"How dead are you if your mind is wiped", and other questions of personal identity

This discussion sprang up in the "sanctimonious arseholery on QQ thread" of all places, and is rather interesting, but off-topic as fuck.

I'm not going to cross-post all the discussion, because phone-posting is suffering, but I am going to try to quote everyone involved.

Capital idea.

I never meant to imply that they were the same, but I don't think that the original person is any more alive in either case.



For the record, in case the argument drifts, the position I am trying to establish is that there are (at least potentially) radical mental changes that one might undergo, and not survive, that do not involve death in the traditional sense.

 

For a second I thought this site was different from SV. We actually have hookers and blackjack here.

Then I started going through the pages instead of using threadmarks and I was like, 'Oh there's a bunch of argu- Nope, totally the same.'

It feels nostalgic.

... Not sure why you quoted me though. I kinda made one meaningless comment so... Er.

 

If your mind is wiped, then yourself-with-wiped-mind got blackjack and hooker, is it you that enjoy them, or not?

 

I more or less just grabbed everyone who replied on the topic on the last page or so.

*shrug*

It seemed better to err on the side of inclusion.

 

... It depends. How hot are the hookers?

In all seriousness though... I'm going to say 'yes'. I'm not going to ponder on some moralistic introspective relativistic quandaries because that's far too serious for my tastes. And I literally made one comment and I honestly have no idea what this argument is even about or how it started.

 

That's fine. We disagree.

Of course I'm one of the rare people who would rather be mentally handicapped than dead, so what have you. It's not a view that many people I've met accept for themselves.

 

That is actually hilariously close to a legit philosophical thought experiment.

I think it went something like "You and someone else go into this machine. When they come out, each of them will have memories saying they used to be the other before the machine. One of them will be given a billion dollars, and you get to choose which. Who do you give the billion dollars to?"

 

Ok, so I'm not a psychologist, but I do remember a discussion somewhere else where there were a good number of people in that profession commenting.

It's generally agreed that losing your memories doesn't change who you are. Amnesiac patients are still identifiable by their loved ones from their traits and how they respond to certain stimuli.

The only way you're going to end up as Stalin II is if your pre-mind wipe personality would lead you to doing that.

 

Maybe I communicated poorly, but if there is any trace of you whatever, you are less dead than the imhotep case.

If your mind was totally nuked, and a new mind grew out of it, with no mental traits inherited from you, or anything, then you are just as dead as in the imhotep case, I'd say.

Yep, I'd agree with that first bit. Merely losing your memories is not enough to make you a new person.

Bear in mind that by "wipe your mind and replace it with stalin", I was not referring to any existing, or even terribly plausible medical procedure.

 

What can I say? We disagree. I feel that since it's still your brain then any emergent personality would be you. A very literal form of reincarnation, say.

Whereas the imhotep is just someone eating you from the inside out to wear your empty body like a sock. I agree that this is a death. Likewise for someone imprinting another personality into you, full stop so that it subsumes everything.

An interesting question in this line of thinking might be this; are you still you if your memories are all the same, but your personality is completely rewritten? As in, you act completely differently, have different values and ideals, but they're all drawn from the same stored information.

 

It would depend on how it was done, I reckon.

The more internal the process behind it, the more you are you afterwards. Also the extent to which they were complete and irreversible changes would play a role.

If you just wake up one day and decide to bend your herculean will to the task of changing all your preferences, the I'd say you are still you. Some outside force does it? The resulting being is less you, or not you at all, depending on specifics.

 

At the risk of getting involved in this discussion, something about the distinction between doing it yourself and having it done by an outside force strikes me as suspect. Surely a change either makes you a different person or it doesn't. What possible bearing could the identity of agent of that change have on the question?

 

I've seen people argue on another forum that someone from 10 years ago¹ who bore the same name is distinct enough to not be the same person for the purposes of how they will treat others and how they will be treated.

And certainly, I've seen previously happy-cheerful people, after meeting them with years passing, to be vastly more reserved - though that person still remembers me, the resulting person's reactions were different enough to not be able to pick up where we left.

Given the above, I don't think you can exactly separate memories from personality, not fully anyway. Sure, things that are not memories affect personality, and not all things we remember is something we have a preference about either. But they're very much intertwined.

1 Arising in conversation about Mathilde of Schlock Mercenary, whose only memory backup was from before they married and had a child by "now" old enough to go to school.

 

It's not the identity of the agent of change I am concerned with so much as the nature of the process.

How big the change was is important, but so is how it was done.

(Eg: case 1: a man re-examines everything he believes in and decides to radically change his attitudes on everything.
case 2: A man has bits of his brain swapped out with bits of other brains until he has radically different attitudes on everything.)

 

Assuming ~same initial and end results the main difference between those two cases is that case 1 person is unstable existence with a half-life.

From here, one could say that while cut flowers are still beautiful, it is not worth crying over them drying.

 

Eh, I don't believe in souls, if i got mind wiped down to zero I would be dead in every way that matters. I'd wish the new person wearing body luck getting by with this defective old thing though.

That said to me it's a matter of continuity. I am still me despite having very little in common with my shit head teenage self because the change was a continuous process, a mind wipe breaks that.

Just opinion though, I don't have any fancy philosophical education, so my view isn't going to change from outside interference.

 

Would you still ascribe importance to the nature of the process if we were to add the stipulation that the man's beginning and ending states did not differ based on the process used? Or is your attention to the nature of the process predicated on the assumption that different processes yield different results?

 

Oddly enough, your view is basically identical to one of the leading theories in the philosophy od personal identity.

Different processes yield different results, but the processes are important beyond that.

I hold with the Psychological Continuity view of personal identity, according to which you are basically the same person as long as your psychology is joined in a continuous causal history.

Processes that maintain that connection, or leave it unaffected won't change your identity, processes that sever that connection make you not you (ugh phrasing), and processes that mess with that connection can make things murky.

Someone with a different account of personal identity may well give you a different answer on that, of course.

 

Not surprising that my random musings haven't exactly been breaking new ground, cool to know nonetheless.

 

Not breaking ground, perhaps, but quite on the money.

 

I suppose I'm still unclear on how hooking oneself into a mindwipe machine isn't part of a "continuous causal history." I'm uncertain what that phrase excludes.

 

YOU EXCLUDED ME.

SENTENCE IS DEATH OF PERSONALITY.

There are people who do cry over it?

That stipulation is sufficiently biased to alter things, yes. Because in the ideal case it only holds when there is implicit consent, and the only reason relying on implicit consent is bad in RL is because you might be mistaken about it. Essentially, it by definition prunes away all the cases in which it is objectionable (and a fair chunk of those in which it is not).

EDIT: Forgot something. Is a case of split personality without self-contained memory (i.e. two personalities, both of whom can remember everything the other one does as though they did it) two people or one?

 

I explained it poorly, cuz drained and tired, but not just any causation will do. Otherwise everyone would be the same person as everyone else, pretty much.

Your mind at each moment very intimately and directly causes your mind at the next moment to be, and determines how it is (along with other factors, of course.). When you get mind-wiped, your mind afterwards is not shaped by your mind before in this way.

Even if it was your mind that ordered the mind-wipe, that doesn't change matters, as your mind causes the new, wiped mind at several orders of remove, (mind causes hand, hand causes lever, lever causes injection, sort of thing), which lacks that causal intimacy, and is much the same as how someone else might cause that state if they pulled the lever.

Edit: Sorry shroom.

 

It's interesting that you use the word "biased," because at this point I'm not arguing for any particular view - I'm just exploring positions. Case in point, your answer differs significantly from the one Priapus gave. The stipulation isn't meant to reflect any probable reality (even within the absurd hypotheticals that form the basis for the entire thread), it's meant to tease apart principles from ultimately irrelevant situational factors. Apparently, Priapus believes there's something inherent in the nature of the process that matters, completely separate from any question of results, while you believe the only relevant difference between the two processes lies in their outcomes.

Can you elucidate for me what difference you see (if any) between someone else pulling the lever, someone else engaging a calculated campaign of psychological breakdown and reconstruction (as might be performed on a military conscript), and someone else presenting a series of well-reasoned arguments? Purely from a perspective of process.

 

I was using the word in the strict statistical sense of "sampling bias" i.e. a sample which systematically does not represent the population.

Though my answer was to some extent an off-topic one since I was describing what I'd object to if somebody was doing it to a third party (continuing the origin of the tangent in the parent thread which was "how evil is forcibly turning paedophiles into non-paedophiles on a scale of 0 to Hitler"), not what I'd believe to be "death" and "not death". My answer to the latter is "I don't know so I take the most conservative approach possible; other people can make up their own minds".


Any thoughts on the situation I edited in above?

 

From a perspective of process, the latter two are much the same.

As for the lever, that would depend on what it did.

If the lever completely determined your mental state, such that it would be the same no matter what your mind was before it was pulled, then the continuous psychological connection would be disrupted, and you probably wouldn't exist anymore.

If it did the same to just a chunk of your mind, then things get fairly murky, but you're still you.

If whatever it did did allow your previous mental state some causal potence, say if it just put an enormous pressure on you towards forming a certain belief, then it is just another cause of many, and doesn't in any way damage your personal identity.

And, of course, if the lever wiped your mind, then as above, you are basically gone.



I think I just figured out that we might be meaning slightly different things by "process". You seem to be thinking more in terms of brainwashing vs persuasion vs implantation, while I mean something more general. Basically, what I mean is that it is not just state that is important, but how that state was attained.

 

No, no, that's not it all - as near as I can tell, we've had exactly the same idea of "process" from the very beginning. No need to second-guess yourself now.

Those examples were just a way of getting at what you meant by causal continuity, and I was quite satisfied with your explanation.