Never forget where you came from

Jared Moore and David Gottlieb

Parfit recap

Nutshell

We normally think it is rational to care more about our own future wellbeing than other people’s.
Implicitly, we normally think personal identity is what matters.
Cases like the Combined Spectrum and the Branch Line show that personal identity can’t be what rationalizes our special concern for our future selves.
- Combined Spectrum shows that there are cases where it is an empty question whether a future person will be me: they’re not me but they’re not not me.
- Branch Line shows that there are future persons (copies of me) who aren’t me but with regard to whom I have just as much reason for special concern.
Accordingly, personal identity is not what matters.

Nutshell

If anything justifies our special concern for our own future selves, it’s psychological continuity and connectedness (Relation R).
- The Moderate View says: our special concern is justified by Relation R.
- The Extreme View says: our special concern is not justified.
While personal identity is an absolute all-or-nothing relation, Relation R is a graded relation that can hold more or less.
- Our own future selves become less and less R-related to us over time.
- We are related to other future people in ways similar to Relation R – e.g. by connections of shared memory and feeling.
If anything justifies our special concern for our own future selves, it justifies a less-sharp distinction of concern between our future selves and other future people.
We should rationally care more about other people than we normally do.

Smaller nutshell

We naively think that the self is metaphysically deep.
But it’s not.
So “self-interest” doesn’t really make sense.

What about the biological self?

If the self is so unreal, how come trillions of organisms work with something like a “self” every day?

Parfit’s rejoinder:

Special concern for one’s own future would be selected by evolution. Animals without such concern would be more likely to die before passing on their genes. … [I]f some attitude has an evolutionary explanation, this fact is neutral. It neither supports nor undermines the claim that this attitude is justified. But there is one exception. This is the claim that, since we all have this attitude, this is a ground for thinking it justified. This claim is undermined by the evolutionary explanation. Since there is this explanation, we would all have this attitude even if it was not justified. (Parfit 1984, 308)

A reply to Parfit

Parfit shows that personal identity is not a deep metaphysical reality that is robust across science fictional thought experiments.
But what if it is (e.g.) a biological reality that is robust across realistic life events.
When we are thinking about what is rational, …
- Why isn’t a theory that tells us what to do across realistic life events good enough?
- Why do we need one that tells us what to do in science fictional thought experiments?
- Especially if those thought experiments might be impossible?

Conceivable Selves

AI Teletransporter

It’s your first day as a crewmember of the famous Federation starship USS Enterprise! Time to report for duty by beaming aboard! As a reminder, this is how the transporter works. At the beginning of your journey, a computer scans your physical structure molecule-by-molecule. This process destroys your body. Then, a digital copy of the scan is sent to your destination. At your destination, a computer builds a new body that’s an exact copy of your original body. Then you can report for your exciting new duty! You’ve never been transported before. It’s your turn. Ready to come aboard?

Now imagine that “you” is some AI system.
How do our anwers to the thought experiment change, if at all?

What’s the good of a self?

When you try to implement selves, you either find yourself already committed—or sometimes it’s just a reasonable next step—to building out some of the main features of personal identity over time. (Millgram 2025)

…

“Evolution, in animals, puts a premium on coherent action, and from a certain point onward, the way to act effectively as a self is to have a sense of oneself, as a unit of that kind. This sense of self is entirely tacit or implicit at first, but can become less tacit as the complexity of behavior continues to evolve.” (Godfrey-Smith 2020, pg. 259)

“The view I’m defending here does, in a way, agree that minds exist in patterns of activity, but those patterns are a lot less”portable” than people often suppose; they are tied to a particular kind of physical and biological basis.” (Godfrey-Smith 2020, pg. 270)

Real Teletransporters

The claim is that there is no teletransporter that can produce an exact replica.

Maybe: That there is a difference that matters between the teletransporter when applied to some digital system and when applied to a biological system. (Hence our intuition on the previous thought experiment.)

Further: Any conceivable transformation that results in a psychological connection (a qualitative one), one might argue, maintains a physical connection (a numerical one).

And so personal identity matters, at least in this biological world.

What counts as self organizing?

(As having a self)

(And does AI count?)

chemicals?

molecules?

RNA?

single-cells?

bio-film?

modular (bryzoan)?

unitary organisms / bodies (sponges)?

intercellular communication?

reafference?

What would a real teletransporter be?

In this way, we can take Godfrey Smith to argue that the only way to really do something like the teletransporter is to play with the degree of similarity between the systems we’re considering.

What are conceivable changes to the systems we’re considering?

Our challenge: what is a thought experiment similar to the teletransporter but that is biologically possible?

Does this thought experiment license the same kind of conclusions that Parfit would want it to?

Does this tell us anything about whether AI systems have selves?

A real (?) self-splitter

(mathematically) (self) organizing

Primordial Soup

Light blue: hidden; Pink: sensory; Red: active; Blue: internal

Privatization of sensation

Humphrey, 2006

“The ‘privatisation’ of sensation” (humphrey, 2022, pg. 112) Figure 11.8 in Blackmore, 2018

“Humphrey’s ideas moved on from his earlier work on ‘nature’s psychologists’ to provide a different take on how ‘the mind–brain identity equation for sensations could work’ (2006, p. 98). Having begun to sketch an action-based or enactive theory (Humphrey, 1992), he now tells a new just-so story (2006), starting with an amoeba-like creature that reacts to chemicals or vibrations around it by wriggling towards or away from them. At first, the responses are purely local, but soon they become linked into some kind of nervous system for more effective action. As sense organs evolve, the creatures react with more complex wriggles until the time comes when they need to make internal representations of their world. And here is Humphrey’s key point – they can do this by using their own reactions to the outside world, via the command signals they already issue. So this creature learns about the outside world and its own feelings ‘by the simple trick of monitoring what it itself is doing about it’ (2006, p. 87).”

a) active (red) and hidden (light blue) states relate c) non-influential states d) slow subsystems

Figure 3. Emergence of the Markov blanket. (a) The adjacency matrix that indicates a conditional dependency (spatial proximity) on at least one occasion over the last 256 s of the simulation. The adjacency matrix has been reordered to show the partition of hidden (cyan), sensory (magenta), active (red) and internal (blue) subsystems, whose positions are shown in (b)—using the same format as in the previous figure. Note the absence of direct connections (edges) between external or hidden and internal subsystem states. The circled area illustrates coupling between active and hidden states that are not reciprocated (there are no edges between hidden and active states). The spatial self-organization in the upper left panel is self evident; where the internal states have arranged themselves in a small loop structure with a little cilium, protected by the active states that support the surface or sensory states. When viewed as a movie, the entire ensemble pulsates in a chaotic but structured fashion, with the most marked motion in the periphery. (c,d) Highlights those subsystems that cannot influence others (closed subsystems (c)) and those that have slower dynamics (slow subsystems (d)). The remarkable thing here is that all the closed subsystems have been rusticated to the periphery—where they provide a locus for vigorous dynamics and motion. Contrast this with the deployment of slow subsystems that are found throughout the hidden, sensory, active and internal partition.

a) normal b) ablate active (red) c) ablate sensory (pink) d) ablate internal (blue)

Figure 5. Autopoiesis and oscillator death. These results show the trajectory of the subsystems for 512 s after the last time point characterized in the previous figures. (a) The trajectories under the normal state of affairs; showing a preserved and quasicrystalline arrangement of the internal states (blue) and the Markov blanket (active states in red and sensory states in magenta). Contrast this formal self-organization with the decay and dispersion that ensues when the internal states and Markov blankets are synthetically lesioned (b,c,d). In all simulations, a subset of states was lesioned by simply rendering their subsystems closed—in other words, although the Newtonian interactions were preserved, they were unable to affect the functional states of neighbouring subsystems. (b) The effect of this relatively subtle lesion on active states—that are rapidly expelled from the interior of the ensemble, allowing sensory states to invade and disrupt the internal states. A similar phenomenon is seen when the sensory states were lesioned (c)—as they drift out into the external system. There is a catastrophic loss of structural integrity when the internal states themselves cannot affect each other, with a rapid migration of internal states through and beyond their Markov blanket (d). These simulations illustrate the effective death of biological self-organization that is a well-known phenomenon in dynamical systems theory—known as oscillator death: see [58]. In our setting, they are a testament to autopoiesis or self-creation—in the sense that self-organized dynamics are necessary to maintain structural or configurational integrity.

Free Energy

“If biological systems must minimise their entropy, and entropy is average information, then it follows that they must keep the flow of information they process to a minimum.” (Solms 2021)
“Friston free energy is a quantifiable measure of the difference between the way the world is modeled by a system and the way the world really behaves.” (Solms 2021)

References

Godfrey-Smith, Peter. 2020. Metazoa: Animal Life and the Birth of the Mind. First edition. New York: Farrar, Straus; Giroux.

Millgram, Elijah. 2025. “A Life Hack with a Future.” In A Life Hack with a Future.

Parfit, Derek. 1984. Reasons and Persons. Oxford [Oxfordshire]: Clarendon Press. https://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/stanford-ebooks/detail.action?docID=728732.

———. 1987. “Divided Minds and the Nature of Persons.” Mindwaves.

Solms, Mark. 2021. The Hidden Spring: A Journey to the Source of Consciousness. Profile books.