Closed individualism is kind of weird because it posits a sort of thread of continuity that follows you around, and it's unclear how such a thing arises or why it exists. It makes sense that we have an *expectation* of continuity: it's evolutionarily advantageous, and most people care about their future self to approximately the degree they care about their current self, so you might as well treat them as the same entity. But that expectation doesn't necessarily correspond to some sort of actual thing linking two moments-of-experience together, and it's unclear how you would prove it does exist, since as you say it's not really a question of empirical fact. Imo empty individualism + evolutionary expectations and values is the simplest explanation.
Is closed individualism what normal people *consider* sane? Yes, of course it is, but it's full of all sorts of complicated questions it's not clear how to answer. Furthermore, the average person is *not* sane, and is afflicted with many different delusions common in our population. We even have reason to believe in their bias, since we can deduce that they would have an expectation of continuity from evolutionary instincts alone, which doesn't necessarily correspond to a real thing, and thus discount their opinion.
There are many dimensions of sanity and there are tragically very few people whom I trust to be high on all of them, rats are less delusional but unfortunately they are often also less psychologically stable and more isolated from broader society. TBH I should probably stop telling people to "just be normal" since I definitely don't want them to be more like the average person and in fact I am often criticizing them becoming more crazy in the direction of the average person (coming up with clever justifications to believe in astrology or other supernatural beliefs, for example)
I think it makes sense to posit a slightly nebulous metaphysical object if it's sanity promoting, so long as you don't reify it so hard that you start believing in anthropic immortality or something.
Or maybe anthropic immortality is right and you should believe in it, I guess.
IDK to me it kind of feels like a "If a tree falls in a forest does it make a sound" question which everyone realizes is stupid or "does free will exist in a deterministic universe" question which less people realize is stupid
> You don’t stop being you just because you had a quarter-life crisis or experienced “ego death” on a psychedelic or something.
You can definitely up the rate of update on psychedelics and iterate your ego over a short timespan that there appear important almost-discontinues. And then you either question the whole "closed individualism" default or come to terms that you really are a different person now.
What are your own experiences with psychedelics like?
I don't know if I buy it! I mean, maybe a lot of people are inclined to end up feeling that way, but I'm pretty sure I'd be like "well I experienced a huge jump in my personality but I'm still, like, me, it's not like my personality hasn't changed dramatically before!"
I had a lot of psychedelics in like, summer of 2024 or so, and it was fun but mostly impacted my life by partially contributing to me going a little crazy for a while. I'd be interested in trying them again sometime but I'm not in a massive hurry to!
Well, if you remain you under all possible transformations of your mind... that's already halfway to open individualism. Open individualism is just taking the next step: maybe this continuity is not just in time but also in space, all possible configurations of conscious matter = you, it's not like atoms keep track of where they came from.
What's your best argument for continuity in time but not in space?
> I'm pretty sure I'd be like "well I experienced a huge jump in my personality but I'm still, like, me, it's not like my personality hasn't changed dramatically before!"
Normal waking conscious usually doesn't produce changes at a similar rate. Once almost-discontinuities hit, you are forced to contemplate the whole ontology you use to write things like "I" "experienced" "changes" of "my" "personality".
PS: totally reasonable to not want to use psychedelics, doubly so given you are not guaranteed to have ontology-breaking trips with them.
My ontology has definitely gotten a little broken before!
I think like, it's not literally "all possible transformations of my mind." I expect there is a big gap between, like, actually replacing my brain with that of a different person, and the consequences of any sort of meditative attainment or other ontology-shattering experience.
So when is the breaking point for all these transformations? Why do some yield 'new you' and others yield 'someone else'?
If someone's started rewiring your brain to become a brain of a different person, when do you think your consciousness would turn off and another person's consciousness would light up?
One specific distinction I might point at between "the difference between me before and after meditative attainment" and "the difference between me and some other human" is like... memories and maybe skills? I think there's probably some other things that stick around but I feel like memories and (some subset of) skills are a clear example.
If we want to talk about gradually brain rewiring, gee I don't think I have any very good answers here. I definitely don't believe in any sort of magic "your consciousness turns off and someone else's turns on" moment. I don't expect I'd strongly disagree with your guesses about, how to put this... what sensations occur? I don't know if I think the idea of a self or an individual would necessarily be a very useful thing to include in an ontology you're using to describe the process of rewiring a brain to resemble that of a different person.
eh I think there will turn out to be a fact of the matter about if there's, for lack of a better term, temporal linkiness between one phenomenal experience and another. when I say "open individualism is true" I mean that I'm putting my chips on "it will turn out that there is no temporal linkiness if/when we have an actual science of qualia"
that doesn't imply you aren't allowed to *care* about things closed individualist-ly though. there's nothing wrong with caring about categories that don't cut reality at the joints.
that is my 101 guide to sanity under skepticism for people like me. if something is weird, you never have to care. if morality isn't real, you can be kind anyways if you want. if there is no linkiness between the experiences your brain-meat generates now and the experiences it generates later, you can just care about those future experiences anyways. you don't have to believe in moral facts or linkiness to do that, you can just be normal without a based vulgar physicalist reason. if this approach doesn't work to preserve sanity for the average person idk maybe they should believe false things but like, c'mon just be chill. have non-distressing ontological qualia regardless of your propositional qualia wrt questions of ontology.
also it is unsurprising that radicalism and !woo often coincide. the average person is deeply superstitious.
Closed individualism is kind of weird because it posits a sort of thread of continuity that follows you around, and it's unclear how such a thing arises or why it exists. It makes sense that we have an *expectation* of continuity: it's evolutionarily advantageous, and most people care about their future self to approximately the degree they care about their current self, so you might as well treat them as the same entity. But that expectation doesn't necessarily correspond to some sort of actual thing linking two moments-of-experience together, and it's unclear how you would prove it does exist, since as you say it's not really a question of empirical fact. Imo empty individualism + evolutionary expectations and values is the simplest explanation.
Is closed individualism what normal people *consider* sane? Yes, of course it is, but it's full of all sorts of complicated questions it's not clear how to answer. Furthermore, the average person is *not* sane, and is afflicted with many different delusions common in our population. We even have reason to believe in their bias, since we can deduce that they would have an expectation of continuity from evolutionary instincts alone, which doesn't necessarily correspond to a real thing, and thus discount their opinion.
I read an interesting LessWrong comment by Anna Salamon about sanity, recently. https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/n299hFwqBxqwJfZyN/adele-lopez-s-shortform?commentId=YBFmQMmmYHiQcQKmx
There are many dimensions of sanity and there are tragically very few people whom I trust to be high on all of them, rats are less delusional but unfortunately they are often also less psychologically stable and more isolated from broader society. TBH I should probably stop telling people to "just be normal" since I definitely don't want them to be more like the average person and in fact I am often criticizing them becoming more crazy in the direction of the average person (coming up with clever justifications to believe in astrology or other supernatural beliefs, for example)
I think it makes sense to posit a slightly nebulous metaphysical object if it's sanity promoting, so long as you don't reify it so hard that you start believing in anthropic immortality or something.
Or maybe anthropic immortality is right and you should believe in it, I guess.
IDK to me it kind of feels like a "If a tree falls in a forest does it make a sound" question which everyone realizes is stupid or "does free will exist in a deterministic universe" question which less people realize is stupid
i think it's reasonable to pick the most sanity promoting answer to dumb questions
Um, "TRUE". I'll go "true". Huh. That was easy.
what are rats, like the animal or?
short for "rationalists" :p
imo moments of experience are linked by causation
> You don’t stop being you just because you had a quarter-life crisis or experienced “ego death” on a psychedelic or something.
You can definitely up the rate of update on psychedelics and iterate your ego over a short timespan that there appear important almost-discontinues. And then you either question the whole "closed individualism" default or come to terms that you really are a different person now.
What are your own experiences with psychedelics like?
I don't know if I buy it! I mean, maybe a lot of people are inclined to end up feeling that way, but I'm pretty sure I'd be like "well I experienced a huge jump in my personality but I'm still, like, me, it's not like my personality hasn't changed dramatically before!"
I had a lot of psychedelics in like, summer of 2024 or so, and it was fun but mostly impacted my life by partially contributing to me going a little crazy for a while. I'd be interested in trying them again sometime but I'm not in a massive hurry to!
Well, if you remain you under all possible transformations of your mind... that's already halfway to open individualism. Open individualism is just taking the next step: maybe this continuity is not just in time but also in space, all possible configurations of conscious matter = you, it's not like atoms keep track of where they came from.
What's your best argument for continuity in time but not in space?
> I'm pretty sure I'd be like "well I experienced a huge jump in my personality but I'm still, like, me, it's not like my personality hasn't changed dramatically before!"
Normal waking conscious usually doesn't produce changes at a similar rate. Once almost-discontinuities hit, you are forced to contemplate the whole ontology you use to write things like "I" "experienced" "changes" of "my" "personality".
PS: totally reasonable to not want to use psychedelics, doubly so given you are not guaranteed to have ontology-breaking trips with them.
My ontology has definitely gotten a little broken before!
I think like, it's not literally "all possible transformations of my mind." I expect there is a big gap between, like, actually replacing my brain with that of a different person, and the consequences of any sort of meditative attainment or other ontology-shattering experience.
So when is the breaking point for all these transformations? Why do some yield 'new you' and others yield 'someone else'?
If someone's started rewiring your brain to become a brain of a different person, when do you think your consciousness would turn off and another person's consciousness would light up?
One specific distinction I might point at between "the difference between me before and after meditative attainment" and "the difference between me and some other human" is like... memories and maybe skills? I think there's probably some other things that stick around but I feel like memories and (some subset of) skills are a clear example.
If we want to talk about gradually brain rewiring, gee I don't think I have any very good answers here. I definitely don't believe in any sort of magic "your consciousness turns off and someone else's turns on" moment. I don't expect I'd strongly disagree with your guesses about, how to put this... what sensations occur? I don't know if I think the idea of a self or an individual would necessarily be a very useful thing to include in an ontology you're using to describe the process of rewiring a brain to resemble that of a different person.
eh I think there will turn out to be a fact of the matter about if there's, for lack of a better term, temporal linkiness between one phenomenal experience and another. when I say "open individualism is true" I mean that I'm putting my chips on "it will turn out that there is no temporal linkiness if/when we have an actual science of qualia"
that doesn't imply you aren't allowed to *care* about things closed individualist-ly though. there's nothing wrong with caring about categories that don't cut reality at the joints.
that is my 101 guide to sanity under skepticism for people like me. if something is weird, you never have to care. if morality isn't real, you can be kind anyways if you want. if there is no linkiness between the experiences your brain-meat generates now and the experiences it generates later, you can just care about those future experiences anyways. you don't have to believe in moral facts or linkiness to do that, you can just be normal without a based vulgar physicalist reason. if this approach doesn't work to preserve sanity for the average person idk maybe they should believe false things but like, c'mon just be chill. have non-distressing ontological qualia regardless of your propositional qualia wrt questions of ontology.
also it is unsurprising that radicalism and !woo often coincide. the average person is deeply superstitious.
well i certainly agree no one needs any based vulgar physicalist reasons for anything