Mike, I really enjoyed the vast sweep and playful spirit of the piece. I agree with its spirit. But I kept getting snagged on one point that made it hard for me to fully go along for the ride.
You invoke the word “reincarnation,” which for many carries deep ontological weight — the idea that something permanent in them continues. But your argument seems to point to something else: the recurrence of the same pattern, not the persistence of the same subjective locus of experience.
The theory of identity undergirding the argument seems to blur these two interpretations — continuity of the actual self vs. creation of a similar but separate experience.
Both views are philosophically loaded, and I wonder if you think it’s worth addressing that gap more explicitly. I’ve seen it arise in debates about mind uploading and life extension too, and it always seems to quietly haunt the discussion.
I'm not saying there is a recurring pattern. I'm saying *you* literally live again. That is what the argument shows. Btw, other incarnations of you need not be very qualitatively similar to you; the argument does not show that. It only shows that, one way or another, you can live again.
Right, and the thing hinges on the definition of “you.” In this case a reductionist near-identical version. All plausible. The question is whether and in what way this matters.
The “you” that matters to me is the one typing this, and there’s a sense of a lighted cave of phenomena and continuity, a story told in real time in one instantiation, a space-time specific electro-magnetic field clinging to an evolving but local neuronal substrate, like specific water clinging to a river bed. If you were to kill me while making an exact clone three feet over, knowing that clone was coming wouldn’t “matter” to me. It’s the old Star Trek transporter problem.
Even if all the atoms and molecules were the same type and relation to each other it still wouldn’t matter to me. It would provide zero solace in the way the folk understanding of “reincarnation” does. Showing your version of reincarnation is possible, or as you beautifully point out, “inevitable,” somewhere else in the infinite universe, or in a lab in 2035, provides the same solace, zero.
I currently don’t call that reincarnation for reasons that need unpacking. (Switching our intuition of this may be a critical project.) I call that cloning a different guy who is similar to me minus the ways that matter when talking about “reincarnation.”
It seems like you are using a version of the word that doesn’t denote what I’ve always intuitively felt it does (which is totally fair game, btw): The experience, the qualia of knowing my instance of EMF and neuronal storyline is unbroken is the part that matters. Air gapping another version somewhere in space-time lacks narrative allure for a lot of us. It’s like the lab technician talking us into taking the bullet, saying “you” will appear right over there, three feet away. But that’s not you, and the lab technician is doing a sleight of hand there. I write about the sufficient conditions for a subjectively meaningful version of continued life at https://open.substack.com/pub/galan/p/mind-transfer-without-death?r=1xoiww&utm_medium=ios.
One way or another the universe has to use the SAME electromagnetic field, not a copy of it, for it to be what we intuit to be “true” reincarnation, and all the loaded stuff that word evokes. I assume I’m not alone here, but that most just won’t bother expressing this. I’m open to changing my intuition of what matters.
Your deduction on being alive now as proof that your version of reincarnation is real, very cool — it’s an elegant thought worth sharing, and it’s yours. Please don’t mistake this for minimizing the beauty of your observation. Just trying to audit how much it “matters.” I hope this shows that I love engaging with your work.
"But there could not be a time when time did not exist." I've said something very similar during many a late night argument, usually related to someone asking if I believe there was a beginning to space and time. I think I put it as "Time has always existed. There's never been a time when time did not exist."
"Everyone seems to agree" in not much of an argument. Please spend more time talking to physicists.
[Not saying your conclusion is mistaken, but this is not a strong argument]
BTW, if you really want to get into this, I highly recommend Max Tegmark's "Our Mathematical Universe". A very accessibly written summary of what we think we know about cosmology (and ultimately Tegmark agrees with you, even your general line of argument.).
I don’t see why infinite time means reincarnation; it appears that it only requires incarnations of qualitatively identical “selves” but not numerically identical ones. Wouldn't this be enough reason to think that I would be here and now? Someone would be. At another time it is a different qualitatively identical self. And so on.
Your evidence is not that someone is here now. Your evidence is that *you* are here now. The probability of this, given non-reincarnation, would be zero.
Typical ideas about reincarnation frame it as person x comes back as person y later in time, or as a member of a different species, or as a supernatural being. This is more like a hologram, or something, where there are multiple identical copies of a person that are separate in time and space.
The idea works well with a conventional physicalist conception of the self, but there are objections to that too. How strong does the concept of self have to be for this to work? If I am not really the same self from one minute to the next, what is being copied? A (somewhat) continuous consciousness, I suppose.
There will be infinite copies of someone having the exact experiences I have had and will have had. But there will also be infinite imperfect copies, where perhaps they started out the same but then diverged, or where the divergence occurred before I was born. How similar should they be for me to think of them as me? Doesn’t this all collapse into an absurdity?
Do infinity and logic really work together? Logic is isomorphic with a crippled version of two-dimensional geometry that has no concept of infinity. It has “everything there is” but makes no judgement about whether that is infinite or not.
And if it were all true, of what significance would it be to any of my selves?
There's no way of knowing, from this argument, how similar other bodies have to be to be incarnations of you. There's no way to know whether they can be members of, e.g., non-intelligent species.
Logic can't really fail to "work" with anything. If logic doesn't work with a theory, that really just means that the theory makes no sense. (Literally, that's all that means.) For solutions to the paradoxes of infinity, see my book, _Approaching Infinity_. However, there aren't any paradoxes involved in the present argument.
“There's no way of knowing, from this argument, how similar other bodies have to be to be incarnations of you.”
So it is a separate question, but whatever answer comes up, there are infinite copies of you and even more near-copies that aren’t quite you but really close. Even if the me that existed five minutes ago is not me any longer, there are infinite copies of the me right now.
And how is this relevant to anything?
“If logic doesn't work with a theory, that really just means that the theory makes no sense. “
Yes, or rather, it may seem to make sense but is actually incoherent. It violates a presupposition of logic.
Typically when that happens, we go with logic and abandon the theory or concept that violated it. Or, as in the case of set theory, people try to refine the definitions to eliminate the contradiction. It is hard to imagine a circumstance where the concept is so fundamental or obvious that it would outrank logic, although there are persons who think that is what has happened with the mathematical treatment of infinity. I am not well-grounded enough to prove that they are making a mistake. I suppose the burden of proof is on them.
“classical logic was abstracted from the mathematics of finite sets and their subsets …. Forgetful of this limited origin, one afterwards mistook that logic for something above and prior to all mathematics, and finally applied it, without justification, to the mathematics of infinite sets. This is the Fall and original sin of [Cantor's] set theory.”
Mike, I really enjoyed the vast sweep and playful spirit of the piece. I agree with its spirit. But I kept getting snagged on one point that made it hard for me to fully go along for the ride.
You invoke the word “reincarnation,” which for many carries deep ontological weight — the idea that something permanent in them continues. But your argument seems to point to something else: the recurrence of the same pattern, not the persistence of the same subjective locus of experience.
The theory of identity undergirding the argument seems to blur these two interpretations — continuity of the actual self vs. creation of a similar but separate experience.
Both views are philosophically loaded, and I wonder if you think it’s worth addressing that gap more explicitly. I’ve seen it arise in debates about mind uploading and life extension too, and it always seems to quietly haunt the discussion.
I'm not saying there is a recurring pattern. I'm saying *you* literally live again. That is what the argument shows. Btw, other incarnations of you need not be very qualitatively similar to you; the argument does not show that. It only shows that, one way or another, you can live again.
Right, and the thing hinges on the definition of “you.” In this case a reductionist near-identical version. All plausible. The question is whether and in what way this matters.
The “you” that matters to me is the one typing this, and there’s a sense of a lighted cave of phenomena and continuity, a story told in real time in one instantiation, a space-time specific electro-magnetic field clinging to an evolving but local neuronal substrate, like specific water clinging to a river bed. If you were to kill me while making an exact clone three feet over, knowing that clone was coming wouldn’t “matter” to me. It’s the old Star Trek transporter problem.
Even if all the atoms and molecules were the same type and relation to each other it still wouldn’t matter to me. It would provide zero solace in the way the folk understanding of “reincarnation” does. Showing your version of reincarnation is possible, or as you beautifully point out, “inevitable,” somewhere else in the infinite universe, or in a lab in 2035, provides the same solace, zero.
I currently don’t call that reincarnation for reasons that need unpacking. (Switching our intuition of this may be a critical project.) I call that cloning a different guy who is similar to me minus the ways that matter when talking about “reincarnation.”
It seems like you are using a version of the word that doesn’t denote what I’ve always intuitively felt it does (which is totally fair game, btw): The experience, the qualia of knowing my instance of EMF and neuronal storyline is unbroken is the part that matters. Air gapping another version somewhere in space-time lacks narrative allure for a lot of us. It’s like the lab technician talking us into taking the bullet, saying “you” will appear right over there, three feet away. But that’s not you, and the lab technician is doing a sleight of hand there. I write about the sufficient conditions for a subjectively meaningful version of continued life at https://open.substack.com/pub/galan/p/mind-transfer-without-death?r=1xoiww&utm_medium=ios.
One way or another the universe has to use the SAME electromagnetic field, not a copy of it, for it to be what we intuit to be “true” reincarnation, and all the loaded stuff that word evokes. I assume I’m not alone here, but that most just won’t bother expressing this. I’m open to changing my intuition of what matters.
Your deduction on being alive now as proof that your version of reincarnation is real, very cool — it’s an elegant thought worth sharing, and it’s yours. Please don’t mistake this for minimizing the beauty of your observation. Just trying to audit how much it “matters.” I hope this shows that I love engaging with your work.
"But there could not be a time when time did not exist." I've said something very similar during many a late night argument, usually related to someone asking if I believe there was a beginning to space and time. I think I put it as "Time has always existed. There's never been a time when time did not exist."
"Everyone seems to agree" in not much of an argument. Please spend more time talking to physicists.
[Not saying your conclusion is mistaken, but this is not a strong argument]
BTW, if you really want to get into this, I highly recommend Max Tegmark's "Our Mathematical Universe". A very accessibly written summary of what we think we know about cosmology (and ultimately Tegmark agrees with you, even your general line of argument.).
I don’t see why infinite time means reincarnation; it appears that it only requires incarnations of qualitatively identical “selves” but not numerically identical ones. Wouldn't this be enough reason to think that I would be here and now? Someone would be. At another time it is a different qualitatively identical self. And so on.
Your evidence is not that someone is here now. Your evidence is that *you* are here now. The probability of this, given non-reincarnation, would be zero.
But is that reincarnation?
Typical ideas about reincarnation frame it as person x comes back as person y later in time, or as a member of a different species, or as a supernatural being. This is more like a hologram, or something, where there are multiple identical copies of a person that are separate in time and space.
The idea works well with a conventional physicalist conception of the self, but there are objections to that too. How strong does the concept of self have to be for this to work? If I am not really the same self from one minute to the next, what is being copied? A (somewhat) continuous consciousness, I suppose.
There will be infinite copies of someone having the exact experiences I have had and will have had. But there will also be infinite imperfect copies, where perhaps they started out the same but then diverged, or where the divergence occurred before I was born. How similar should they be for me to think of them as me? Doesn’t this all collapse into an absurdity?
Do infinity and logic really work together? Logic is isomorphic with a crippled version of two-dimensional geometry that has no concept of infinity. It has “everything there is” but makes no judgement about whether that is infinite or not.
And if it were all true, of what significance would it be to any of my selves?
There's no way of knowing, from this argument, how similar other bodies have to be to be incarnations of you. There's no way to know whether they can be members of, e.g., non-intelligent species.
Logic can't really fail to "work" with anything. If logic doesn't work with a theory, that really just means that the theory makes no sense. (Literally, that's all that means.) For solutions to the paradoxes of infinity, see my book, _Approaching Infinity_. However, there aren't any paradoxes involved in the present argument.
“There's no way of knowing, from this argument, how similar other bodies have to be to be incarnations of you.”
So it is a separate question, but whatever answer comes up, there are infinite copies of you and even more near-copies that aren’t quite you but really close. Even if the me that existed five minutes ago is not me any longer, there are infinite copies of the me right now.
And how is this relevant to anything?
“If logic doesn't work with a theory, that really just means that the theory makes no sense. “
Yes, or rather, it may seem to make sense but is actually incoherent. It violates a presupposition of logic.
Typically when that happens, we go with logic and abandon the theory or concept that violated it. Or, as in the case of set theory, people try to refine the definitions to eliminate the contradiction. It is hard to imagine a circumstance where the concept is so fundamental or obvious that it would outrank logic, although there are persons who think that is what has happened with the mathematical treatment of infinity. I am not well-grounded enough to prove that they are making a mistake. I suppose the burden of proof is on them.
Wikipedia quotes Hermann Weyl:
“classical logic was abstracted from the mathematics of finite sets and their subsets …. Forgetful of this limited origin, one afterwards mistook that logic for something above and prior to all mathematics, and finally applied it, without justification, to the mathematics of infinite sets. This is the Fall and original sin of [Cantor's] set theory.”