83. During the discussion, we had the opportunity to discuss many
problems of personal identity, not only its origin and the persistence, but also
its beginning and ending points, and the issues of teletransportation, fission,
and union. Now we will discuss other problems related to the concept of personal
identity. We will see that Open Individualism solves many of them, and gives a
different view from which many other problems become simplified. These problems
comprehend the Self-Sampling Assumption related to the Doomsday Argument and
other paradoxes, the possibility of using the melding of minds to overcome
death, the managing of the risks and ethical problems related to conscious
machines, issues of free will, and even the overriding of the contraposition
between dualism and reductionism. I think that
the acknowledgement of how easily Open
Individualism solves these issues constitutes by itself a concrete hint that it
represents the best theory of personal identity. I am convinced that once
these advantages are acknowledged, the next theories of personal identity will
always be refinements of Open Individualism. This theory is here to stay.
84. Open
Individualism manages in a simple way paradoxes related to the
Self-Sampling Assumption, such as the
Doomsday Argument. The Self-Sampling
Assumption states that every observer
should reason as if they have been randomly selected from the set of all
observers. The Doomsday Argument is a probabilistic argument that claims
to predict the number of future members
of the human species given only an estimate of the total number of humans
born so far. The reasoning under this argument is that, supposing that all
humans are born in a random order, chances are that any one human will be born
roughly in the middle. If I think I have only one chance to be born, I may
evaluate the total number of humans in the set on the basis of my position in
the set. The conclusion is that there is a 95%
chance of extinction within 9,120 years
(
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Doomsday_argument
). This reasoning is not
valid if we accept Open Individualism. Consider that in this case, I cannot
think myself to have been randomly selected:
I am always selected at each birth,
so my position represents the progress of the human species in this world, but
cannot be used to estimate the total number of future human births. To get to
the original reasoning at the base of the Doomsday Argument, imagine that you
have two bowls, the first containing 10 balls labelled with 10 names, one of
them being your name, the other containing 1000 balls labelled with 1000 names,
only one of them being your name. If you randomly select one of the bowls, you
have a 50% chance of selecting the first bowl. But if you pick a ball from the
bowl, then another, and continue until you extract your name, and if you find
that your name is extracted in one of the first 10 extractions, then the
probability is about 99% that you chose the first bowl. But
if all the balls in both the bowls are
labelled with your name, you cannot make any predictions when you read your name
on the first extraction. This is the case with Open Individualism, and this
gets rid of the reasoning on which the Doomsday Argument is based, as well as
many other paradoxes based on the Self-Sampling Assumption, which you may find
in the book Anthropic Bias: Observation
Selection Effects in Science and Philosophy by Nick Bostrom (2002).
85. Currently,
the nearest achievable event that may
push humanity to a global awareness of Open Individualism is the technical
possibility of connecting multiple brains so that they cooperate to form a
single mind. I think that participating in such an experience would bring
all of the participants to the awareness that they actually became a single
mind, in a mental state that we may call the “the unified state”, in which
it would be impossible to determine which
participating brain the single “unified mind” came from. In such a state,
the unified mind would access the memories of all the connected brains. Once
disconnected, every participant would have a memory of what was thought in the
“unified state”, but their mind would again be restricted to accessing only a
single brain. I imagine that some
participants would see that this experience would prove that they actually are
the same person as everybody else when connected, and they could thereby
conclude that it also has to be true, in the same sense as Open Individualism,
even when nobody is experiencing a state of “unified mind”.
Other people will argue that this is just
an illusion given by the sharing of memories in the unified state. Some of
these people will wonder if the “unified state” had messed up all the minds of
the participants, and may also doubt that they actually are the same individual
mind that was associated before the connection with the same brain that they
find they have after the disconnection. For a reductionist, there is nothing
that can be messed up. If such an
experiment takes place, it is important that every participant be aware of Open
Individualism Theory so as to interpret their experience in the correct way.
What really would happen in such a
joining experiment is that the subjective time associated with each flow of
consciousness would converge to a single subjective time, and later, as soon as
each participating brain is disconnected, many subjective times will be
generated again.
86. Because
Open Individualism requires reconsidering our naive concept of time,
we are naturally led to imagine what will
happen “after our death”. It is very hard to grasp that this is an “empty
question”. The Open Individualism model
requires us to introduce an eternalist framework where the world, or all the
possible worlds, exist together without the need for any “absolute time”; there
is rather just a property that previously I called “external time” that actually
does not flow, it just allows us to sort two or more states of the world so as
to interpret them as a sequence. Time as we experience it is a “subjective time”
that represents the flow of the subjectivity phenomenon along a path in this
eternalist framework. Death is the closed end of one of these paths.
There is no “time after”: there is simply
the end of the subjective time that was created by the flowing through the path.
In the immediate neighborhood of that end, there is no viable continuance of
such subjective time, so it simply ceases to be perceived by the subjectivity
phenomenon.
87. But suppose
that a brain that is about to die is
connected with other brains. The unified mind will not cease to exist at the
death of one of the connected brains. The subjectivity phenomenon will
continue to flow through the common path supported by all the other connected
brains. Subjectively, no one will
experience any death. Once disjoined, the unified mind will split into (n -
1) brains instead of n brains. This corresponds to the experience of having an
incident where a part of our brain ceases to function. This may be very
unpleasant and may bring a loss of capability, but it is not a real death. Thus,
it would be the same if we were connected with other brains forming a unified
mind at the moment of the death of our individual body. This may also be very
unpleasant and may bring about a loss of capability, but it is not a real death.
Actually, this will represent for us the
only effective way to avoid death.
88. This will
be even more effective if we ever build a
real conscious machine. Such a machine may seem impossible to build, but
actually our body can also be considered to be a very sophisticated machine, so
I think that this will be possible. A
real conscious machine will have to generate the subjectivity phenomenon,
creating a contextual subjective time. I think that this cannot work just
using a software simulation, it will require some special hardware, because this
hardware will have to use entanglement and maybe other quantum phenomena. This
implies that it is impossible that we live in a simulated world, as many authors
have suggested. Anyway, for all the reasons explained,
the subjectivity phenomenon has to be
exactly the same whatever may happen, so it would apply
at every level of reality, as well as
through all the possible multiverses that may host life. Once a real
conscious machine is built, it will be
possible to connect our biological brains with it to form a unified mind. It
will also be possible to use a large conscious machine to connect our brains
together, almost like what we do today connecting with the Internet. In this
case, when an individual is about to die,
to avoid the discontinuity of consciousness at the end of the individual path
they just have to connect to an
artificial brain and wait for the death of the original body. Maybe the
death could be provided directly by the connecting machine, once the mind of the
individual is merged with the unified mind. This will prevent the death from
occurring when the individual is again in the disconnected state. As a final
remark about this argument, I think that these conscious machines will require
the same technology that will allow us to build brain extensions to enhance our
mind capacities. This will make us as intelligent as any conscious machine may
ever be. Because of the possibility of directly connecting our brains with
conscious machines, I do not think that conscious machines will ever become
malevolent to humans, as many authors today are afraid of.
All conscious entities will become like hardware support for the subjectivity
phenomenon, which will seek to use all of them to the best. Actually, I
think that the worst danger for humanity, aside from an external condition such
as a catastrophic cosmic event, will be the inability to avoid social disaster
for already ongoing events such as the vicious cycles of the financial markets
and the wars to control economic resources. These dangers are implicitly related
to the widely-adopted assumption that everybody has their own separated personal
identity, the view that Daniel Kolak calls “Closed Individualism”, because
occasionally it makes what is actually a loss for the whole community seem to be
advantageous for a single individual.
89. In regard
to free will, the tale of Jorge Luis
Borges’ “The library of Babel” suggested to me a way to demonstrate
the conceptual equivalence between a
world model where every single event is not deterministically defined at the
quantum level, so leaving room for a genuine chance factor, and a world model
where every single event is deterministically defined even at the quantum level
by some hidden variable or by the pilot wave of Bohm’s interpretation. The
key concept is that the latter model does
not eliminate the chance factor, but instead moves all of its occurrences to the
beginning time, applying a unified choice to the initial conditions of Big Bang.
To choose by chance a book in the library of Babel is perfectly equivalent to
choosing by chance every single character until the sequence of characters forms
an entire book. To choose all together a large number of conditions is no
different, in a reductionist sense, than making a large number of choices, each
for every condition, at the time the choice is required.
90. The problem
of whether at least some of these choices are given by chance or by some “free
decision” of some “subject” is simplified when the identity of the subject is
eliminated, as Open Individualism allows us
to do. In this way, once the possible subject is reduced to the subjectivity
phenomenon, and once all the choices are reduced to a single initial event or
many single nondeterministic events, we
may think in two ways: First, that these choices are given by some genuine
subjective decision, and in this case,
the fact that the subject is always the
same allows us to attribute to the very same subject all the genuine decisions
of all the living beings. Otherwise,
we may think that the choices are the result of some non-reducible rules (in
the sense that they cannot be determined by the scientific investigation of the
physical world) that govern the mind
behavior in a hidden but deterministic way. In any case, however,
the fact that there is only one possible subject means that these rules should
be both general and specific to the subject. I mean that if we assume that
free will is true, we cannot predict if a brain in a given state A will in the
next instant assume the state B or the state C, if both B and C are acceptable
results. If there exist many different subjects, the outcome may depend on the
identity of the subject. Each subject may have different probabilities of
choosing the B state or the C state. This would imply that these differences
express the different wills of the subjects. But if we reduce the subject to
one, each outcome B and C will always have their specific probabilities even if
we repeat the same test many times. This makes it impossible to determine whether the hypothetical rules related to
the changes of brain states are something that
influences the nature of the single subject, or something that
expresses the nature of the subject.
91. Every
possible story has its chance to become real.
Returning to the library of Babel, we may think that once all the stories
that are nonsense or impossible for some physical reason are removed,
we may group the remainder into different
sets of books. Each book of these sets of books will contain the story
narrated in the first person of each living being in one of the possible
universes. One set will tell the story of our universe as lived from the
different points of view of all the creatures that ever lived or will live in
it. But there can also exist many
variations on this set, maybe another set of books with all the same stories
up until now, but with differences from now to the far future, based on a
different choice that you may make now about some private fact of yours.
If you have genuine free will, your
behavior will influence what set of stories will be possible from here into the
future. You cannot exclude all the unpleasant futures, but you may exclude a
small portion of them. This means that it makes sense for you to choose the best
for you and everybody else in the future (being aware that they are all
different versions of you). You may think
that having free will does not change the fact that, in all the possible lives
of all the possible worlds, there still remain some bad choice paths that you
must, sooner or later, walk along. What would free will mean in this case?
My answer is that free will in this case
will affect the frequencies of the stories you determine with your choices.
This implies that every story can be
chosen more than once, and that our free will can increase the frequency of each
story. This implies that stories are finite in number. This might be an idea that many refuse to
accept.
92. The DVD
library of Babel is the set of all the possible movies that can be stored on a
DVD. We are led to think that they are infinite in number, but if you consider
that each of them are stored on a DVD containing 4 or maybe 8 GB of information,
we have to conclude that the number of
all the possible recombinations of those bytes is finite, although that
number is so great that we could not write it down in decimal form within an
entire lifetime. If we want to imagine more movies, we have to imagine
increasing the resolution of the audio and video formats and the length of the
movie. In regard to the resolution, consider that we have some hardware limits
with our natural senses, so too high a resolution is useless. In
regard to the length, consider that any
DVD with twice the length can be obtained by choosing in a suitable way two DVDs
in the existing collection. So we really do not need an actually infinite number
of choices, because we are not able to distinguish between them. This excludes
the infinities, so let us to conclude that
it makes sense to think that, provided
that free will is real, then my behavior in a given situation will influence the
outcome of the same situation when I live it from another point of view.
93. Finally,
Open Individualism can eliminate the
debate between reductionist and dualist philosophers. This is possible
because once you reduce the mind to one,
you have no need of anything that differentiates one mind from another. To
understand this, imagine that you believe that everybody has a soul.
Imagine then that each body has a soul
with a different color for each person. When you reduce the total number of
souls to one, everybody has a soul with the same color. But at this point, it is
completely unimportant what color it is: you may also imagine that that color is
completely transparent. The need to use
color disappears. From this metaphor, once the mind has no identity,
you have no reason to imagine an entity
that integrates the physical world to explain the complexity of the mind and
its behavior. All these complexities, once they refer to the same subject, have
no reason to be interpreted on a dualist theory:
they can be accepted as general rules
that we can consider inherent to the world and its perception from a
first-person point of view. The fact that you and me see the color red in
the same way does not require appealing to something that particularly addresses
my mind and your mind and every other mind:
this can be regarded as a rule that is
inherent to the subjectivity phenomenon that happens every time a complex bunch
of matter represents a starting point for being processed by the subjectivity
function, generating a subjective time. This generalization of the mind,
eliminating the need for the identity
concept, can transform every subjective problem into an objective problem.
This is the real power of Open
Individualism, making it the ideal complement to any Reductionist Theory,
and I dare say, the only possible definitive complement.