From: M. Taylor Saotome-Westlake Date: Thu, 26 May 2022 18:12:04 +0000 (-0700) Subject: "personal identity" anchor in "Sexual Dimorphism" X-Git-Url: http://534655.efjtl6rk.asia/source?a=commitdiff_plain;h=feb246e15b9ba0b1bb3e69c090ceaa5e6fe32097;p=Ultimately_Untrue_Thought.git "personal identity" anchor in "Sexual Dimorphism" --- diff --git a/content/2021/sexual-dimorphism-in-the-sequences-in-relation-to-my-gender-problems.md b/content/2021/sexual-dimorphism-in-the-sequences-in-relation-to-my-gender-problems.md index e3292e3..7557b2c 100644 --- a/content/2021/sexual-dimorphism-in-the-sequences-in-relation-to-my-gender-problems.md +++ b/content/2021/sexual-dimorphism-in-the-sequences-in-relation-to-my-gender-problems.md @@ -437,7 +437,7 @@ In the comments, [I wrote](https://www.greaterwrong.com/posts/QZs4vkC7cbyjL9XA9/ I now realize that the correct answer to [the question](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/vjmw8tW6wZAtNJMKo/which-parts-are-me) is—_yes!_ Yes, it's cheating! Category-membership claims of the form "X is a Y" [represent hidden probabilistic inferences](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/3nxs2WYDGzJbzcLMp/words-as-hidden-inferences); inferring that entity X is a member of category Y means [using observations about X to decide to use knowledge about members of Y to make predictions about features of X that you haven't observed yet](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/gDWvLicHhcMfGmwaK/conditional-independence-and-naive-bayes). But this AI trick can only _work_ if the entities you've assigned to category Y are _actually_ similar in the real world—if they form a tight cluster in configuration space, such that using the center of the cluster to make predictions about unobserved features gets you _close_ to the right answer, on average. -The rules don't change when the entity X happens to be "my female analogue" and the category Y happens to be "me". The ordinary concept of "personal identity" tracks how the high-level features of individual human organisms are stable over time. You're going to want to model me-on-Monday and me-on-Thursday as "the same" person even if my Thursday-self woke up on the wrong side of bed and has three whole days of new memories. When interacting with my Thursday-self, you're going to be using your existing mental model of me, plus a diff for "He's grumpy" and "Haven't seen him in three days"—but that's a _very small_ diff, compared to the diff between me and some other specific person you know, or the diff between me and a generic human who you don't know. +The rules don't change when the entity X happens to be "my female analogue" and the category Y happens to be "me". The ordinary concept of "personal identity" tracks how the high-level features of individual human organisms are stable over time. You're going to want to model me-on-Monday and me-on-Thursday as "the same" person even if my Thursday-self woke up on the wrong side of bed and has three whole days of new memories. When interacting with my Thursday-self, you're going to be using your existing mental model of me, plus a diff for "He's grumpy" and "Haven't seen him in three days"—but that's a _very small_ diff, compared to the diff between me and some other specific person you know, or the diff between me and a generic human who you don't know. In everyday life, we're almost never in doubt as to which entities we want to consider "the same" person (like me-on-Monday and me-on-Thursday), but we can concoct science-fictional thought experiments that force [the Sorites problem](https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/sorites-paradox/) to come up. What if you could _interpolate_ between two people—construct a human with a personality "in between" yours and mine, that had both or some fraction of each of our memories? (You know, like [Tuvix](https://memory-alpha.fandom.com/wiki/Tuvix_(episode)).) At what point on the spectrum would that person be me, or you, or both, or neither? (Derek Parfit has [a book](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reasons_and_Persons#Personal_identity) with lots of these.)