as someone who constantly thinks about the past & future versions of myself, i loved this!! the analysis of severance & how it’s connected to those ideas was also so smart. what a great read!!
Cool piece tying things together, i hope your friends end up interested in consciousness though i think it will always be a static percentage - some people want to play exclusively 'innies' the consciousness and some people like talking 'abouties' the consciousness.
I see you mentioned IFS I didn't quite make that connection though maybe they will head that direction in the show, especially with the brother-in-law author as a stepping stone to ease people into this kind of talk. My first thought was that the innie represents an inner child abandoned and attempting to do reintegration, but it also makes sense that future seasons will start looking very IFS-like too.
I really got stuck on the re-integration part in the story, I wonder if the "permanently severed" cases are the ones where they forced reintegration and they failed. Any thoughts on this?
Beautifully put together! Really love how you tied down an idea expressed in multitudes, just like the thing the idea is describing. The text feels like a gentle reminder about approaching this multitude and the fact that it goes in the time dimension as well. Thank you :)
Did a recent bit of writing on the Substance with a digression through Soma on the teletransportation paradox (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Teletransportation_paradox) where I reference an old tweet that I think is at least the start of an internally consistent way of thinking on this that I describe as:
"The trick is to do a value handshake with every future version of yourself to agree that all current thought patterns and those causally resulting from them are you, no original pattern is automatically privileged, and all instantiations agree to work together as is reasonable; any homunculus housing a reasonable approximation of my past memories and recent thought patterns gets to be me regardless of how many there were in the past or are presently"
Part of the premise here is that you're already doing this with your consciousness second-to-second anyways (or if it's easier to conceptualize, every time you go to sleep and wake up in the morning). Still probably needs some refining, it sort of critically fails to account for long time periods between forkings of consciousness that might have extremely divergent values and sort of doesn't address Severance-style the-copy-has-amnesia situations, but I chiefly don't have to think too hard about whether the post-transporter me is still me. Amended it later to include context-sensitive equitable sharing of the wife conditional on the number of wifes.
I've never heard of the Teletransportation paradox, but it sounds like something I would love to read about! Actually, someone just recommended part three of Parfit's Reasons and Persons based on this Substack post I wrote, so sounds like I need to move it up on my TBR list. I mean, this is literally what my post argues for haha: "That accepted, it is a short extrapolation to conclude that it is also incumbent on society to protect an individual's "Future Self" from such transgressions; tobacco use could be classified as an abuse of a Future Self's right to a healthy existence."
A value handshake with your future selves, including on a second-to-second basis, is a great way to look at it. Super interesting!
Side note, I have not seen The Substance but it's high on my list of movies to watch.
I hadn't heard of it either until I was trying to write about it! I went looking briefly for how far back people have been thinking about it; I've always heard it discussed like the Star Trek transporters--if it's destroying you at one location and constructing a perfect copy at another, what does this imply about consciousness? Part of Soma's plot posits a world where you can transcribe and copy consciousness like simple software, but the process doesn't destroy the original.
I don't think it make sense to encourage temporal one-way prosecution of moral judgments, on the personal level it's kind of a whacky abdication of personal responsibility (it wasn't -my- fault, it was past me's fault!) and on the society level you'd be encouraging some extremely abusable and corruptible curtailing of personal freedoms; same issues the "What We Owe the Future" sort of position notably dodges, you can't reasonably audit the present without clear advanced knowledge of the future (and even if you could you run into meta-moral arguments over what constitutes a "best" future).
Can mostly recommend the Substance, I was lukewarm on it but I think most people would get something out of it.
as someone who constantly thinks about the past & future versions of myself, i loved this!! the analysis of severance & how it’s connected to those ideas was also so smart. what a great read!!
thank you so much! means a lot to me. :)
Cool piece tying things together, i hope your friends end up interested in consciousness though i think it will always be a static percentage - some people want to play exclusively 'innies' the consciousness and some people like talking 'abouties' the consciousness.
I see you mentioned IFS I didn't quite make that connection though maybe they will head that direction in the show, especially with the brother-in-law author as a stepping stone to ease people into this kind of talk. My first thought was that the innie represents an inner child abandoned and attempting to do reintegration, but it also makes sense that future seasons will start looking very IFS-like too.
I really got stuck on the re-integration part in the story, I wonder if the "permanently severed" cases are the ones where they forced reintegration and they failed. Any thoughts on this?
Beautifully put together! Really love how you tied down an idea expressed in multitudes, just like the thing the idea is describing. The text feels like a gentle reminder about approaching this multitude and the fact that it goes in the time dimension as well. Thank you :)
Thank you! I'm glad you enjoyed the post :)
Did a recent bit of writing on the Substance with a digression through Soma on the teletransportation paradox (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Teletransportation_paradox) where I reference an old tweet that I think is at least the start of an internally consistent way of thinking on this that I describe as:
"The trick is to do a value handshake with every future version of yourself to agree that all current thought patterns and those causally resulting from them are you, no original pattern is automatically privileged, and all instantiations agree to work together as is reasonable; any homunculus housing a reasonable approximation of my past memories and recent thought patterns gets to be me regardless of how many there were in the past or are presently"
Part of the premise here is that you're already doing this with your consciousness second-to-second anyways (or if it's easier to conceptualize, every time you go to sleep and wake up in the morning). Still probably needs some refining, it sort of critically fails to account for long time periods between forkings of consciousness that might have extremely divergent values and sort of doesn't address Severance-style the-copy-has-amnesia situations, but I chiefly don't have to think too hard about whether the post-transporter me is still me. Amended it later to include context-sensitive equitable sharing of the wife conditional on the number of wifes.
I've never heard of the Teletransportation paradox, but it sounds like something I would love to read about! Actually, someone just recommended part three of Parfit's Reasons and Persons based on this Substack post I wrote, so sounds like I need to move it up on my TBR list. I mean, this is literally what my post argues for haha: "That accepted, it is a short extrapolation to conclude that it is also incumbent on society to protect an individual's "Future Self" from such transgressions; tobacco use could be classified as an abuse of a Future Self's right to a healthy existence."
A value handshake with your future selves, including on a second-to-second basis, is a great way to look at it. Super interesting!
Side note, I have not seen The Substance but it's high on my list of movies to watch.
I hadn't heard of it either until I was trying to write about it! I went looking briefly for how far back people have been thinking about it; I've always heard it discussed like the Star Trek transporters--if it's destroying you at one location and constructing a perfect copy at another, what does this imply about consciousness? Part of Soma's plot posits a world where you can transcribe and copy consciousness like simple software, but the process doesn't destroy the original.
I don't think it make sense to encourage temporal one-way prosecution of moral judgments, on the personal level it's kind of a whacky abdication of personal responsibility (it wasn't -my- fault, it was past me's fault!) and on the society level you'd be encouraging some extremely abusable and corruptible curtailing of personal freedoms; same issues the "What We Owe the Future" sort of position notably dodges, you can't reasonably audit the present without clear advanced knowledge of the future (and even if you could you run into meta-moral arguments over what constitutes a "best" future).
Can mostly recommend the Substance, I was lukewarm on it but I think most people would get something out of it.