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After a Long Absence

Here I am again.

I say “I” hesitantly, given the context. Anyway, this self-same bundle of attributes, having lost and gained more than a few (attributes) over the years, persists with enough continuity to be recognized as the same person.

I did not die of melanoma. With the help of state-of-the-art immunotherapy, my immune system made short work of the cancer. But my ramped-up, unleashed immune system also destroyed my thyroid, and my thyroxine levels fell to levels that are clinically rare. Thyroxine controls the body’s metabolic rate, and therefore everything. I was treated for hypothyroidism, but not before falling into a deep depression, which left me unable to write, or think, or even compose a simple email without revising it for hours.  Here is a fragment of writing from that time I found this morning in an old file:

Yesterday I thought I could perhaps write again, another blog post. But the attempt seems to have cast me into the pit of despair. I wanted to do something simple and clear, something I could be proud of.

Anyway, that explains my absence. The road to recovery was long, involving physically-demanding tasks far removed from the philosophy of personal identity.  This past summer, I finally began to think about taking up this project again. Then I got an email out of the blue (or whatever colour cyberspace is).  It started out

Hi Gordon,
I want to thank you for so clearly and plainly 
explaining this idea of self-concern in your 
illusion of survival post. Before I found it 
I had been searching for a way to positively 
conceptualize the possibility that Parfit's 
extreme claim was real. I've now read that post 
many times and a number of your other posts from
the blog. I've shared the illusion of survival 
post with many of my friends but it seems it 
doesn't fascinate them as it does me.

That hooked me. I have friends like that too. The email was from Scott  Emerson.  Scott said he wanted to “somehow make the illusion of survival post into a video for people who aren’t interested enough to read very much.” We started corresponding, met on Zoom. Scott’s video went through several drafts. This week he published it on YouTube.

It’s interesting and rewarding to see someone else’s sympathetic take on ideas you have worked with a long time.  Scott’s lens is not my lens; he says things I wouldn’t say, and says things I would say in ways I wouldn’t think of saying them. That is to be expected. We are different people, with different backgrounds. Variation adds depth to the topic, and broadens its appeal. Scott’s video grew from seeds planted by Parfit, by William Hazlitt, by Nagarjuna, seeds of the same lineage that sprouted as the Phantom Self  blog. The existence of Scott’s video proves that the seeds remain viable; this is a life form that can survive and thrive in the competition of ideas. I invite you to watch it. It is also in text form here. As always, both Scott and I welcome your comments.

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The Human Kludge

Human Kludge (glowing edges)Natural selection—Richard Dawkins’ ‘blind watchmaker’—has come up with some remarkable designs over four billion years. Those that persisted are, to a greater or lesser extent, effective responses to evolutionary pressures. But many of these design solutions are far from optimal. Natural selection is an opportunist, whose default move is to recombine existing resources, cobbling something together from bits of earlier work rather than redesign from the ground up.

When I worked in software development, it was our default move too. Most programmers don’t mind describing themselves as “lazy.” Reinventing the wheel is rarely the best solution, if you have a library of previously developed, de bugged, tested implementations of rims, axles, and drive trains that have seen a few years of revenue service. Programmers like to re-use their old code because they know it works. Also, it’s usually the fastest way to meet a deadline. “Lazy” can be efficient and smart.

Although they may perform reliably, solutions assembled out of a hodgepodge of old components rarely look as nice as if someone had time to sit down and design them from scratch. And because the components were not originally made to work together , there is a greater risk of unintended side effects.

The Free On-line Dictionary defines a “kludge” (pronounced “klooj”) as:

1. A system, especially a computer system, that is constituted of poorly matched elements or of elements originally intended for other applications.

2. A clumsy or inelegant solution to a problem.

Close scrutiny of the human motivational system reveals a kludgy design. A uniquely human, state-of-the-art module for visualizing and planning the future was bolted on to the emotional apparatus of an iguana. The result works, but not well. On the whole it has been hugely adaptive, allowing us humans to flourish, multiply, and dominate our planet, outcompeting all other large species. But it is far from optimal, often working against itself, driving behaviour that is not at all adaptive either for the individuals involved or for our species as a whole. Moreover, it has unpleasant side effects.

In this post I will outline a theory of this design: how it came to be, its primary components, and why it works as well as it does. I will also lay out some of its shortcomings, and recommend an alternative, improved solution. Continue reading “The Human Kludge”

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The Illusion of Survival

TheIllusion of Survival (small)When people ask what the Phantom Self is about and I have to come up with an elevator speech of a minute or less, I’ve started saying something along the lines of, “There is no fundamental difference between your relationship to your future self and your relationships to other people.” This sometimes strikes a chord, making people want to hear more. It’s better than leading with teleportation, although teleportation is not bad at parties, where people take it as an invitation to play; they light up and start recalling the Hollywood fantasies they enjoyed in their misspent youth, the more outrageous the better. It’s way better than starting off with the idea that we are informational entities, to which people respond as though they’d stepped in something squishy.

There’s no doubt that this material is hard to understand, still harder to explain. It doesn’t help that it’s spread over 60-odd posts written over three and a half years. I can’t distill it all into a one-minute elevator speech. But if I had to pick one key finding—the most important—it would be that personal survival is an illusion. And although support for this claim—which is puzzling and incomprehensible if you come across it cold—is scattered throughout 400 pages or so, no single post addresses this point directly.

So here goes. Continue reading “The Illusion of Survival”