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Episode 49: The Self: Bundle and Ego Theories
82 Plays1 year ago
Rolf and Joe discuss two philosophical theories of the self, Bundle Theory and Ego Theory, based on a paper by Derek Parfit. They return to the topic of the teletransporter, and although Joe is happy to go through the teletransporter, Rolf is convinced it means certain death.
Parfit, D. (2016). Divided minds and the nature of persons. Science Fiction and Philosophy: From Time Travel to Superintelligence, 91-98.
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Transcript
Introduction to the Problem of the Self
00:00:09
Speaker
Welcome to Cognation. I'm your host, Rolf Nelson. And I'm Joe Hardy. On today's episode, we're going to talk about a philosophical problem of the self. And we're basing our discussion off of a paper by Derek Parfit, a philosopher. And the paper is entitled Divided Minds and the Nature of Persons. The topic that we're going to get into
Bundle Theory vs. Ego Theory
00:00:35
Speaker
is sort of fundamental questioning about the nature of the self. And the terminology that's used is bundle theory versus ego theory. So, Joe, you want to start out telling us a little bit about what the distinction between bundle theory and ego theory is.
00:00:57
Speaker
Yeah, sure. So I think when a lot of people hear the word ego, they think about Freud and his theories. And we're not talking about that in this context. What we're really talking about is ego in the sense of the subject of experience. So when I say, I saw something, or I heard something, or I had a thought, the I in that statement, the subject of that experience,
00:01:26
Speaker
is in this framework, the ego. And the idea of ego theory is that in order for a person to have a sense of a continuous stream of experiences over time that is part of the same set of experiences, the same conscious experience of the self,
00:01:54
Speaker
there needs to be a subject of that experience. And that subject of the experience is called the ego. So that's ego theory, that each person is defined by one ego. One person equals one ego, one subject of experience. Over time, I'm able to interpret things in regards to my experiences over time because I'm the same person. Bundle theory basically says that that's wrong.
00:02:24
Speaker
that there is no singular subject of experiences within an individual, but rather there are simply a bundle, a collection of sensations, actions, thoughts, feelings, and emotions. And each of these states essentially occur as somewhat discrete units
00:02:51
Speaker
over time, and they're essentially bundled together, and that bundle is what we call the experience, call the individual. So there's a little bit abstract in this level, but that's kind of the idea that do you have one subject of experience, which is ego theory, or do you have no subjects of experience, but rather just a collection of sensory states
00:03:17
Speaker
subjective states that are bundled together within a physical organism that is an individual. Now, looking at this from sort of a larger lens, most people have intuitions about this. And I think if you were to ask people on the street, they might probably come back with something like ego theory, which I would, I think is probably the most common, at least Western idea to hold about this.
00:03:44
Speaker
Ego theory is consistent with the idea of a soul, a continuous self that exists over time and can even exist beyond death. So the soul is a kind of ego theory. So I think this is sort of a natural place that most people might start and it might be difficult to think of ourselves as divided in this way or not really connected or just sort of this bundle of experiences.
Split-Brain Research and the Self
00:04:13
Speaker
And the first Western philosopher to talk about this, and this is where the term bundle theory comes from, was David Hume. So David Hume, you know, psychologists like to think of him as kind of like an early psychologist. He lived in the 1700s before the
00:04:37
Speaker
field of psychology began, but he talked about a lot of things that psychologists really care about, where perceptions come from, you know, the nature of the self, the nature of consciousness, a lot of these kinds of things. So I'm going to read just a little bit from an essay from David Hume where he talks about
00:04:57
Speaker
his reaction to other philosophers, and he proposes this idea that we're more a bundle of experiences. So he says, okay, I'll start. So there are some philosophers who imagine at every moment, who imagine we are at every moment intimately conscious of what we call self,
00:05:16
Speaker
that we feel its existence and its continuance in existence and are certain beyond the evidence of a demonstration, both of its perfect identity and simplicity. The strongest sensation, the most violent passion, they say, instead of distracting us from this view, only fix it more intently and make us consider their influence on self by either pain or pleasure.
00:05:40
Speaker
Okay, and then he says, what must become of our particular perceptions upon this hypothesis? All of these are different and distinguishable and separable from each other and may be separately considered and may exist separately, so these are these bundles, have no need of anything to support their existence. And what manner therefore do they belong to self
00:06:05
Speaker
and how are they connected with it? For my part, when I enter most intimately into what I call myself, I always stumble on some particular perception or other of heat or cold, light or shade, love or hatred, pain or pleasure. I can never catch myself at any time without a perception and can never observe anything but the perception.
00:06:30
Speaker
And then he further comes to this conclusion. He says, I may venture to affirm of the rest of mankind that they are nothing but a bundle of or collection of different perceptions.
00:06:46
Speaker
which succeed each other with inconceivable rapidity and are in a perpetual flux and movement. So he goes on to further delineate this, but this is his main idea that
00:07:02
Speaker
Most people, most philosophers even have this central concept of self that they feel really truly exist in some way. And Hume just says, no, I don't think that's how it works. We're just a collection of perceptions, memories, ideas, beliefs, things like that. And this happens in everyday life where there are
00:07:29
Speaker
many things going through our head and only one of them may make it to full consciousness but there's a lot going on inside our head and this is really not something that we should think of as just a single unit.
00:07:43
Speaker
Yeah, exactly. And this comes up, this Hume's view on this is kind of this idea that you can walk and chew gum at the same time, for example. So you may be walking down the street and chewing gum, and you can do these two actions at the same time. You may not be conscious of both of these things. So is it actually, when you're not thinking about chewing gum, are you actually
00:08:09
Speaker
Is there a self that is chewing gum? Or is it just that these are just a bundle of different actions? All the things you're seeing, the cars on the street, avoiding the cracks in the potholes. All these things are being done by the body and by the mind, if you will. But you're not conscious of them in that way.
00:08:36
Speaker
Is that all part of the self? Or are these just separate actions and separate bundles of experiences and sensations? Hume would say they're separate. David Parfitt would say they're separate. I guess it's a little bit like, OK, so what? So what are the consequences of these different theories? And is there any way to kind of get at them from a neuroscientific perspective? And is there any practical implication of that?
Parfit's Perspective on Split-Brain Patients
00:09:01
Speaker
And I think this is where Parfit's argumentation is super interesting. He starts off, he got interested in this question because he was looking at split brain patients and the whole split brain research. And split brain patients and this sort of field of psychology comes from the 1960s. So Sperry and Kazanaga were the sort of researchers most well-known for this work.
00:09:29
Speaker
And what this comes from is there are a bunch of patients who had their corpus callosums cut. The corpus callosum is this bundle of fibers that connects the two sides of the brain, the left side of the brain and the right side of the brain. And the left side of the brain and the right side of the brain, most of you probably know, have somewhat separate functions. And so the reason why these, okay, so backing up for a second, the reason why these patients had
00:09:59
Speaker
these surgeries is that there was, they had epilepsy. So very severe epilepsy and the epilepsy, this abnormal firing of neurons would bounce back and forth between the sides of the brain. And in order to circumvent that, to stop that,
00:10:14
Speaker
there was this surgery that, you know, I think this is still done sometimes today where people- Although I think it's much more rare today because exactly for the reason you say that since they're trying to treat epilepsy, that's a pretty, it's a pretty crude measure just to split the brain in half and better localization means that you can find the actual, you know. Yeah, but sometimes they actually need to remove an entire side of the brain.
00:10:38
Speaker
Yeah. Yeah. And that's another thing too. Yeah. Yeah. So this is, this is the thing that, that happens in very severe epilepsy where the patient would be otherwise, you know, very severely disabled or, or die otherwise. And so the point is that you separate out so that the communication between the left side of the brain and the right side of the brain are, is disrupted. And
00:11:04
Speaker
What's interesting is that you can kind of essentially query the two hemispheres of the brain, the two sides of the brain separately, at least to a certain degree, experimentally, because the left hemisphere, the left side of the brain controls the right side of the body. And the right hemisphere, the right side of the brain controls the left side of the body.
00:11:33
Speaker
and similarly for the visual field. So everything to the left of the midline is, in other words, the midline being the middle down from your nose, everything to the left in your visual field is processed by the right side of your brain and everything to the right of the midline is processed by the left side of your brain.
00:11:56
Speaker
So you've got essentially everything that's happening on the left side of the world can be experienced and interacted with by the right side of the brain and vice versa. And these clever researchers actually figured out a way to like ask questions to the different sides of the brain. And they have argued experimentally and you know,
00:12:21
Speaker
through through discourse that actually you can get separate experiences reported on by the left side of the brain and the right side of the brain and the two different responses don't know about the other so the left side of the brain doesn't know what the right side of the brain is seeing and the right side of the brain doesn't know what the left side of the brain is seeing and they actually
00:12:46
Speaker
comes up with, creates some interesting conundrums and it raises calls into question this idea that there's a single self or person or ego in that individual. So in the, I mean, in sort of the extreme interpretation of this, the idea is that when you sever the connection between the two hemispheres, you end up with two separate selves inside a brain. Yeah, exactly. And do you want to, Ralph, do you want to describe like a version of one of these experiments just to make it very concrete?
00:13:15
Speaker
Yeah, so one version of these kinds of experiments would be, so you could, if you flash an image to the left side of the visual field, it'll go to the right brain. And so, like you said before,
00:13:31
Speaker
And if you flash an image to the right side of the visual field, it'll go to the left brain. And you have to flash these quickly enough so that people can't move their eyes over and take a look at it. So it just presents a static image. Okay, so one example of this is flashing an image of some object that the left hemisphere, so flashing it to the
00:14:01
Speaker
Yeah, let's see. So some object, the left hemisphere, so first of all, the left hemisphere is generally dominant in language. So one trick in these experiments is that it seems as though the left hemisphere can communicate via language, whereas the right hemisphere. At least for right-handed people. At least right, yeah, yeah. In general, it's at least more facile in language, right? So if you present something to just the right hemisphere,
00:14:28
Speaker
one example, say a picture of a saw, for example, and then ask the person to, the split brain patient to say what they saw, they might not be able to say it. And there's, I didn't say anything. And the idea is that would be the product of the left hemisphere language saying I didn't see anything.
00:14:52
Speaker
Nevertheless, if you give the person a pen and allow them to draw freely, they may draw something that looks like a saw, or, you know, something antiquated related, maybe they'll draw a hammer or something like that. Yeah, only with their left hand.
00:15:07
Speaker
only with their left hand. So it's as though just the right hemisphere is understanding this and drawing it out, trying to communicate in some way. And only after looking at their picture, they would say, oh, it's a saw. Because then they can verbalize it. So this seems to give a strong impression that it's as though there are two separate individuals inside each with their full sort of sets of
00:15:34
Speaker
Yeah. And you can actually do this simultaneously. So like say, for example, you had a saw and a hammer. One was presented to the left hemis, to the, to the left visual field. And one was presented to the right visual field.
00:15:47
Speaker
let's say that the right visual field saw the hammer and the left visual field saw the saw. You ask the person what they saw, they would say, hammer, because the audit. Now, when you're saying the person, you mean the left hemisphere, you ask, well, but also the person to the individual that is able to speak and make the individual's mouth. Which would emit, which presumably is being controlled by their language, dominant left hemisphere. Yeah.
00:16:16
Speaker
the hammer. And then but there may be an opportunity where that person using their other hand, their non dominant hand, their left hand, they may be able to select the saw, or maybe able to draw it. So they may actually, there may be some sense in which there were two separate experiences that were both reportable, but in disagreement about what the individual experienced.
00:16:46
Speaker
And I think Gazanaga's interpretation of this, so one of the researchers who did a lot of this early work on split-brain patients, one of his interpretations was that the left brain is the one that's conscious or the interpreter for the whole brain. And the right brain was not able to express itself and didn't possess a sort of consciousness. And you could also, it's tough to decide exactly what's going on.
00:17:14
Speaker
Is there one person inside that brain? Are there two people inside that brain? And then Derek Parfit says, well, no, there's actually no persons inside that brain.
Challenges of a Continuous Self
00:17:25
Speaker
Exactly. Yeah. So Parfit provocatively says the number of persons having that experience is zero. So there's this question, is it two people? Is it one person? No, it's zero people having that experience. So the idea is that the
00:17:44
Speaker
And that's a strong, but I think when he says that, it's just he's being a strong bundle theorist. Exactly. Not that you've suddenly destroyed, you know, experiences that there never were, there never was a person in the first place. There never was just a single person just as, as each individual that we think of isn't just a single person.
00:18:04
Speaker
Right, exactly. And so it's really that it's not that there isn't an experience, or there aren't a set of experiences, is that there's no singular, reducible subject of the experience. And so I think it's just, I don't, we're obviously in this conversation, we're not going to be able to resolve this, right? Like, we don't have the answer for you. And so but I think it's, it's really just interesting to problematize the idea of
00:18:30
Speaker
the ego in the sense of a singular subject of experience that's continuous over time for a lot of reasons. I mean, one of the reasons is that, you know, this idea that we feel very strongly, at least I think many of us do, I certainly do have a very strong sense that I am a continuous self over time and that the person who did things in the past
00:18:56
Speaker
is the same me that is doing things now, and my memories belong to me in some meaningful sense. Yeah, that two-year-old Joe Hardy, even when you didn't really know what was going on with the world, is still fundamentally the same person as you right now.
00:19:12
Speaker
Right. Exactly. Exactly. As opposed to, I mean, if you were to, if that two year old Joe Hardy were to come and hang out with you right now, you probably wouldn't see a whole lot of similarities and you'd see that, you know, its experiences are probably a lot different than yours, but you still identify strongly with that continuous sense of self. Yeah. And a lot of it is tied up in memory too, right? It's tied up in two things, language and memory. And I think also people are individually a little bit different in terms of how much their
00:19:42
Speaker
reported sense of self has to do with language. I mean, for me personally, I have a very strong
00:19:51
Speaker
internal dial, I have a very strong sense of an internal dialogue. So I'm constantly talking to myself, hearing myself, talking to myself, sometimes, you know, just on and on and on. Sometimes it's extremely unhelpful. Right, right. That's an interesting point. That's an interesting point, though, that internal dialogue is sometimes what gives you what may give you that sense of self, right? Because you're talking to someone. For me, someone's talking. For me, that's 100% what it is. That's 100%. What my sense of self is 100% that internal dialogue of
00:20:21
Speaker
this ongoing conversation that I am having with myself and the memory of past conversations or past experiences that have been processed through that in some sense. So it's really when I, when I, when I think of like the, the self or the ego, I really think of that narrative self. I sometimes use the term narrative self because it's like that continuous story that you're telling yourself about yourself.
00:20:47
Speaker
And this relates a little bit to our episode with Chris Beatty a few episodes back where we talked a little bit about narrative continuity and whether you feel as though your life is sort of like a story, like it's a continuous narrative like that, or whether it's just this disjointed set of episodes that sort of happen. So in a way, I think bundle theory is a little bit like that.
00:21:12
Speaker
I think you can get individuals that feel as though their life is, you know, maybe experienced as a very coherent whole or feel as though it's very disjointed.
Neuroscience and Bundle Theory
00:21:23
Speaker
So people can have different opinions on this based on their individual experiences too.
00:21:29
Speaker
Yeah, and I think it wasn't Beatty, the one who said that he felt like it was more disjointed like a set of experiences. We have to go back and listen to that. We encourage our listeners to go back and listen to it also. But I think David Hume seems to be in that category of folks who feel like a little bit more separated into
00:21:49
Speaker
that may feel like what his experience is like. And maybe that's partially just on closer examination, too. Different ways of looking at it. Not a personality type, but upon examination.
00:22:01
Speaker
Yeah, no, absolutely. And I mean, I've been exploring that sense as well in terms of just trying to think about what we'll get back to that. Should we talk any more about other kinds of neuroscience that have something to say about bundle versus ego theory? Absolutely. I mean, one aspect of it in neuroscience that I think about is parallel processing.
00:22:29
Speaker
So the idea that you are able to process simultaneously the whole visual field, take in that information, everything that you're hearing, everything that you're feeling in your body, and all of these things, you can prove that some of that is being processed. So for example, if you flash a stimulus in the upper corner of your visual field, you will orient towards it.
00:22:56
Speaker
You know, it's not all the time, but often you'll look towards it or you move towards it to see what's there. Now, otherwise you would have no idea that there's anything there. You have not, I mean, not consciously, there's parts of the visual field that you're basically never consciously aware of as being visual in that sense. Most of your visual field, right? So at most times this is something most people are probably not entirely aware of that you're really only consciously aware of a very small portion of your vision at any one time.
00:23:24
Speaker
And, and that part of it that actually gets processed into something like a memory is much, much smaller even than that. So the part that you're seeing is, is smaller than the whole of possible inner interaction. But, you know, the part that you get an actually process that would be part of that narrative that goes forward is tiny.
00:23:42
Speaker
But that's one of those, there's one little bundle that's kind of noticing those things in the upper corner, not consciously, and then eventually that makes it to consciousness at some point. Yeah, and so this gets into this idea of attention, and how attention is important for our feeling or sense of consciousness, right? So, you know, as you, body scan is another great example. If you do a meditation, like a body scan, where you attend to different parts of your body starting at the top of your head or starting at your feet,
00:24:10
Speaker
starting at the top of your head, then you know, feeling your eyes, your face, your upper body and all the way down, you realize that you have a set you can experience a set of sensations of each part of your body that you just normally don't unless there's something impinging it with pain or, you know, pressure or something like that.
00:24:29
Speaker
I think there's a lot in neuroscience that supports bundle theory. And I think, I mean, in my thinking, just about everything in neuroscience supports bundle theory, because we, you know, we think of the brain as decomposable into all of these different parts and all of these different processes, like you said, that are going on in parallel. Every module that does some specific thing in our brain from, you know, face recognition to
00:24:54
Speaker
specialized visual processing or audio processing. All those are kind of bundles of processing of events or things that are going on in our brain separately that we're not aware of or that we're sometimes aware of and sometimes not aware of.
00:25:09
Speaker
Sadly, you see this in something like Alzheimer's, where you see mental facilities go to something that you might consider integral to yourself, like, you know, your, you know, your personal memories, your, all of your mental faculties as they go one by one, you see that they may not be just a single unitary thing, and they may be independent kinds of processes that that formulate ourself.
00:25:35
Speaker
Yeah, no, absolutely. Absolutely. I mean, you know, this kind of gets into a little bit into, you know, this sense of no self, which is the Buddhist sort of in the Buddhist
Buddhist 'No Self' vs. Bundle Theory
00:25:50
Speaker
sense. Yeah, exactly. There's a Buddhist kind of view of this, which is always something puzzling to me. Yeah, I mean, it's, it's hard to describe with language or language.
00:26:02
Speaker
it gets to this whole point that our idea of ego, our sense of self, the narrative self is a language construction largely. That's the way I'm thinking about it right now anyway. So it's just hard to talk about with words because our words are built around this thing, this process, this ability that is constructing itself, is constructed to create a sense of
00:26:29
Speaker
continuity over time. So the language is built into that. But the Buddha talks about this idea of no self. Actions do exist and also their consequences, but the person that acts does not. There is no one to cast away this set of elements and no one to assume a new set of them. There exists no individual. It is only a conventional name given to a set of elements.
00:26:56
Speaker
So the idea is that it's not that there is not consciousness, it's just that the individual self as an experiencer of that consciousness does not exist when understood correctly. Actually, there's a way in which this actually relates back to Kant.
00:27:20
Speaker
because Kant says, you can't experience the thing in itself. You only have the sensation. That's all you have. That's right. Yeah, yeah. Yeah, right. That's a good connection. It's kind of a similar... Kant's another sort of early psychologist. I think it was another kind of early... It's not exactly the same thing, but it's kind of hitting at the same vibe, right? Which is that the world is filtered through your brain and your experience of that
00:27:47
Speaker
is your brain kind of telling you
00:27:51
Speaker
that you are a thing that is singular and exists separate from everything else. That's the difference where Buddha brings it back to like, actually everything's kind of the same. It's kind of part of the same. This is where I get stuck in some of the language games here because, and you just said, this is your brain telling you. Yeah, exactly. There's no way to describe it with words. There's no way to describe it. We don't have the language to describe that. We can make up words, but it would just be,
00:28:21
Speaker
it would make this podcast impenetrable. Yeah, so I think, you know, from that perspective, like Kant and Buddha kind of agree that like, there, you know, to the extent that there is something essential, a thing in itself, a true reality, true existence,
00:28:40
Speaker
We're not, our individual egoic self does not experience that or does not actually exist. I mean, that's kind of bundle theory. So again, why, who cares? Well, there's actually a bunch of interesting consequences that result from how you think about that. I mean, one of the ways that I find particularly interesting is in the world of just,
00:29:06
Speaker
psychology and psychotherapy. So like psychology from the perspective of like, are you doing well? Are you not doing well from mental health and wellness perspective? One of the interesting findings from the world of psychedelic assisted therapy is that when you do high dose psychedelics in a appropriately
00:29:28
Speaker
Uh, controlled environment with the right supports and so on and so forth. A consistent finding is that people experience what is called ego dissolution. And now this is maybe this can go from, you know, this is a very common experience. Um,
00:29:46
Speaker
And it's also there's, it's graded it's dose dependent. So, uh, I think it, I'll describe that sort of the lower dose kind of experiences. And then I can't really describe the higher dose experiences because they're not describable, but, um, at least not with the current line with our, with our existing language, but you know, at the lower doses, what's reported is in the literature is something like, uh,
00:30:11
Speaker
an increased sense of unitariness, unitive experience is sometimes referred to as unitive experience. So you feel like there's less separation between yourself and the other people that you're with. There's less separation between yourself and the world around you. You feel more connected to the natural environment, to nature, to the universe.
00:30:41
Speaker
And at the extremes of this, it's been reported that people have a sense of total unity. And this happens, this is a, this is also something that happens in mystical type experiences and religious contexts and other near death experiences, other experiences like that, where people have a sense of like total connection to everything.
00:31:02
Speaker
Why is this not our default way of thinking? In other words, our brain imposes this idea of self on us. Of course, this seems important, right?
00:31:18
Speaker
We should be, you know, if we want to, if, you know, evolutionarily, we want to continue our existence, we should distinguish what we are from the external world and make sure that we're protecting ourselves and doing everything we can to promote the continued existence of that self as our brain is helping define it. So, you know,
00:31:44
Speaker
I guess it could be a negative thing losing all boundaries to the external world because it wouldn't promote a kind of selfish behavior, I guess, right? Well, yeah, I think there's a lot to unpack there, what you just said. I think it's really a good point. I mean, there's the different levels. First point is like where I was coming at this from was
00:32:05
Speaker
I think the additional point is that people then find that that experience of the unit of experience is beneficial for them psychologically. Meaningful and beneficial. This is often reported so that people subsequently feel like less depressed, for example, less anxious, but are able to integrate certain traumatic experiences.
00:32:29
Speaker
Well, there is something to the idea that the ego, and I think you can connect the idea of ego theory with a Freudian idea of this too, there is something to the idea that the ego can get in our way. Oh, yeah, 100%. 100%. I mean, it's this whole thing of, I mean, not to get too far down into like the Buddhist thing, but, you know, the sense that, you know, of attachment, right? So the idea that suffering,
00:32:58
Speaker
is part of the experience of being like an individual self or having the illusion of being an individual self. So it's tied up in that, right? Which is I want something and that wanting something
00:33:15
Speaker
uh, is a craving, you know, this is an attachment to a thing or, or, you know, that I want, let's say I want, uh, I, this is one that I've been thinking about this week was I would really love to have a lake house. So house on a lake in Maine, you know, wonderful. Um, and you know, so I was at a house on a lake in Maine.
00:33:35
Speaker
this week enjoying it. But I was not fully enjoying it because I was wishing that I owned it. So I was there actually experiencing the enjoying it as much as you possibly could be enjoying it yet your ego is still getting in the way because you totally it's like I there's no sense in which I could have been more there than I was actually there physically but I wasn't entirely 100% there because I was thinking about oh I don't own this I have a sense of a sense of loss or the fact that I have to leave
00:34:05
Speaker
And then I can't come back to that exact spot whenever I want, because I don't own it. So that's kind of just an example of the ego attaching itself in a totally unhelpful way.
00:34:15
Speaker
There's no sense in which that helps me in any way. But those kinds of little attachments, and you can play this game out in a million different ways, but those little sense of attachments to I want, I need, I am, I do, blah, blah, blah, to the extent that they're not just you taking an action in the world and not helpful in any way, but they actually cause pain and anxiety and stress and suffering and all that.
00:34:44
Speaker
Yeah. Yeah. So in some sense, that sense of an attachment to myself as a continuous ongoing thing that is important, that matters. Well, let's talk about death. I mean, the fact that I'm scared of dying. Who is the eye that is dying, right? If that eye doesn't exist, then death is a very different thing.
00:35:09
Speaker
Yeah, I think this is one of the conclusions that Parfit takes out of it, too, is his overall viewpoint, and it takes a little bit to come to where he's thinking of this stuff, is that we shouldn't be concerned with our personal demise because, well, it's hard to say 100% why, because we're a bundle of experiences and there's no central eye that will be
Parfit's Teleportation Thought Experiment
00:35:36
Speaker
dying. In his view, we're changing from day to day so much that it's like a little bit of death. We're experiencing the death of small bundles of ourselves as we stop doing certain sorts of things and change over time.
00:35:51
Speaker
The 12-year-old Roth is gone. It's not coming back. There's no way to get back to that 12-year-old Roth that's gone. It's dead in that sense. This gets us into the tele-transportation thing, which I think should definitely hit because I love this. I believe we've talked about this a little bit before. We have, but we've made some progress. I think it's worth revisiting it because I think we've got a little bit more to say about it now.
00:36:17
Speaker
Yeah, so this is Parfit's thought experiment that he's famous for, and it comes in a couple different versions. But the basic idea, and you can see this applied all different ways to different kinds of science fiction, the basic idea is imagine that you are being tele-transported. You go through a transporter.
00:36:36
Speaker
the pattern of your body is copied and then duplicated in another place, say Mars, right, sent off somewhere and duplicated in another place and your original body is destroyed. Yeah, so critically in this in this thought experiment, I don't know how it works in star and Star Trek. But like in this particular version, all the cells and all the patterns and states are replicated. But they're not there. The originals are all destroyed.
00:37:05
Speaker
And the originals are all destroyed. There's all different versions of this, but I mean, this is exactly the same thing as being uploaded to a computer, right? The idea is that your pattern of- No, it's not exactly the same, because in this case, there is a body that is created. It's not exactly the same. Well, because in a sense, it gets into the whole body recognition thing. Right, right. So I think having a body there
00:37:34
Speaker
that is exactly like your body, I think is kind of important in a way. I will say that if you go back, you actually see some of these kinds of things as early as John Locke even talks about some of this stuff. It's kind of just like a Freaky Friday thing, right? What happens if the soul of one person enters into another person? Whose identity is it? He uses an example of the prince and the cobbler.
00:38:02
Speaker
A prince enters in somehow into the cobbler's consciousness. What is that body? Is it the prince or is it the cobbler? So he has that identity question. But OK, so for the tele-transporter argument, you're destroyed and replicated somewhere else. In Star Trek, this is no problem, right? Because the narrative tells us
00:38:25
Speaker
you are disappearing here and you are reappearing somewhere else. Well, what if it's actually the fact that you are being destroyed here and a copy of you is being recreated somewhere else? That's not physically, spatiotemporally contiguous with you. Are you satisfied that
00:38:45
Speaker
Is this a problem for you? Personally, you're dead, but there's a copy that has every ask. It'll continue everything. It'll act as though it's you. It'll respond in the same way. Parfit says, no, it doesn't matter because it's psychologically continuous with us.
00:39:05
Speaker
Yeah, it's just a bundle of experiences. It's just a bundle of experiences and all of those things, even though they're not. It's not even, that's not a problem. It's just not even a question. It's just, you know, it's another bundle that's somewhere else. And to the outside world, nothing would have changed. It would be the same as if you had been transported to that place. So being destroyed and being replicated exactly would be the same as being destroyed.
00:39:30
Speaker
And in Parfitt's view, in the ego theory, you should be really concerned because your continuous narrative self has been, you know, that ego has been destroyed. The physical sense of that has been destroyed. And then a new one has been created, the replica has been created. He goes through an interesting exercise in this particular version of the discussion, which is that
00:39:52
Speaker
uh, that I think helps elucidate this. Cause I think the way it was described there, it's a little hard to grapple. I think it's easy for everyone to sort of say, Oh, it's actually probably pretty fine. I feel pretty okay with that. But I think it's interesting to think about what percentage of the parts of the body need to be replicated. I mean, it need to be like preserved in the new version to feel like it's actually the same person.
00:40:22
Speaker
So like if you do that, and it seems as though it matters to people whether you do this slowly or quickly. So if you were to say replace one neuron of the brain at a time with, you know, an electronic component or something like this so that in, you know, in five years, eventually you would be entirely made out of silicon. Are you the same self?
00:40:41
Speaker
You're acting the same. Nobody notices the difference and it's been gradual enough Versus if it happens instantly all at once where there's a complete destruction and then recreation Does that matter and that seems to matter to some people? Does the percentage matter maybe at you know?
00:41:00
Speaker
Yeah. One percent of your body was, was like replaced cyborg. Yeah. Yeah, exactly. You know, most people will say that's totally fine. Yeah. Uh, is it, is it like 50.1% is the same person, you know, at what point? And then you would start to get into the physics of it. You realize that actually a lot of your, like the molecules in your body are being swapped out. You know, the organelles are being, you know, updated, reproduced, recreated.
00:41:27
Speaker
Cells are dying and being produced. So there's a sense in which that's happening all the time anyway. Is that important for the continuity of yourself?
00:41:36
Speaker
So I think in this case of, for me, I feel totally cool about being transported and recreated. Unbelievable. Unbelievable. I don't know how you could say that. See, Rob doesn't feel okay. I feel strongly about this. And maybe that means I'm an ego theorist. Maybe that means that I have to commit myself, but I just have this strong reaction that it would be the death of me and that's what I care about.
00:42:05
Speaker
When I was thinking about this for this episode, what struck me as the hard thing to think about is the sense of, because the question is, am I dying?
00:42:20
Speaker
And what does that mean? So like, I'm I think part of it is that I'm yeah, we get in there's a whole nother podcast about why I'm less interested in that now. But like, in terms of like, it's less concerning than it might have been. And it doesn't relate to this bundle theory. But I think that in terms of just how to think about it, it's hard for me to imagine
00:42:43
Speaker
how you would know. So in other words, if I'm, so I'm here now, I'm having this thought, I have all these memories, right? And then there's a discontinuity. I'm projected to another place.
00:42:59
Speaker
The, the, the, the entity that was called the replica for now, the replica in the new place, let's call it, you know, just for the sake of, you know, make it less crazy, like Nebraska. Um, this, the, the replica in Nebraska has all the same memories, has all the same thoughts, proclivities, you know, tendencies has all the same friendships, community, all that stuff. So for me, it's like, how would you, how would,
00:43:29
Speaker
that replica know some sense that it's not me. It couldn't. It wouldn't. It would think that was you. To me, it's kind of trivially fine in that way. What I got into thinking about a little bit more was two things. One is the sense that how do I know that the past me was really me?
00:43:56
Speaker
Okay, so how do you know that you're not being deceived? You're not a brain in a vat kind of thing? Yeah, but I mean this more trivially like in the sense of this bundle theory versus ego theories Like how is there a sense in which that I am the same person that I was?
00:44:08
Speaker
a minute ago, a year ago, 10 years ago. That's a real sense in which it is not the same person. That's one of the scary things I think about thinking about the tele transporter argument is that you may think, well, okay, is there really a big difference between tele transportation and just going to sleep and waking up the next morning, or being unconscious for some amount of time? Or as we're saying, like all of our atoms in our body being replaced over time, you know? Yeah.
00:44:38
Speaker
Yeah. So, I mean, I think that's, that's kind of, that's where it gets interesting. And there's obviously there's no answer, right? There's no, there's no, there's no right answer here, but I think that's where it starts to get, there's like some interest. If you just kind of really work on that thought of like, or how to, what would that be like to be that replica? And then what happens to this? If this body, if this version of me dies, what does that like?
00:45:00
Speaker
See, I say that's not like anything because that's your physical death. And then there's no, there's nothing that's like, well, that's, that's part of the difference maybe. But the, the, I mean, the other thing that in terms of the unit of sense, right, the sense of like being, you know, so there's the bundle theory, which is just that like, there's lots of different pieces of the consciousness and the conscious experience. There's no single subjective experience or ever that's an ego, but there's also the sense of just the unit of component, which is like, actually, consciousness is actually just,
00:45:28
Speaker
one thread, one resonance of this greater thing that exists in the universe, this greater, what's called consciousness for whatever, it's not the right word, but you know, there's no word for it, right? This greater, unitive existence.
00:45:48
Speaker
And in that sense, your role in that greater unit of existence, if you're replicated perfectly and you have all the same friendships, loves, you know, history, all that is totally preserved. That's why I think the physical body being replicated is important because like, if it's just a brain of that, I feel like it's different. That's very different because you don't, you're not able to, you don't have the same affordances. Yeah.
00:46:15
Speaker
That's why the replica thing just doesn't bother me. It's because the role in the universe is the same. It hasn't changed. Now, the second problem, okay, now let's say you don't destroy the replica. You keep the replica. That's what Perfect calls the branch line case. We've got two of you existing at the same time. How does that feel? Which one is you? How does that feel to you? Does that feel okay? Exactly. The first question is like, which of those is you?
00:46:43
Speaker
Is the replica less U than the original U or the equally U, but just different? That's where just our concepts begin to break
AI, Self, and Consciousness
00:46:53
Speaker
down. I think this also prefigures a lot of ideas within artificial intelligence too, because an artificial intelligence can be replicated easily. I mean, if there ever is artificial intelligence that
00:47:11
Speaker
may have something approaching consciousness or a sense of self, it's going to be a very different kind of self than we have because it exists differently over time. Large language models right now don't really, they're not really active in the same way our brains are active all the time. So it's very different sense of self. But the idea that a self could be replicated infinitely
00:47:39
Speaker
know, in artificial intelligence, that's possible. It's already possible to replicate something, whether it has consciousness, we don't know. So that's going to come quicker than a tele transporter that can do any of these kinds of things like Parfait is talking about. And I think that's where these questions are going to be sort of relevant to.
00:48:00
Speaker
Yeah, no, absolutely. Absolutely. Yeah. Yeah. So then I think that's, that's, that's, that's a topic for another conversation because that really gets into the thing of other selves. Cause here we've been, we've been problematizing our own self, our own ego or lack thereof. Uh, and then this gets into the question of if there, this whole idea that we have this feeling, this felt sense that if, if, if another being is conscious or has,
00:48:29
Speaker
and ego or a self that their existence is somehow more worthy or worthwhile than otherwise. More important in some way, which is I think it's a separate but related concept. You have any other thoughts about this before we wrap things up, Joe? No, I mean, I just think that it's really helpful
00:48:57
Speaker
as we think about our concerns and our worries and our hopes and our dreams to have a framework for thinking about who or what is worrying or thinking or hoping and that that exploration of that can be very helpful in reducing some of those, especially negative aspects in terms of worries and fears and things like that.
00:49:26
Speaker
I often come back to like whether a theory is useful. And I think that that's where like the bundle approach to me is somewhat more useful in the sense that like not being attached, that there's some importance to my ongoing egoic experience as a continuous, uh, line, uh, that has like,
00:49:49
Speaker
like a victory state, like a goal state, releasing that letting go of that sense of ego, I find to be extremely helpful.
00:49:58
Speaker
I find that philosophically I can buy into bundle theory and certainly through the neuroscience it all makes a lot of sense, but I think there is definitely some feature of my brain that's encouraging me to believe that I have an ego, that there is something there and that I need to protect at all times.
00:50:23
Speaker
I think, in a sense, I can see the correctness of both viewpoints in a way that, of course, there's not going to be any such thing as an indivisible self. The self has to be composed of something, at least as far as we're thinking about it as made of physical material and not something immaterial.
00:50:47
Speaker
from a naturalistic point of view, you almost have to buy bundle theory. But on the other hand, you can also, I mean, this is the Gestalt psychologist in me, you can also see that you could
00:51:02
Speaker
That it's just saying that things are composed of smaller things doesn't invalidate some of the larger truths, right? That there's no reason we can't talk about sort of a virtual self or a virtual ego. That there's something that emerges from this bundle. I mean, we talk about consciousness emerging from the brain.
00:51:24
Speaker
And we can think about the self as emerging from the brain, as there's something different about all of the parts when they're put together a certain way. I don't think I'm going to weigh down on one side or the other as being absolutely correct. But it is an interesting way to talk about it. And I think it's eliminating to think about it in these terms. And it probably calls into question some of the ideas that we hold in everyday life.
00:51:52
Speaker
Yeah, no, absolutely. Well, I have a million more thoughts on this, but yeah, this is one of those things that you just starts in one place and you can take it in any direction. So I'm sure we'll come back to it at some, I'm sure we'll come back to it another time too. Yeah. And it would be good to, it would be good to, you know, bring on some experts in different aspects of this and to lead us in different directions.
00:52:11
Speaker
But yeah, let's leave it there for now. Thank you. Thanks, everyone, for for listening again. And I guess we should do the how to get in touch with this thing. So we have Twitter X X X. So, you know, my Twitter handle is JL Hardy at JL Hardy PhD.
00:52:39
Speaker
We also have at nation cog. You can also just type in cognition. I think it finds us and, um, cognition podcast at gmail.com. Feel free to just send us an email if you got any suggestions or ideas for the show.
00:52:54
Speaker
Yeah, we've got, we've gotten some great input there from people suggesting people they'd like to have on the show and it's been super helpful. So if you want to be on the show or you know, someone who you think would be great to have on the show, please reach out. If you have topics you'd like us to discuss, do that as well. So thanks a lot. All right. Thank you.