I love the accessibility of presenting this very complex philosophical thought experiment in the form of fiction. He walks you through some of the analysis you need to be making in the beginning, with the narrator-philosopher basically teaching you, but as the story goes on, you are increasingly left to your own devices to unpack the consequences of the increasingly bizarre scenario. By the end, it's completely stopped being a lecture and is just an entertaining story, but still no less instructive because of the way it captures your imagination and makes you want to work through the ideas.

Agreed, Dennett hit all of the high points of the who-am-I philosophy in a really entertaining story. It also reminded me of a great Greg Egan story, Learning To Be Me:

https://philosophy.williams.edu/files/Egan-Learning-to-Be-Me...

This is focused on just one aspect of the philosophical dilemma, and both Dennett and Egan touch on the horror of it in delightful ways.

Yes! I absolutely loved Egan's idea of the Jewel, and of course it turns out Dennett predates him by about a decade.

Near the end of Dennett's essay, this is exactly the story I was thinking of.

This was a very enjoyable read. Thanks for sharing.

Amazing thinker. His collaborative book with Hofstader, The Mind's I, has left a profound impression.

There’s a passage in there about Nagel’s “what is it like to be a bat” which has fundamentally changed my worldview ever since I read a shitty OCR version on a blogspot. I ended up buying the book and enjoyed it even more.

I just googled it and it’s still up, the formatting is terrible so it’s kind of hard to follow but i recommend it anyway: http://themindi.blogspot.com/2007/02/chapter-24-what-is-it-l...

I remember when first reading the story thinking, that I can resolve the question "Where am I" easily because of my experience with video games.

When I play a first-person video game, and someone behind me looks at my screen and asks me, "Where are you?", I don't say "In a chair playing a game". I say "I'm in such-and-such room on a space station" or whatever.

This made me think that "Where am I" depends on the spatial coordinates your inputs (eyes, ears) are picking up. In an every day case it's wherever my eyeballs are, in a video game case it's the setting of the video game, and Daniel Dennet's case it's wherever his eyeballs are.

This works for videogames but not TV. So the brain must be able to control the inputs.

This also works for the "Tom and Dick switch brains" thought experiment in the story. After the switch, Tom is wherever the eyeballs that are communicating with his brains are, which is to say wherever Dick's body is.

What if you're playing a game and someone pulls the chair from under you?

Do you remain in the game, unresponsive?

Do you prove that you were indeed on the chair all the time?

Or do you get forcefully pulled out from the game to the floor?

What if you play a game at a LAN party while chatting with others in the same room?

What if you put the loudspeaker on in the LAN room to order a pizza? What will you answer to the question of "where are you?"?

I think the answer is closer to "you're in all of those places, to differing extents, depending on who asks". Yes, it feels useless, but attempting to figure out one ultimate answer feels even more useless to me.

>What if you're playing a game and someone pulls the chair from under you?

Right, here is Daniel Dennet's answer, from the story: "For as the last radio signal between Tulsa and Houston died away, had I not changed location from Tulsa to Houston at the speed of light? And had I not accomplished this without any increase in mass? What moved from A to B at such speed was surely myself, or at any rate my soul or mind — the massless center of my being and home of my consciousness."

What you perceive is a kind of virtual reality similar to a video game. It's just constructed based on sensory input, but still has a coordinate system and a point of view, like the camera location in a game engine. Electrically stimulating certain regions of the brain can change the point of view, leading what is called an out-of-body experience. You may wonder how it is that you can move the camera location without moving the eyes. That's because the sensory input creates a kind of 3d model and just like you can imagine what if would be like to see the room from another angle, you can also "hallucinate" it.

Yeah I was thinking the same thing - but more generalised to just “sensory input”

The fact that our brains and sensory input have been tightly coupled since forever basically means we don’t have a framework for perceiving these in different spatial coordinates simultaneously.

But then I was thinking what if our sensory input was split up? My eyes in one location, seeing stuff, my ears in another location hearing stuff, my mouth in another location tasting stuff, then my notion of self switches back to wherever the brain is, but where was that transition? It’s not clear to me :/

I was more interested in the dual minds at the end of the blog post though, musing on the Ship of Theseus type problem of at what point do the two minds become distinct after desynchronisation?

That got me to thinking about how much biology alters the mind too - e.g. when he mentioned that his body was drinking alcohol would his mind get drunk (I think no, presumably because only nerve impulses are being transmitted) but then does he feel the other effects of alcohol? Rapid heartbeat, hot flushes? Can you have an adrenaline induced panic attack using such an interface?

If the sensory duplication is severed can they re-merge at any point in future even if they diverge a lot? How does the interface resolve conflicting brain outputs? Just issue the dual signals? What of conflicting signals go to the heartbeat control nerve?

Great article! Made me think a lot!

> My eyes in one location, seeing stuff, my ears in another location hearing stuff, my mouth in another location tasting stuff, then my notion of self switches back to wherever the brain is, but where was that transition?

There's a text adventure game that has exactly that as a game mechanic. I don't remember what it is called, I want to say it's "A Mind Forever Voyaging" but reading about it on Wikipedia makes no mention of this.

That sounds cool!

Loved this story. Surprised to find how simple and straightforward his writing is here, when in discussions on free will he was much more obfuscatory. Is it due to the difference in difficulty between posing interesting questions and giving good answers?

Here is the part I completely lost the thread - Right at the beginning..

> “Yorick,” I said aloud to my brain, “you are my brain. The rest of my body, seated in this chair, I dub ‘Hamlet.’” So here we all are: Yorick’s my brain, Hamlet’s my body, and I am Dennett.

Why is the brain or the body different from "I"? There seems to be an unstated assumption that your ego is different from your physical manifestation and I did not see anything to substantiate that. This is a religious argument and I could not make sense of the arguments following it.

Maybe there is already an assumption that I missed.

I don't think there's any assumption, and later on he explores your point of view as well:

> The matter was not nearly as strange or metaphysical as I had been supposing. Where was I? In two places, clearly: both inside the vat and outside it. Just as one can stand with one foot in Connecticut and the other in Rhode Island, I was in two places at once.

But this also has problems that he gets into. If the brain and body are both "you", and one is destroyed, do you not exist anymore? Do you half exist? What if your brain gets a new body or your body gets a new brain, or both at the same time? I thought the whole point of this story was to challenge the assumption that your brain and body are both "you" by imagining different scenarios that make that difficult to believe, not to just assume it isn't true. I also didn't think it made any arguments or conclusions, it's just following an interesting thread and seeing where it leads. It's supposed to be thought-provoking, not persuasive.

The statement of the argument is classic Dualism. I am pretty sure that Dennett is setting up the scene in order to poke holes in the said argument.

The brain is part of you, but not the whole you, so it's different by definition. Same goes for the body. Now that they are split, the distinction is only more pronounced.

The narrator goes on to investigate how and whether the difference is actually supported by subjective feelings.

I find the existence of the "narrator" to be utterly debasing of the thought experiment.

Apply Dennett's deconstructions to the author and ask yourself why are you interested in this thesis of indeterminacy of the self when you've already a priori accepted and endorsed Dennett's existence though your consideration of his story on its own terms. Simply apply the same logic you used to accept the source to acceptance of yourself.

Is the dislocation of Dennett's brain from his body a genuinely marvelous feature of the scenario when the scenario is just in your own mind, already a totally displaced manifestation of Dennett's?

Maybe you are not sure that Dennett exists (apparently he actually doesn't) in which case what's going on in this thread: Is it all thoughts from no one mechanically clicking in the machine of "your" own mind?

How can there be a reasoned discussion of a topic the author himself has totally debased?

More troublingly, this response is no more meaningful, don't bother trying to respond because there's no one to respond to! Yet you're stuck with the chaotic intrusion from no one to no one.

If Dennett somehow transcends his scenario, of which there is universal agreement on this forum that he does because even in death his existence is unquestioned, this whole scene is a fright.

Ultimately, why will you allow his scenario to debase your own commonsense, unless there's a greater wisdom of the self to be learned and mastered?

Maybe there is!

So let's look at Dennett himself: he happily maintained he was Dennett his entire life and is consummately well known as such.

QED

Sure, the story places you from the start with the assumption that there was someone who has been split in the first place.

But why does the topic have to be about any more than that? The question is not "is there a Dennet?", but "what locates a person?". What's there about it that prevents reasoned discussion?

When I try to rely on my common sense, I fall into ruts already described in the story, which Dennet the author clearly shows aren't worth much. Seems my common sense deserves some debasing.

The funny thing is, we already have some experiments that do answer this. There was an experiment where two people wore glasses that projected other's physical view point and IIRC, it led to identity and gender confusion. (Unfortunately, I am not able to find that experiment link now).

It seems like we have solid evidence that your brain maps your body, but the map is in your brain. You is the brain as it exists now seems to be a reasonable starting point and I would expect the philosopher to poke holes starting from that.

This appears to be the logical build up to his critique of the Cartesian Theater . https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cartesian_theater

For anyone not aware, Daniel died few weeks ago

“Let’s just assume impossible things are part of reality not fiction and then use that as a basis for philosophical theories of identity and the self”

Hmmm...I don't find this compelling, at all.

Perhaps the notions are so pervasive that they were integrated into my mind and way of thinking early on due to the initial popularity of this writing?

It's a bit like how Francis Crick, after he left DNA research and went into neuroscience, wrote a book called "The Astonishing Hypothesis" with the premise that the mind is nothing magical but simply the product of all those neurons in your brain, even if we don't understand yet exactly how. Lots of people (including me) thought "well, of course, what's so astonishing about that?", but I guess there are people who still believe the mind is some mystical thing not determined by biology.

> I guess there are people who still believe the mind is some mystical thing not determined by biology

There's a gap between accepting that the mind is ultimately made up of neurons firing and what it feels like to be a mind made up of neurons firing.

Depending on one's upbringing, they likely hold deep unexamined beliefs - bedrocks of thinking - that more or less boil down to: the mind feels like some mystical thing. People can believe in the science of biology and conceptually understand that they're the product of long spans of evolution while still feeling like the mind is quite a mystical and mysterious thing.

And it can be hard to cut through this feeling without intentionally uprooting those unexamined beliefs. I know this from personal experience. My upbringing involved the deep conditioning of a religious world view that instills these mystical ideas. I left it behind in my late teens. It wasn't until my mid 30s that I started to deeply appreciate how embedded those feelings were, and even though I didn't believe them when examining them rationally, I realized they were still there in my underlying thought processes, influencing my interpretation of everyday things.

So I wouldn't say it's just that people "still believe the mind is some mystical thing" (although this group does exist), but that "the default mode of experience for many people is the one that feels mystical".

Another unstated assumption is that one necessarily exists. After all, every last experience we have ever had has been with ourselves being there, experiencing it.

This leads to the idea that we will cease to exist to just be unbelievable, as it's contrary to everything we have ever experienced. From this I think we get the idea of some essence separate from our biology and the idea of its continuation after death.

I have entertained the idea (if you believe in the quantum many worlds) that everyone will experience themselves as aging to infinitely old age, because in the parallel worlds, well, you don't exist.

If you want a grim take on this looking into the quantum immortality thought experiment. I can't remember who wrote it, I think maybe Chalmers, but the idea is that while the experiencer is immortal, they will still accumulate injuries, old age, etc. It would not be a very pleasant immortality.

Saying that something will happen across the multiverse is stating a certainty, so long as it's physically and logically possible. Every absurdly unlikely thing will happen in that sense. Everybody will, somewhere (and somewhen) become purple with flashing yellow spots. That's very different from saying "I expect to experience this happening", which is a statement about what's probable.

>There's a gap between accepting that the mind is ultimately made up of neurons firing and what it feels like to be a mind made up of neurons firing.

This is exactly my objection. I fully believe were mechanical machines, fully believe in determinism, I think human behavior /thoughts will fully be explained mechanically etc but I cannot find any way to deny consciousness or qualia and reduce them to physical properties (lest we augment our definition of physical to include consciousness as a fundamental property. I also contest the notion that doing so would be "mysticism" or any less scientific than having added "mystical" properties like force/energy and randomness into the standard model of physics). It seems the motivation for this has far more to do with desperately trying to cram everything into materialism than following sense.

Until one can give any kind of plausible explanation as to how feeling/qualia can become an emergent property of matter, it is a complete mystery. My thoughts are it is impossible as they are completely orthogonal and complimentary properties. Qualia is the experience of going through the physical process. Pain is the experience of having this mysterious thing called force acted upon pain receptors hooked up to a working neural system. The physical description can explain exactly what happens, but yet it leaves us with an experience that has no physical description. How can that be?

Lastly, there will always be unanswered questions or presumptions in science (how did the universe emerge? what makes up energy?), so while the attempt to do is formidable, the presupposition that consciousness must be explained by science is nonsensical.

Dennet's eliminative materialism isn't some well accepted philosophical position. In fact, its one the most rejected. https://survey2020.philpeople.org/survey/results/5042 https://survey2020.philpeople.org/survey/results/correlation...

We just had a long discussion about this if you're interested. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40254047#40257234

I should add that I’m agnostic as to the actual reality of things, and a perspective that has felt useful to me is to remind myself that the fields of science are a map, and that there are portions of the map that are just completely undefined. We know there’s a terrain to explore, but haven’t made much progress in increasing the fidelity of that portion of the map. What I do know is that the fundamental Christian version of beliefs leaves a particularly shaped imprint on the psyche, and my relationship with what I thought myself to be started shifting/expanding when I started diving deeper into these unexamined “mystical” notions and having those notions confront the scientific view. That confrontation is what leaves me agnostic.

As the map gets better and better, it’s seen as more and more acceptable to look at that map as if it provides ultimate answers. But it still has nothing to tell us about primordial existence.

Consciousness sits in the same category of unexplained and possibly unexplainable.

Who knows. Maybe all matter truly is conscious and the spectrum of available conscious states scales with the complexity of the matter’s configuration. In either case, I don’t feel that a purely mechanical explanation is necessarily relevant to the question people often claim it answers.

Looks like a good thread. Thanks.

I think this (qualia) is certainly the heart of the issue, and I personally go back and forth from some kind of quietism (or some kind of mysterianism), and some kind of illusionism. The latter position I would have found utterly topic-changing for the better part of 2 decades, but now I am finding it more plausible as I lose confidence in first-person reports and a series of related phenomena (documented by people like Eric Schwitzgebel).

I'll also add the eliminative materialism is probably not the precise position to describe his views on consciousness. You could be the polar opposite of Dennett, like a Jerry Fodor, and still be a staunch anti-realist about consciousness (a view that I think Fodor even entertained). I take EM to be an assault on folk psychology, which may or may not include qualia, and illusionism is probably the better term for his position on qualia.

Funny enough I completely agree with the eliminative take that folk psychology can be reduced to physical processes. I dont think beliefs, desires, hopes and dreams are all require any kind of consciousness.

Where I disagree completely is qualia. Dennet makes some arguments about how any attribute/description we can ascribe to qualia is contradictory. As I see it, a failure to describe it with language has no bearing on the fact that it exists as a mental phenomenona.

I've long-described myself as an eliminativist about everything but consciousness :) I think there were some really interesting attempts to save classic architectures that were purpose-built to save the folk conception (https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/book/10.1002/97814443104...), but ultimately I think we don't have the sort of neural architectures that support such a view.

Out of curiosity, have you read any of the newer attempts to vindicate the view that most now call illusionism? I doubt you will find it compelling, but leastwise it serves as an update with some pretty new arguments and fresh blood. You might find it amusing: https://philarchive.org/archive/KAMHCY-2

Thanks for the link. Do you understand what they mean by "normative" pain? I cant make sense of it.

The first argument given for illusionism is merely stating physical processes are strongly anagaolous to mental pheneomena. Ok agreed, but this is equivalently supports a panpsychic view. It just states "if one adds anomalousness as a premise for illusion, and then further assumes that illusionism is a possibility, then we have strong evidence of illuionism". Huh?? Cant one make the exact same argument for panpschyism? If one adds a premise that physical properties are anomalousness with conscious experiences, and then one supposes that the possibility of panpsychism is evidence for panpsychism then we ought to believe in panpsychism. Besides, what about a synonymous relationship between two things denotes one is illusionary and a product of the other? All this does is show that a singular criteria of illusion is met.

The second argument is even more bizarre. It starts with the premise that consciousness/conscious phenomena can be explained fully by physical properties (but not right now, but science will obviously explain it surely, one day). Is this so obviously true that zero words are given to it's justification?

Then the rest of the article is an argument to how one cannot treat the "obviousness" of experience so casually...

It doesnt seem to me that illusionists actually deny conscious phenomena. More so, they call it an "illusion" and claim this makes the hard problem equivalent to the easy problem. i.e it becomes reducible to giving it a physical explanation. But if all is meant by "its an illusion" is "its really just a physical process", it doesnt grant any useful pathway. It seems very circular.

All this makes me really wonder if some of us truly are p zombies and thst the illusionists have managed to figure out a test for it.

>Thanks for the link. Do you understand what they mean by "normative" pain? I cant make sense of it.

Normative pain means there are a set of beliefs and actions that are attached to certain states that carry connotations of goodness, badness, etc. I would consider this usage the cousin of projectivism, where we project moral properties onto physical states of affairs.

>The first argument given for illusionism is merely stating physical processes are strongly anagaolous to mental pheneomena. Ok agreed, but this is equivalently supports a panpsychic view. It just states "if one adds anomalousness as a premise for illusion, and then further assumes that illusionism is a possibility, then we have strong evidence of illuionism".

I think this is a good point, but I do see a lot of illusionist and panspychist arguments as attempting to hollow out the middle ground positions. Thus Chalmers "If I were a physicalist I would be a illusionist". I think the arguments can still be interesting if it leaves us with a dichotomy.

Chalmers has given arguments for panpsychism so I dont think hes totally opposed to the idea.

And Im not so sure materialism necessitates reduction of consciousness. It entirely depends on what one considers to be "material". I would hold for example, that if consciousness were a fundamental property of all matter, it would fit any functional meaning of the term "material" as it relates to scientific inquiry.

By "materialism" what we really seem to mean here is "a conservatory position on what constitutes material". If one accepts consciousness as a property of matter, then it becomes a materialist view, no?

All possible explanations for existence have a 'well okay, but what created that' issue. Whether you start with a God, or with a quantum fluctuation, one is left asking - okay well what created the God, or what created the void in which quantum mechanics (and who created such a system to begin with) burst forth. There is no answer to these questions, because regardless of the story - it always ends (or in this case, begins) in the same very uncompelling way - 'Well it just always was.'

In any case, the mystical and physical are not fixed. Imagine explaining the consequences of relativity to a skeptical individual of times past. Think of his response to the notion that time itself is a variable and can move at different rates for different people in different circumstances. It sounds like absurd mystical sci-FI nonsense. Except it's real, so now has been promoted from the mystical to the physical.

So what a skeptic of today would label "mystical" will almost certainly change over the centuries and millennia yet to come. Scarcely more than a century ago, state of the art transport was a horse, computers did not exist, quantum physics did not exist, relativity did not exist, human flight was widely believed to be impossible, and so on endlessly. It seems unlikely in just a century that we've even scratched the surface of knowledge yet to come, let alone meaningfully penetrated into it.

I'm certain this topic has been addressed many times, but I can't see how to reconcile basic morality with "it's just a calculation". Tell me I should not inflict pain on sentient beings while subscribing to the belief that pain is simply one particular result of a massive mathematical calculation. It's literally just a number/matrix.

Perhaps you're not over-valuing pain, but under-valuing numbers. There's no reason to think that morality can't or shouldn't center around minimizing a pain metric. That would put it in line with any other trajectory-planning-under-constraints problem. Once you've done a bit of work in trajectory optimization, you start to feel the numbers come alive, and develop a visceral feeling for them. I wince when I see a car scrape to the edge of its traction limit as it rounds a corner at high speed.

Nature itself plans trajectories to minimize action, the integral of a Lagrangian: it's literally just a number, but it decides the motion of molecules and galaxies. What's wrong with a moral system based around minimizing a pain integral, subject to constraints? Still just a number. But one that can easily take an important position in our decision-making, and find a deep-seated place in our minds as well.

Of course, we probably ended up with morals in the first place as a distillation of game-theoretic heuristics, which helped us trust and cooperate with each other, which would have been an evolutionary benefit. But as with anything else, we're accountable to the drives that evolution left us with, not evolution's reasons for putting them there. The morals are in our minds, not in nature, but either way it's numbers all the way down.

Consider whether we should define electrons to be "positive" or "negative": there isn't any fact of the matter, it's merely a convention. But it doesn't seem like experiencing pain works this way: pain feels a particular way. If pain is just a mathematical entity, there shouldn't be any particular way that it feels, since it's just a symbol.

Maybe we're deeply wrong about our intuitions, and actually no conscious experience is happening in the brain at all, despite the brain having an incorrect model about itself which predicts this (and causes it to make utterances claiming that it has experiences). That's the school of thought known as eliminitivism. Under this view, all suffering is a myth, in the same way that luckiness and angels are.

Sign conventions are not arbitrary in trajectory planning, though. You'll get very different results if you solve for a robot trajectory that moves from A to B while minimizing motor energy consumption, than if you solve for maximum energy consumption. You'll notice the difference - it's a mistake you'll only make once!

If we have some internal decision-making process that pushes us to make decisions that minimize a pain metric, the sign we attach to the "pain" number will make a very big difference, both in internal state and resultant observed behaviour.

It shouldn't be that hard: you don't like suffering, right? There you go! Those numbers/matrices are bad because they feel bad.

so all thats necessary for someone to inflict pain is to claim they personally enjoy it?

No, they need to convince a large portion of society that it's good enough to allow. So far the arc of human history has shown this to be a difficult argument to make at scale and at length.

but "they" don't exist to the agent inflicting pain. "they" are just a number, by definition. Just the result of a calculation...

Edit: or if you dont like that explanation, why should a consensus of a calculation have any more merit than an individual calculation?

Well no, the agent's model of the other person is just data, but this model is so convincing that most people don't perceive it as such and they're thoroughly convinced of the realness of the other person.

Consensus matters because if people around you disagree with you they will kill you or put you in prison. At rock bottom this is how all laws and ethical norms are created.

And it isn‘t just a number. A number doesn‘t feel like anything but pain does feel like something.

It would be honest to admit that we don‘t know why consciousness subjectively feels like anything. Pointing to complexity or integrated information doesn‘t explain this at all. It‘s easy to imagine a complex process that doesn‘t have a subjective experience.

> A number doesn‘t feel like anything but pain does feel like something.

so it's not "just a calculation"? I am NOT trying to make a joke/reference to Clinton, but I think in these philosophical conversations, we have to step back even further and question what our definition of "is" is.

Again, I'm a CS grad who has never taken philosophy, so I'm sure this has been explored to death by people who own this field. But there's absolutely a point in philosophy where you can't even rely on "what is true": slamming my fingers in the doorway IS painful (to me), but it IS also "just a calculation" to almost everyone else in the universe. Just as Einstein proved, two observers can experience different realities, fundamentally, two mutually exclusive truths can exist simultaneously (it does not hurt YOU when I put my finger in the doorway and slam the door).

> but it IS also "just a calculation" to almost everyone else in the universe

What do you mean by "just a calculation" here, and how does everyone else's experience of pain apply?

You seem to be implying that for everyone who is not the 1st person subjective experiencer of pain, the only possible representation of that pain is some form of "calculation". You seem to further imply that this reduction somehow says something specific about the nature of pain itself. Am I reading this right?

Sure, you could choose to use some process of calculation as one way to measure pain, but this isn't the only way to conceptualize it, nor is it the only way that people experience it.

e.g. mirror neurons are interesting to consider. We have in our brains these neurons dedicated to experiencing what we observe others experiencing. We cringe when we see someone suddenly become involved in a painful accident. We recoil when we see something horrific. The nature of what the observer experiences is almost certainly very different than what the person in pain is experiencing, but there's a shared experience for those in proximity.

Whatever pain is or isn't, the fact that its effects can be localized to a single person and the fact that it may be calculable in some way seem unrelated to each other.

> two mutually exclusive truths can exist simultaneously (it does not hurt YOU when I put my finger in the doorway and slam the door)

You hurting your finger in the door and me not feeling the exact thing you experienced are independent facts about the state of the world when the door slamming occurred. Mutual exclusivity seems misapplied here.

>You seem to be implying that for everyone who is not the 1st person subjective experiencer of pain, the only possible representation of that pain is some form of "calculation".

Not exactly. I'm showing the abusrdity of people who think that the brain is just a computer and that its results: "just a number" fly in the face of their reality of experiencing pain. If it's just a number, why don't they slam their hand in the door and show us?

> You seem to further imply that this reduction somehow says something specific about the nature of pain itself. Am I reading this right?

By their own definition, "the nature of pain itself" is just a number, just a result of a huge calculation of trillions of neurons with substantially higher numbers of networks. The terrifying sound, the facial expressions, the visceral "gut-feeling", thats all just pattern recognition (on your behalf), there's nothing more to it than a calculation, right?

> Mutual exclusivity seems misapplied here.

technically correct but only because we could, in theory, both inflict pain on ourselves simultaneously using the doorway.

> We have in our brains these neurons dedicated to experiencing what we observe others experiencing. We cringe when we see someone suddenly become involved in a painful accident. We recoil when we see something horrific. The nature of what the observer experiences is almost certainly very different than what the person in pain is experiencing, but there's a shared experience for those in proximity.

That is an assumption, and a dangerous one at that. What you speak of is a kind of 'empathy', a feeling of emotions by Proxy... not everyone actually has that... some people don't cringe at other's pain, for some: their pupils dilate.

That's a tangent to the current discussion, but yeah... some 'calculate your pain', other's 'calculate the pleasure your pain cause in them'...

But to add to the discussion, pain isn't localizable to one person, not always, at least... so is emotion/feeling mappable a calculation of the neurons? (maybe/probably)

My point wasn't to claim that everyone experiences empathy in the same way, or even that everyone has it, but to point out that pain can't be reduced to "calculations". It's a low resolution substitute for a deeply complex interplay of physical, biological and social phenomenon.

People get into philosophical trouble with this because humans have a hard-wired system for what's part of your body and what isn't. That's a survival trait. Problems with that system cause phantom limb syndrome, self-injury, and other body-model disorders.[1]

We're looking at a protection system from the inside. Brains are internally interconnected distributed systems, but we're evolved not to feel that way. Trying to reconcile that drives philosophers and theologians into inventing dualism, souls, and other hacks to explain the concept of a unified mind. That goes back at least two millennia and hasn't helped much.

Brains are distributed systems. They have features to drive them towards eventual internal consistency. Failures of those features underlay schizophrenia and similar disorders. Has neuroscience explored eventually-consistent system theory yet? That might be useful.

[1] https://wolpertlab.neuroscience.columbia.edu/sites/default/f...

I think most of the philosophers Dennett is engaging with aren't suggesting that the mind is magical or mystical, but simply that subjective phenomena (thoughts, perceptions, etc) cannot be fully explained in exclusively physical terms. To give a popular argument, you can imagine a scenario where somebody has completed a perfect and complete explanation of the physical processes of human color perception. Would this explanation grant a reader who had never seen color an understanding of what it is actually like to see the color red? The argument goes that if you can't explain something in purely physical terms, then that thing isn't purely physical in nature.

Just because something isn't physical doesn't mean that it is mystical or magical; it is just a different kind of Stuff. The idea that only physical things exist is intuitively pretty compelling to me, but I've found arguments to the contrary to be much more convincing.

> Would this explanation grant a reader who had never seen color an understanding of what it is actually like to see the color red?

Suppose that you were to manually fire neurons in this person's brain, so as to exactly simulate the brain's response to red-frequency photons hitting the retina. Would this give them such an understanding? I would guess that most people would say yes. So one can learn subjective experiences without needing the perception to actually occur. In some sense the subjective experience is physically encoded in the details of the neural intervention.

The interesting question is where is the line on the spectrum between verbal explanations and direct neural intervention, at which such an understanding becomes impossible to impart?

If I'm understanding your thought experiment correctly, you are saying that you could stimulate the right part of the brain to cause the person to have an experience of seeing the color red without actually perceiving something red. I think that it would be right to say that they would have gained a more complete understanding of what it is like to perceive the color red, but that's only because you have caused them to actually perceive the color red—that perception just didn't reflect reality. I think we could argue about the definition of "perception", but the important part is that you are making them experience redness firsthand.

If you ask me, there is nothing short of direct firsthand experience that will allow you to understand what it is like to see the color red.

Here's some further reading on that argument, if you're interested: https://iep.utm.edu/know-arg/

> you have caused them to actually perceive the color red

Perhaps pedantic, but I'd argue there is no perception going on, since the senses are not involved.

> the important part is that you are making them experience redness firsthand

To me the important part is this: knowledge of the experience of redness can be transferred to a someone, without them going through the process of seeing redness, but purely by means of changes to their neural states. Framed this way, it is not so difficult to swallow that similar neural changes could also happen in response to reading or being told about seeing the colour red.

I don't think it's pedantic, semantics are absolutely necessary for talking about this kind of thing precisely. I use the word perception to describe certain mental phenomena that we take as usually occurring in response to stimuli: sights, smells, etc. I'm not certain I totally understand your definition, but it sounds like you use the term to describe a type of process where sensory organs and the brain interact with the rest of the physical world to create mental phenomena—the same phenomena that I would call a perception. So because there aren't actual objects interacting with the sensory organs, then direct neural stimulation of the brain isn't a perception under your definition.

I can see where you are coming from with the idea that you could trigger those neural changes through some other process. It's an interesting idea, and I wonder if it could be true in practice somehow. Regardless, I'd still argue that you are manipulating the brain in one way or another to create a firsthand experience of seeing the color red. If you can explain redness fully in terms of physical systems and processes, then somebody having that firsthand experience for the first time shouldn't be thinking "oh, so that's what it is like to actually see red."

If these are purely physical processes, then that knowledge should have come along with your complete knowledge of all of physics. You should also know what it is like to have experiences that your brain doesn't have the hardware for, like a bat's experience of echolocation. It seems like an unfairly high bar to clear; how could you understand an experience without having it firsthand? But if you are committed to believing that conscious experience is a physical thing, then I think you are also committed to believing that it can be fully described in physical terms. Physicalists do have arguments that try to explain how you could pass that bar in theory or dodge the commitment altogether, but personally I think those arguments are pretty weak.

> If you can explain redness fully in terms of physical systems and processes, then somebody having that firsthand experience for the first time shouldn't be thinking "oh, so that's what it is like to actually see red."

I mean, I think I totally agree here. It's just that I think a "full" explanation would be able to include a description of "what it is like". And that somebody having the firsthand experience would think "Yup, that matches what I read it would be like". The cynical side of me feels that people who deny this will ever be possible are being a little pessimistic or unambitious.

> You should also know what it is like to have experiences that your brain doesn't have the hardware for, like a bat's experience of echolocation.

I don't think that this necessarily follows. The hardware defines limits to what an individual can understand. I will never have a full understanding of the location and velocity of every atom in the universe - even if in principle a physical description of it could exist - because my brain's hardware is insufficient to represent the model. Likewise I cannot expect a human to know what it's like to have a bat's experiences. But there could in principle be a super AI that can understand both human and bat experiences.

So this leads down to some interesting consequences.

If everything is determined by biology, and biology is determined by chemistry, and chemistry is determined by physics (quantum or classical). The next question is: "from where does 'choice' come from? if the sum of each part contains none to begin with, how can it emerge without 'proto-choice properties'?"

The conclusion from this view must be one of two:

1) That 'choice' is an unfounded axiom, an illusion of subjective qualities that we misinterpret as our 'will'.

2) Though if we do have 'will', and ability to exert control via choice, and not be controlled by physically determined processes... perhaps that is this notion of 'chance/random' which we seem to have to deal with.

A consequence of point 2 is that if that is our ability to choose, how can we choose better than the baseline 'random' as we apparently do?

> The next question is: [ ... ]

Dennett has you covered there too. His book "Elbow Room: the varieties of free will worth wanting" is a must-read on this topic.

I've give it a read. But if it's just rehashing John Locke's prisoner dilemma of perceived choice vs actual choice...

I'm talking about objective reality, not subjective experience. The free will I'm interested in knowing if it exists or not is one we (in theory) could possible eventually measure (a difference in what physical processes say we should do and what we actually do). I'm interested in 'actual' free will, the ability to do what you would otherwise not.

Illusionary free wills are boring to discuss - as they are merely redefining our experiences in terms feed-back systems... which obviously exist - but that's not free will, that's our understanding and knowledge about observable systems.

The only free will that matters is: can we defy physics, or are we subjects of physics from now until the end of time. Are we free to choose the actions or is physics determining the actions we take. Are we in control of our lives or is the universe and we just lie to ourselves to keep on keeping on?

If everything is run by physics - that make you physics' sweet submissive.

edit: reading the back cover - the idea's of control vs freedom and elbow room are familiar, and in my opinion entirely misguided from the point I raise above... a feedback-system that allows you to control results is not a good definition of free will. What free will in that case is: is being able to choose anything in response to that feedback system... which has yet to be shown to be the case... and good arguments argue that it is impossible.

IMO, Dennett's book is a tour de force review of many others' writing about free will combined with what he considers his own contributions to the philosophical ideas around it. It is a relatively easy read, but also profound, and (again, IMO) he dispenses with your "The only free will that matters is: can we defy physics..." quite thoroughly and effectively.

Reading the back cover is certainly not an adequate way to assess the contents (not that it ever is, but is certainly is not in this case).

I'll put it in my reading list and get to it soon. But these are ideas that I have been looking at for a long time... and previous refutations of 'free will' as 'actually it's just these feed-back systems and we shouldn't think or worry about John Locke's locked door', have been unsatisfactory.

Also - having read the short story - 'Where Am I' relies heavily on the author's incredulity to make their arguments... which is unconvincing to me. Not being able to conceive of something is different than the reality of that thing. It's a story about confusing subjective experience with objective reality. The reality of the 'self' is different than your own point of view of what that self is. Your subjective experience is just that: subjective and not objective...

He also makes dubious claims in that story like 'the self can move faster than the speed of light'... That's going to need some evidence to claim something that fantastical...

It is a fantastic story, fun and fantastical, and asks interesting questions...

No less a scientist than Roger Penrose is (arguably) in that camp: his excellent “The Emperor’s New Mind” is about the paradox of free will in a mechanistic universe, and the question of where among the laws of physics might consciousness fit. (Spoiler alert: the collapse of the quantum wave function has a different character from all the other laws.)

That is a rather tenuous thing to base an argument (and a book) on. Quantum wave collapse is not understood at all, to the point there are physicists who deny collapsing even happens.

> No less a scientist than Roger Penrose

This is argument from authority.

In Penrose's case, while his position is mildly interesting, most other scientists and philosophers interested in consciousness and mind/brain questions completely reject it.

> This is argument from authority.

No, it isn't. An argument from authority would be me claiming that X is true because Penrose says so. The parent poster had said "I guess there are people who still believe the mind is some mystical thing not determined by biology." To which I responded with a data point: a highly respected physicist (indeed, an authority) who professes to be, essentially, a Cartesian dualist. I wasn't even claiming that X is true.

HNers do seem to love casually slinging claims of logical fallacies at each other.

Yes it is. You sought to bolster the mention of Penrose's almost-certainly ridiculous consciousness-is-quantum ideas by starting with an implicit description of his rank as a scientist.

Had you started with: "There are a handful (and I do mean a mere handful) of scientists, most of them with no background in either brain or computation science, who think ...." and then later mentioned Penrose, you'd be right.

But you chose to lead with his nominal status derived from his life as a talented and (rightfully) celebrated mathematician, thus attempting to improve the otherwise less than marginal status of the quantum-centric view of consciousness with his authority.

Rudy Rucker points out, in one of his SF books, that free will and random number generators are the same thing.

Lee Smolin (a physicist) argues that all this talk of determinism (as opposed to free will) has a real impact on people, leading to fatalism and feelings of helplessness and hopelessness, and that this has real impact on prospects for public policy responses to the crises we as a species face.

Interesting! Not compelling because you already have your own answers to the questioned posed? Or perhaps not compelling because you don't find the questions to be interesting/relevant?

The value of this story, in my opinion, isn't just that these are neat things to think about. There are deep unanswered questions here that challenge how we understand the connection between materialistic science and a non-materialistic belief in "self", and push the limits of theories of ethics. For example, right up to the very end it keeps throwing new questions at you, such as "What is justice when 'two' people have identical claims on a fundamental right? Namely, which of them gets to keep the body? Which of them gets the estate? Which of them is married?"

Dennett's story is a powerful instigator of thought on these topics.

I don't find it compelling because I don't buy the premise, that a person whose brain has been separated from his body is anywhere at all. A simulation of life isn't life, and that's all this is. You have, on the one hand, a corpse relieved of its brain being used as a puppet, and on the other, a brain kept firing in a vat.

It's popular to think of "ourselves" as a sort of "ghost in a machine," and we particularly assume the ghost resides in the brain, but I don't think that's what people are at all. I don't think either our brains or the rest of our bodies are separable from our selves.

That's not to say you can't validly discuss how to treat the body and/or the brain, but I think the person here, the I, has died.

Is someone with a cochlear implant dead? How about someone using a BCI to move a mouse? Or a locked-in patient?

Is there a minimum number of organic connections we need to be alive?

How would you convince this person that their 'I' has died?

I think these questions are exactly along the lines of the question this story begs.

I don't know how many, but that doesn't keep me from knowing it's more than zero.

"Convincing a person that their 'I' has died" is a category error, like a married bachelor. Corpses can't know they're dead, and anything simulating life for the corpse isn't a person to convince.

There might be some other entity deserving of rights that does exist. I'm not about to argue that only persons deserve rights. I don't think a horse is a person, but I do think it has a right not to be abused. There's a meaningful discussion to be had about what rights the corpse and simulation ought to have in this circumstance.

But "convincing a person their 'I' has died" is self-contradictory. Being able to put the words together in a syntactically coherent sentence doesn't make the idea possible.

Do you consider non-persons have an "I"? I presume you do, because otherwise there wouldn't be anyone to deserve rights.

In that case, the question is still valid: how would you convince the non-person "I" that the "I" is dead?

(I can see how the original "person I" might be dead after such a change, but it doesn't really make the premise invalid.)

No, I don't think nonpersons have an "I," because that requires a level of self-reflective awareness that's incompatible with their nature. Being or not being a "thou" is a characteristic of persons, which is why I said it's a category error.

Keep in mind, this is all in the context of why I don't find the article compelling. It's because I disagree with one of the fundamental premises of its proposed hypothetical situation, one so fundamental that the thought experiment is dull without it.

I'm not here to change your mind. I'm just explaining why I don't find the thought experiment interesting. Suspension of disbelief about some core thing you believe to be true about the world is fun for the sake of science fiction stories, but it's dull for the sake of philosophical thought experiments.

I don't intend to convince you or get convinced. To me, the answer depends on the purpose of the question.

I'm curious now instead why you'd grant rights to entities that don't have an "I". Isn't that pointless? Or is it a mistake on my part, i.e. maybe there's no "I" but there's still a "you"?

In the "you" case, do you think the thought experiment could be reframed as an attempt at answering the question "where is the you?"?

I think an "it" can have rights. I'll go back to the horse. It has a basic natural right not to be beaten because it's a creature that can experience pain, not because it's an "I."

The legal system (at least in the U.S.) seems to need to call something a "person" in order for it to have rights (e.g., corporations), but I don't think the legal system is the origin of rights.

"I" and "thou" go together as references to personhood, so I wouldn't distinguish between the two. (And I'm mostly using "thou" here instead of "you" to show I'm referring to the concept rather than you personally. The "I/Thou" philosophical concept also has precedent of using the term.)

Are you sure this is a simulation of life? All the story is talking about is longer nerves, brain still connected to the body, it's just slightly further away.

The brain has been severed from the body, and a new type of connection spliced in to replace it. Even if this happens one connection at a time, by the time none of the originals are remaining, all that remains is a simulation of life.