or interface provided by language between brain and “you,” and between you and others. We and our biological brain particles gradually acquire language, personhood, self, and the rest. [...] In any case, the process of becoming a self is developmental and occurs in the course of your interactions with the world and the other things and beings in it. I’m equally attracted to the self-reflexive features of brain and self. At a certain take-off point, the mental entity we think of as a self seems to make decisions about what to do with that self.
[...] Dainton, to my mind, doesn’t say much about language, self-reflexivity, or free will, or not as much as I’d like, though he does offer a chapter on “mind in the world” and is committed, as I’ve noted earlier, to the notion that “how we conceive of ourselves is of profound importance to how we live and how we relate to others and the world around us.” In the end, the surfeit of thought experiments is distracting and Dainton’s fanciful speculations often left me with the sense that we had drifted away from talking about selves as we know them.
[...] As I’ve suggested throughout this discussion, I think that language, self-reflexiveness and free will are tightly bound up with our approach to interpreting reality. I’m fond of Hilary Putnam’s view in Realism with a Human Face (Harvard, 1990) that “elements of what we call ‘language’ or ‘mind’ penetrate so deeply into what we call ‘reality’ that the very prospect of representing ourselves as being ‘mappers’ of something ‘language-independent’ is fatally compromised from the start.” I’d apply the same thought to the self as I would to the world....