Transhumanity / Resurrection Existential Crisis - definition of the “self”

[Quertus]

So, this began with Eclipse Phase, a Transhumanist RPG where you basically treat the brain like a hard drive, and write your memories and personality into a body (“sleeving”).

And that’s all fine and dandy, everyone’s immortal. Great for an RPG. Right?

Except… you call sleeve you memories into multiple bodies at once; if they stay that way too long (over 4 hours), they have trouble reintegrating (insanity), and… if two such beings come into conflict, which one’s the “real” you?

My take on the subject is… hopefully not, but probably actually controversial: the real you is in your first body. The first time that body’s mind gets overwritten, you’re dead.

Sure, there’s other beings running around with your memories and your personality, but they’re no more “you” than if we cloned you, and had the clone live a VR experience to match your life. When you die, you’re dead, that clone isn’t you. (See also “6th Day”).

I’m pretty set on this definition of the “self”. While, from a Gamist perspective, it’s great that you don’t have to roll up a new PC when your character dies, and great from a Narrative perspective that there is at least a surface continuity to the story, from an Immortality perspective, it’s a failure.

But then I started asking myself about testing: how do we test whether a system of Immortality works? How do we test for the self?

Some systems with Resurrection have the concept of a soul - in those systems, one could examine the soul, to know whether or not the resulting being was the same. Of course, at least in modern D&D, there’s about 0 of what I call the “self” inherent in the post-death petitioner soul.

And, from inside the system, as the Resurrected / cloned / resleeved being? Does anyone else see the existential crisis potential of staring at your own dead body, and wondering whether your life’s a lie?

[False God]

You'll need a bunch of players interested in playing through that sort of RP first of course.

But yes, and Transhumanist, "cyberpunk" systems are supposed to make you ask this question. Classic fantasy systems are not intended to make you ask this question. Typically because the latter assumes the "soul" is you, not the body or mind, while the former doesn't assume the soul is a thing and relies entirely on the physical experience. And also because it's not really relevant to play in the same way that existential questions are relevant to what defines cyberpunk from well, not-punk.

It's difficult for you and I to answer the question IRL because we can't truly have the experience.

To the best I can answer personally though, I don't care. To me it would really come down to is who gets my stuff. Suddenly having another "me" in the world is more an issue of space, there's only one job where I work, one car I drive, one girl I date, one house I live in. Not all of these things can be shared. Provided there is space for both of "me" and that whatever I connect myself with, it doesn't really matter.

There's a good reason Thomas Riker becomes resentful, because aside from being stranded on some alien world for years, William Riker gets to do all the stuff Thomas thinks he's supposed to be doing, until he meets William, Thomas has no reason to believe he's a clone, only that for some reason the Enterprise abandoned him. (Maybe they got tired of the bard sleeping with every alien in sight?)

It's important then to note that in a cyberpunk setting where these questions are often asked, people have very little, so what they do have can be very important to them. But the answer can change if they have nothing because then neither "me" has anything at all. The first me or the "real" me hasn't lost anything. And the answer likewise changes when the character has so much that sharing it doesn't really change anything.

See also: Isekai Type D.

[NichG]

So, this began with Eclipse Phase, a Transhumanist RPG where you basically treat the brain like a hard drive, and write your memories and personality into a body (“sleeving”).

And that’s all fine and dandy, everyone’s immortal. Great for an RPG. Right?

Except… you call sleeve you memories into multiple bodies at once; if they stay that way too long (over 4 hours), they have trouble reintegrating (insanity), and… if two such beings come into conflict, which one’s the “real” you?

My take on the subject is… hopefully not, but probably actually controversial: the real you is in your first body. The first time that body’s mind gets overwritten, you’re dead.

Sure, there’s other beings running around with your memories and your personality, but they’re no more “you” than if we cloned you, and had the clone live a VR experience to match your life. When you die, you’re dead, that clone isn’t you. (See also “6th Day”).

I’m pretty set on this definition of the “self”. While, from a Gamist perspective, it’s great that you don’t have to roll up a new PC when your character dies, and great from a Narrative perspective that there is at least a surface continuity to the story, from an Immortality perspective, it’s a failure.

But then I started asking myself about testing: how do we test whether a system of Immortality works? How do we test for the self?

Some systems with Resurrection have the concept of a soul - in those systems, one could examine the soul, to know whether or not the resulting being was the same. Of course, at least in modern D&D, there’s about 0 of what I call the “self” inherent in the post-death petitioner soul.

And, from inside the system, as the Resurrected / cloned / resleeved being? Does anyone else see the existential crisis potential of staring at your own dead body, and wondering whether your life’s a lie?

I see the point of such kinds of hypothetical philosophical fiction as to be pointing out that concepts we feel are solid and fundamental (like unique and inviolate selves) are not actually logically essential. All of our concepts of what is and isn't exist within a local context that supports those concepts being good abstractions for a much more complicated underlying reality. Thinking about something like being able to copy a mind or duplicate a mind reveals that there may be contexts in which our concept of 'self' is basically inherently nonsense. Which of the two beings is the real you? Neither of them! Both of them! Self and real-ness ('aura', authenticity, etc) can't mean the same things in an environment where such operations can take place. Just like every night when you go to sleep, you die, and a new you is born the next day. And every second that passes you die, and a new you is born the next second. You can look at a fruit tree as a single organism, or as hundreds of plants that happen to share conjoined stems due to the history of how they came to be - that's why grafting works, and why you can grow a new plant from a cutting. Is that fruit tree 'one plant' or 'one hundred plants'? Mu.

(So I guess my answer would be, there is no answer as to 'whether a system of immortality works' and no way to 'test for the self', because the self is not a universal inviolable part of physics, its an emergent thing that only exists because of the boundaries that prevent things like duplication from happening; so once duplication is a thing that starts happening, 'selfness' ceases to be the correct phase of organization to describe that system)

Instead of trying to save the concept of 'self' as we understand it, that kind of thing gives an opportunity to imagine alternate concepts which do work in that world. And then you'd have legal systems, cultures, etc adapted to those concepts.

Causal connectedness could be a useful concept to think about - if you had changed something about the person before the split, both copies would carry that change, but if you change a copy then the other one will not reflect it (outside of the 4 hour reintegration protocol at least). So in that sense, rather than talking about 'one person' you could talk about the tree of a person with a 'root' that only exists in the past and 'branches' which deviate from each-other'. This is a useful concept when it comes to things like responsibility - if a copy of you kills someone, should all other copies also be arrested? But maybe not so much for things like 'who gets the money'.

Correlation is weaker than causality, but its what we usually use to identify things that are 'the same'. Two clones behave the same way in response to the same stimulus? Then maybe we conclude that they will continue to be correlated in other ways and other situations. Split someone who enlists as a soldier, put one of them through simulated hell to see their responses, and if they hold up then erase that copy so you don't have to deal with PTSD, and you still get to know you can trust the other copy in similar situations without having to deal with them remembering being tortuously tested. Unethical? Sure! But possible in such a world, and maybe meaningful to consider as significant. Those who are sufficiently correlated according to some kind of stimulus-response testing could be considered legally 'the same entity'. If your correlation score diverges from the Root by enough, congratulations, you're a newborn, the Root has the responsibility to provide as a parent but you get to be kicked out of your job, your house, and your former property! Worth saying though that this kind of correlational identity shows up as kin-selection in evolutionary dynamics among systems with ambiguous boundaries (like in the case of plants and their offspring/cuttings/spreadings/etc) - preserving something more genetically similar to you over something less genetically similar to you becomes homologous to actually replicating becomes homologous to actually just continuing to exist through time in some limit. So its probably a pretty pragmatic concept to use. Is it handy for philosophical purposes? Probably not so much...

The one I tend to go with is more subjective, but I think in this case that makes it more authentic to what would actually matter with regards to 'testing' a system of immortality. That means that for a given immortality system, it might pass for some people and fail for others, but that would be the reality of public reaction to some mind-bending new tech anyhow all philosophy aside. That is to say, if you in the moment would consider suffering some harm in order to avoid greater harm happening to one or both of the outputs of the system, then for you and your psychological state - that is a successful immortality system. In other words, if you are willing to actually behave and make decisions as if you are going to have to live with whatever conditions the entities produced by the system face, then that system is engaging correctly with the same parts of your mind that make you willing to consider what happens to a hypothetical 'you' of tomorrow the business of the 'you' that exists now. For me, that'd be the philosophical pick - that which the present you identifies with in counterfactual imaginings of the future is also you. And yes, this means that for some people painting artwork is immortality, or having kids is immortality, or creating an empire is immortality - because the parts of themselves which they identify most strongly with are a transmissible subset of the whole 'them'.

Edit: A fun implication of that particular subjective immortality viewpoint is that exposing someone to Chalmers' concept of the Hard Problem of Consciousness could be seen as attempted murder.

[LibraryOgre]

They are all their own selves; they may come from a common root, but each has the complete experience of the being up to the point of their forking, and then become their own person post-fork. I think a clear example of this would be the Star Trek: TNG episode "Second Chances", where they encounter a transporter-clone of Riker. Both continued their lives, ignorant of each other's existence, until they were reunited. Both are William T. Riker.

If your game has a metaphysical counterpart to the soul, it might get tricky, but if it does not, then nothing really distinguishes them.

[Vahnavoi]

There is no perpetual self and all forms of physical immortality are hoaxes at worst and equivalent to having children at best (NichG, possibly accidentally, already explained why).

This does apply even to many fantasy settings, mind you, such fantasies just tend to not be faux-medieval European in flavor. The relevant philosophical ideas are, if I recall right, over two thousand years old. Even weirder or deeper takes on D&D afterlife end up as annihilationist regarding the self, due to influence from such sources.

[Mechalich]

Those who are sufficiently correlated according to some kind of stimulus-response testing could be considered legally 'the same entity'.

I'd imagine that in a society sufficiently advanced to read, digitize, and store minds there would also be some way to directly measure correlation between snapshots of mental states, in a way similar to how this can already be done with genetic data.

[Anonymouswizard]

Your view isn't uncommon, and is considered one of the potentially scary parts of the extremes of transhumanist musings. It's not difficult to argue that the society in Eclipse Phase has industrialised mass murder, and there's factions in the game who take this view (primarily the Jovians). It's also interesting to note that reserving=immortality only became the dominant view when most of the population ended up in an 'upload or die' situation.

I've heard Eclipse Phase grew out of Shadowrun, which is interesting. Because Shadowrun has an in-universe issue that after a certain amount of body modification the part that makes you a living person decides you're dead and either disappears or runs off. It also has AI and computer viruses that might be digitised minds, and implications that the internet might be another plane of existence. It throws a bunch of pointers at there being a soul, and then another bunch of pointers at the mind being something completely unrelated to it. So I'd love to see how on earth the designers got from that to the rampant mind swapping seen in Eclipse Phase.

[Mechalich]

I've heard Eclipse Phase grew out of Shadowrun, which is interesting. Because Shadowrun has an in-universe issue that after a certain amount of body modification the part that makes you a living person decides you're dead and either disappears or runs off. It also has AI and computer viruses that might be digitised minds, and implications that the internet might be another plane of existence. It throws a bunch of pointers at there being a soul, and then another bunch of pointers at the mind being something completely unrelated to it. So I'd love to see how on earth the designers got from that to the rampant mind swapping seen in Eclipse Phase.

Eclipse Phase grew out of taking basically every major idea in highly speculative science fiction published between roughly 1990 and 2008, mashing them together in a blender, and slamming the pulse button really hard. It's right there in the References page of the core book. For example, the concept of digitized mind that can be copied and moved around from one body to another is found in: The Culture, Diaspora, Altered Carbon, Accelerando, and others, all on the reference list.

[OldTrees1]

"You" don't exist. The concept of "You" is a useful fiction that conflates multiple different entities because greater precision is unneeded in most conversations. This is similar to the fictions of "Body" and "Mind".

(NichG's explanation is solid)

[Quertus]

It’s nice to know that the questions I’m asking are the types of questions transhumanist material is intended to elicit.

I lost a longer post, but… while I find a lot of the other topics very interesting, I want to try again to communicate my question.

From the point of view of “continuation of perception”, yes, every time we sleep, when we wake, we cannot prove that we are the same person we remember being. Similarly, we cannot prove that the universe isn’t destroyed and recreated millions of times per second (in one of my worlds, it kinda does, in that souls constantly wear out, and the world doesn’t “run” until the dead soul is replaced. Which state lasts milliseconds until another soul burns out. Etc) So, yes, it’s already highly suspect, and the tools to test for the self would already be valuable.

However, my question is, after a Resurrection or reversing a Thanos snap, what tools does the being or the reality in question have to differentiate them from a new creation with old memories?

Put another way, if I did my own snap, and there were 5 copies of someone, what tools would people have to differentiate which is the “real” Peter Parker, if they all share the same memories? If, as a priest Resurrected my dead sidekick, I stopped Time, hopped to another reality or 4, and played “shuffle” with the 5 newly resurrected sidekicks, and told the priest he needed to know which was which, and prove how he knew, what tools could he use?

Put another way, what tools do various realities have to test “identity”, or to test the continuity of consciousness necessary for my definition of Immortality?

How does person B, who woke up with the memories of person A, that whether they are, in fact, person A, or not?

Because

”Bring my ____ back to Life.”

“Ok, I created you a new ____.”

Isn’t a satisfying exchange.

Especially if you are the ____.

[Anonymouswizard]

Eclipse Phase grew out of taking basically every major idea in highly speculative science fiction published between roughly 1990 and 2008, mashing them together in a blender, and slamming the pulse button really hard.

Yes, but it can be interesting to insider how specific sources influenced a setting. Doing a bit more digging Eclipse Phase began as the Shadowrun setting after the horrors returned, but lost the magic and gained the SF kitchen sink stuff over the next 15 years. It's a small link, especially as Equinox is a firmer grasp on that concept, but it's one I like to consider occasionally. Especially as Shadowrun does like to brush up against transhumanist stuff without quite going into the full weird.

On that note it's important to note that Eclipse Phase 1e was designed as a horror game, and the transhuman and human elements are part of that. Humanity created something unfathomably above itself (multiple times) and had no ability to control it. It had to radically change itself just to survive, and graphs onto the idea of self as data to deal with it. It caused its own destruction just as much as it was a victim of it's creations, and it's creations are the only reason why something orders of magnitude greater than anything in the solar system didn't wipe out the entire specimens. Transhumanity's response to the apocalypse was to split into EVEN MORE RADICAL squabbling factions, including a terrorist group that fights against literally everybody (and who serve as the default player faction).

What humanity does to itself in Eclipse Phase is arguably insane and horrifying. It's also horrifying that the end result of the process is the exact same broken mess that went into it. Transhumanity can pull the mind out of a head, rewrite it's beliefs, and stick it into a new body. But for all their talk they can't take a human and make it not human. It's questionable as to if they even want to, the best of them are willing to label ideologies as putting the species at risk of extinction simply because they disagree with them.

Even if you're transhumanist Eclipse Phase can be terrifying without bringing the Exurgent Virus or more traditional SF/horror elements into it.

[NichG]

In principle, there is no obligation that reality allow such tools to exist. That's sort of the point. When resurrection or modification of the boundary of personhood becomes good enough that copies are as similar to each-other in every way as you are to the you of the next or previous second, you have a tension between a philosophical belief that 'there should be a difference, because only one can be the real me' and a reality in which 'there actually is no difference, your philosophical belief, no matter how compelling it may be to your own phenomenal experience, is in conflict with reality'.

That's sort of what existential crises are - something that must have been true because how could one even imagine existing if it were not, meets something that overtly says 'hey, that isn't true' in a way that is difficult to ignore. In order to maintain 'well but it must be true', you would have to actually reject reality.

Of course when said reality is itself a piece of fiction, it's more complicated, since in that case rejecting the reality of that fiction 'I cannot believe in a universe like this' isn't inherently unreasonable. So a fun thing is to ride that edge of nonsense and ask 'what is the most disturbing or unsettling universe I can imagine which I also would feel uncomfortable rejecting out of hand as inherently nonsensical'.

[Mechalich]

In principle, there is no obligation that reality allow such tools to exist. That's sort of the point. When resurrection or modification of the boundary of personhood becomes good enough that copies are as similar to each-other in every way as you are to the you of the next or previous second, you have a tension between a philosophical belief that 'there should be a difference, because only one can be the real me' and a reality in which 'there actually is no difference, your philosophical belief, no matter how compelling it may be to your own phenomenal experience, is in conflict with reality'.

That's sort of what existential crises are - something that must have been true because how could one even imagine existing if it were not, meets something that overtly says 'hey, that isn't true' in a way that is difficult to ignore. In order to maintain 'well but it must be true', you would have to actually reject reality.

Of course when said reality is itself a piece of fiction, it's more complicated, since in that case rejecting the reality of that fiction 'I cannot believe in a universe like this' isn't inherently unreasonable. So a fun thing is to ride that edge of nonsense and ask 'what is the most disturbing or unsettling universe I can imagine which I also would feel uncomfortable rejecting out of hand as inherently nonsensical'.

With regard to the various concepts of transhumanism - and Eclipse Phase, being monstrously overstuffed, includes all of them - these ideas exist on a continuum ranging from 'definitely going to happen' to 'probably going to happen' to 'probably not going to happen. For example, human cloning is absolutely a thing that can already happen (it doesn't because of various medical and ethic complications). Likewise extensive body modification that allows a person to radically modify their physical form to become something diverged from traditional human norms is almost certainly going to be possibly as cybernetic and genetic engineering technologies advance. Nanoscale-level rejuvenation to allow for biological immortality is more questionable, but it's at least theoretically possible as there are organisms that display this trait on some level in nature.

The big question mark is whether or not 'uploading' of consciousness is possible, since human understanding of the technologies involved has not yet reached the point where we can determine if there are intrinsic barriers to doing so (or even if there are practical barriers, such as the size of a silicon-based circuitry setup to run the human mind being too big or too hot to effectively fit within a human-like body). That's the real big one, because if you can turn a consciousness into data, then you can manipulate it like data and at least theoretically things like forking and downloading to new bodies become possible, though again there may be sizeable practical barriers if the process is computationally intensive or requires specialized data substrates and so forth. Transhumanist sci-fi tends to ignore the latter, and treats things like forking as absurdly easy, in some cases allowing characters to spin off multiple forks in fractions of a second, which seems unlikely given that even if you can convert the human mind into a set of programs they are likely to be really big, really inefficient programs that have to be handled carefully.

[NichG]

With regard to the various concepts of transhumanism - and Eclipse Phase, being monstrously overstuffed, includes all of them - these ideas exist on a continuum ranging from 'definitely going to happen' to 'probably going to happen' to 'probably not going to happen. For example, human cloning is absolutely a thing that can already happen (it doesn't because of various medical and ethic complications). Likewise extensive body modification that allows a person to radically modify their physical form to become something diverged from traditional human norms is almost certainly going to be possibly as cybernetic and genetic engineering technologies advance. Nanoscale-level rejuvenation to allow for biological immortality is more questionable, but it's at least theoretically possible as there are organisms that display this trait on some level in nature.

The big question mark is whether or not 'uploading' of consciousness is possible, since human understanding of the technologies involved has not yet reached the point where we can determine if there are intrinsic barriers to doing so (or even if there are practical barriers, such as the size of a silicon-based circuitry setup to run the human mind being too big or too hot to effectively fit within a human-like body). That's the real big one, because if you can turn a consciousness into data, then you can manipulate it like data and at least theoretically things like forking and downloading to new bodies become possible, though again there may be sizeable practical barriers if the process is computationally intensive or requires specialized data substrates and so forth. Transhumanist sci-fi tends to ignore the latter, and treats things like forking as absurdly easy, in some cases allowing characters to spin off multiple forks in fractions of a second, which seems unlikely given that even if you can convert the human mind into a set of programs they are likely to be really big, really inefficient programs that have to be handled carefully.

Oh, I meant it the other way around. Not whether reality is guaranteed or not to contain a means of copying minds, but rather whether reality is guaranteed or not to contain a means of distinguishing a copied mind from the original. At least in the context of things to support existential dread.

Another fun bit of existential dread in these lines comes from Permutation City. If a mind is Turing-emulatable, then if you close off the system and only run it against a simulation, it doesn't matter how it's actually run. Sure you could be running on a box somewhere in realtime. But you could also have your mental processes being executed by a generational order of monks doing the operations by hand over the course of billions of years. And fundamentally, if a mind is Turing-emulatable, then those two cases cannot be distinguished without outside input. You could for example run for 5 years, have a gap of 15000 years, then have someone else pick up the run. You could do one operation per million years using energy bleeding off of ancient black holes as the rest of the universe dissipates into cold gas.

Or, as the book asks, what if you weren't run on any physical hardware at all, but the operations to run you were deterministic and well defined enough that, hypothetically, if anyone were to execute them on any hardware they'd always get the same consistent result. If 'you' are a definable mathematical function, does anyone actually need to evaluate it for you to exist? For you to perceive things and have phenomenal experience?

Not sure Eclipse Phase gets quite that far down the rabbit hole though?

[Vahnavoi]

I was about to talk about the same thing as NichG, above, from the perspective of Platonism.

Namely, presuming some of Platonism is true, and that abstract entities such as those described by high-level math actually exist, then "you" have eternal (read: timeless) non-physical existence and anything that can be shown to be mathematically equivalent is also "you". It's dubious if the physical world even existing is necessary in this framework.

Of course, the same framework can easily suggest "individual self" is purely illusionary and the only "soul" that exists and matters is the world's. The inability to distinquish between copies is a direct result of everything being one in essence.

[Herbert_W]

So, this began with Eclipse Phase, a Transhumanist RPG where you basically treat the brain like a hard drive, and write your memories and personality into a body (“sleeving”) . . . .which one’s the “real” you?

My take is that this is a question of definition, not a question of fact, and in order to answer that sort of question we first need to have a clear idea of why we care. Different definitions of "same/original/real etc." are useful in different contexts. There are, for example, multiple definitions of equality in mathematics. The meaning of "equals" in "this function equals that function" is different from in "this set equals that set".

I'll use a more concrete example to hammer the point home: suppose I have a broom. The bristles wear out; I replace them. The handle breaks; I replace it. I then wonder: at what point did it stop being the original broom?

I know very well what happened to each bristle and handle, and in reality the bristles and broomhandles compose the whole sequence of events. The two together I called a "broom," which I mentally represented as a single entity to save the effort of thinking about each part individually - but the broom was an abstraction in my mind corresponding to no real parts other than bristles and handles. So, I know the whole story - I just don't know how to use the words "same broom" when I tell it. My uncertainty must therefore come from not having a clear and committed definition of what makes a particular broom, not from any uncertainty over matters of fact.

Perhaps I care about when the broom stopped being the original broom because I believe brooms that have been contaminated with outdoors dirt should never after be used indoors. If that's the case then I can decide that the identity of a broom is tied up in the bristles; that definition will suit my purpose. On the other hand, perhaps I care because different members of my household prefer brooms with different lengths of handle; then it would suit my purposes to tie the identity of a broom to the handle.

Only once I have a clear idea of why I care about broom identity can I decide how to use the words "same broom" when describing those events.

Getting back to the subject at hand: I suspect that the reason is "I'm afraid of dying, and I want to be reassured that some entity still exists that's the "real me" in some sense of "real me" that assuages that fear." - but whatever the reason is, step one is understanding that reason.

[Quertus]

My take is that this is a question of definition, not a question of fact, and in order to answer that sort of question we first need to have a clear idea of why we care. Different definitions of "same/original/real etc." are useful in different contexts.

Getting back to the subject at hand: I suspect that the reason is "I'm afraid of dying, and I want to be reassured that some entity still exists that's the "real me" in some sense of "real me" that assuages that fear." - but whatever the reason is, step one is understanding that reason.

Exactly so.

Now, don’t get me wrong - I’m super interested in all these other questions, too. But let’s see if I can give use cases for the question I was trying to ask. Hmmm… your “fear of dying” I think matches my “Immortality” definition. Maybe. But I think I can be more… precise? Detailed? More like your broom?

I forget the exact context, but there was a Playground Zombie Apocalypse thread. Real world, but with 3e classes. My response was to power level by murdering humans (and also thereby reducing the number of nearby zombies).

Pretty morally reprehensible, right? Well, some of the people who thought so dropped their objections when they learned that part of my goal was to Resurrect my victims into a post-zombie-apocalyptic world. At that point, they got all the way off my back (pitch meetings reference), because no harm no foul, right?

But were they right to?

If I had said, “I’m going to murder everyone, then repopulate the world with beings from another world”, even if those beings happened to be alternate reality versions of my victims, my victims are still dead.

So the question of, “is this the real them?”, “is this the same them?” matters a bit.

I was asking, I suppose, what worlds have already asked such questions, have already developed appropriate toolkits to evaluate the “self”?

I was about to talk about the same thing as NichG, above, from the perspective of Platonism.

Namely, presuming some of Platonism is true, and that abstract entities such as those described by high-level math actually exist, then "you" have eternal (read: timeless) non-physical existence and anything that can be shown to be mathematically equivalent is also "you". It's dubious if the physical world even existing is necessary in this framework.

Of course, the same framework can easily suggest "individual self" is purely illusionary and the only "soul" that exists and matters is the world's. The inability to distinquish between copies is a direct result of everything being one in essence.

I like to call this concept “True Names”. The site super ate my post about them (to the tune of “no such thread” ), so I’ll say more about that in another post.

In principle, there is no obligation that reality allow such tools to exist.

Sure. I’m asking which ones, if any, do have such tools.

That's sort of the point. When resurrection or modification of the boundary of personhood becomes good enough that copies are as similar to each-other in every way as you are to the you of the next or previous second, you have a tension between a philosophical belief that 'there should be a difference, because only one can be the real me' and a reality in which 'there actually is no difference, your philosophical belief, no matter how compelling it may be to your own phenomenal experience, is in conflict with reality'.

Are you fine with people you care about dying, and being replaced with copies? Or yourself? What if the death is slow and painful, like making a collect call? If Reality was coded such that everyone died horrifically every day, then new copies of everyone were created, loaded with the appropriate memories, and set to run in the new world, would you care?

Or, perhaps more to my point, can you imagine someone who would care, and what tools they might want to use to evaluate Hulk’s snap, or the product of 3e True Resurrection?

Yes, if I’m a 120 lb goo girl, and I split into 2 60 lb goo girls, each with my memories and personality, both are “real”. If we merge back together, and the resulting being gains the memories and experiences of both, it’s still real. If someone kills one of the splits, they’re guilty of murder (assuming goo girls are given appropriate rights).

However, you’re right, the concept of the “self” needs a little work for these goo girls. Besides legal issues (which is entitled to “my” property, job, spouse, etc), which has my consciousness? There’s 3 (technically 4) answers I can imagine:

1. My consciousness splits as readily as my body (this is what I I pictured when i wrote this scenario)
2. My consciousness stays with one half; the other half gets a new consciousness.
3. Neither half gets my consciousness - I’m dead.
4. [bonus: my consciousness exists outside the body, and I remote puppet one or both]

That's sort of what existential crises are - something that must have been true because how could one even imagine existing if it were not, meets something that overtly says 'hey, that isn't true' in a way that is difficult to ignore. In order to maintain 'well but it must be true', you would have to actually reject reality.

Of course when said reality is itself a piece of fiction, it's more complicated, since in that case rejecting the reality of that fiction 'I cannot believe in a universe like this' isn't inherently unreasonable. So a fun thing is to ride that edge of nonsense and ask 'what is the most disturbing or unsettling universe I can imagine which I also would feel uncomfortable rejecting out of hand as inherently nonsensical'.

The existential crisis issue is (to the extent, say, i felt it excused the zombie apocalypse murders) i no longer have confidence in Resurrection and the like.

Oh, I meant it the other way around. Not whether reality is guaranteed or not to contain a means of copying minds, but rather whether reality is guaranteed or not to contain a means of distinguishing a copied mind from the original. At least in the context of things to support existential dread.

Another fun bit of existential dread in these lines comes from Permutation City. If a mind is Turing-emulatable, then if you close off the system and only run it against a simulation, it doesn't matter how it's actually run. Sure you could be running on a box somewhere in realtime. But you could also have your mental processes being executed by a generational order of monks doing the operations by hand over the course of billions of years. And fundamentally, if a mind is Turing-emulatable, then those two cases cannot be distinguished without outside input. You could for example run for 5 years, have a gap of 15000 years, then have someone else pick up the run. You could do one operation per million years using energy bleeding off of ancient black holes as the rest of the universe dissipates into cold gas.

Or, as the book asks, what if you weren't run on any physical hardware at all, but the operations to run you were deterministic and well defined enough that, hypothetically, if anyone were to execute them on any hardware they'd always get the same consistent result. If 'you' are a definable mathematical function, does anyone actually need to evaluate it for you to exist? For you to perceive things and have phenomenal experience?

Not sure Eclipse Phase gets quite that far down the rabbit hole though?

More True Names for a later post.

[NichG]

If I had said, “I’m going to murder everyone, then repopulate the world with beings from another world”, even if those beings happened to be alternate reality versions of my victims, my victims are still dead.

So the question of, “is this the real them?”, “is this the same them?” matters a bit.

I was asking, I suppose, what worlds have already asked such questions, have already developed appropriate toolkits to evaluate the “self”?

...

Sure. I’m asking which ones, if any, do have such tools.

Basically the issue is that this will always be a matter of social convention and not of reality, because the existence of the self is a choice of definition rather than a matter of fact. Even in fictional settings with an explicit soul, that's only talking about the soul and not the philosophical 'self' - there are plenty of fictional settings where when you dig down into what exactly souls are doing, one person would draw the conclusion that the preservation of their soul alone would be unworthwhile, whereas the preservation of something else about them at the cost of the soul would be true identity.

The webnovel Vigor Mortis plays with this a bit - there are explicit souls, there's an explicit mind-soul relationship, oh but it turns out that you can actually understand souls enough to mess with them directly and do things like rewrite personalities or fuse personae and so on. One of the characters is basically a body-jumper who absorbs the soul of whatever body they jump into and basically gets all their skills and memories, and the novel goes into detail about how in one case that results in the dissolution of that other individual whereas in another case its perceived as a merger with the body-jumper feeling equal ownership of both prior lives. But it also suggests that that wasn't because of any fundamental difference in what happened, but rather just that the body-jumper hated that first soul's way of living enough to just crush it, but liked the second soul's way of living enough to just voluntarily adopt it as 'themselves'. There's also a character who basically edits her own soul to be who she thinks she must be, and her justification for why that was not a form of death was that it was the previous her that made that choice, so the being she became is a continuation of that will even if basically all of the parts that made that decision were stripped out and discarded.

So you could absolutely have world that have a cultural standard or socially accepted definition of 'the self' such that they can have toolkits for evaluating that. They're all correct in that it lets them get on with their day, but they're also all going to be wrong in that there will always be the ways to construct viewpoints or individuals who would have completely reasonable objections to any such measure. Stating 'selfhood = this thing' is a really good way of building a dystopian setting. 'Anyone who can perform 2FA to log into your account is by definition you', 'anyone whose decisions correlate to within 98% of the copy we have on record is that person - you are only allowed to change your mind at a rate of 10kb of entropy each day, anything more is an anomaly and you aren't you', 'we use a majority blockchain to authenticate persona-duplication events, and blockchain consensus is used to label one the original', etc.

Even something like 'your soul is you, and because we get to define the fiction souls are indivisible, impossible to duplicate, etc' - well, that's pretty unfortunate when a total mindwipe or rewrite happens and the actions of that resulting person are associated with the same soul for all such judgments that may need to take place. Okay, so now the fiction is 'your soul is you, and your mind is your soul - brains are just connectors' - so how much change is death? Or are people all totally static personae that aren't influenced by the events of their lives in that setting? Etc...

Are you fine with people you care about dying, and being replaced with copies? Or yourself? What if the death is slow and painful, like making a collect call? If Reality was coded such that everyone died horrifically every day, then new copies of everyone were created, loaded with the appropriate memories, and set to run in the new world, would you care?

Or, perhaps more to my point, can you imagine someone who would care, and what tools they might want to use to evaluate Hulk’s snap, or the product of 3e True Resurrection?

Well what I'm saying is that even if you care deeply that reality give you a way to answer that question, to the extent that it seems like the most important thing, that does not obligate a correct answer to exist. Existential dread: you care, you cannot conceive of not caring, yet you have proven to yourself that it is actually impossible to resolve. No matter how important it might be, its also hopeless. That plus usually the trope of seeing people who have passed through that veil by deciding to stop caring about the thing that is obviously irrelevant to true reality, and finding their behaviors and motivations totally alien - so even if realizing that caring about this nonexistent thing is irrational, you also are faced with what you would become were you to give that up.

More to the point, any given person will make a choice as to what 'counts' for them - the person shows shared memories, acts towards them like the person they remember, passes some kind of artificial test, whatever makes them comfortable really - and will be able to be at varying levels of comfort with that choice from then on. Not as a reflection of how close their choice was to the truth, but rather as a reflection of how introspective they are - those more prone to think things through carefully and consider all evidence seriously will be more at risk for having the bottom drop out of under their confidence in that resurrection than those who live in the moment.

However, you’re right, the concept of the “self” needs a little work for these goo girls. Besides legal issues (which is entitled to “my” property, job, spouse, etc), which has my consciousness? There’s 3 (technically 4) answers I can imagine:

1. My consciousness splits as readily as my body (this is what I I pictured when i wrote this scenario)
2. My consciousness stays with one half; the other half gets a new consciousness.
3. Neither half gets my consciousness - I’m dead.
4. [bonus: my consciousness exists outside the body, and I remote puppet one or both]

There's also 'What you called your consciousness was never really a thing the way you thought of it, no one ever had the thing you imagined your consciousness to be in the first place. Instead they had something else which, for the mind in the first body, resulted in memories consistent with that idea of a consciousness.'

[Quertus]

Basically the issue is that this will always be a matter of social convention and not of reality, because the existence of the self is a choice of definition rather than a matter of fact. Even in fictional settings with an explicit soul, that's only talking about the soul and not the philosophical 'self' - there are plenty of fictional settings where when you dig down into what exactly souls are doing, one person would draw the conclusion that the preservation of their soul alone would be unworthwhile, whereas the preservation of something else about them at the cost of the soul would be true identity.

The webnovel Vigor Mortis plays with this a bit - there are explicit souls, there's an explicit mind-soul relationship, oh but it turns out that you can actually understand souls enough to mess with them directly and do things like rewrite personalities or fuse personae and so on. One of the characters is basically a body-jumper who absorbs the soul of whatever body they jump into and basically gets all their skills and memories, and the novel goes into detail about how in one case that results in the dissolution of that other individual whereas in another case its perceived as a merger with the body-jumper feeling equal ownership of both prior lives. But it also suggests that that wasn't because of any fundamental difference in what happened, but rather just that the body-jumper hated that first soul's way of living enough to just crush it, but liked the second soul's way of living enough to just voluntarily adopt it as 'themselves'. There's also a character who basically edits her own soul to be who she thinks she must be, and her justification for why that was not a form of death was that it was the previous her that made that choice, so the being she became is a continuation of that will even if basically all of the parts that made that decision were stripped out and discarded.

So you could absolutely have world that have a cultural standard or socially accepted definition of 'the self' such that they can have toolkits for evaluating that. They're all correct in that it lets them get on with their day, but they're also all going to be wrong in that there will always be the ways to construct viewpoints or individuals who would have completely reasonable objections to any such measure. Stating 'selfhood = this thing' is a really good way of building a dystopian setting. 'Anyone who can perform 2FA to log into your account is by definition you', 'anyone whose decisions correlate to within 98% of the copy we have on record is that person - you are only allowed to change your mind at a rate of 10kb of entropy each day, anything more is an anomaly and you aren't you', 'we use a majority blockchain to authenticate persona-duplication events, and blockchain consensus is used to label one the original', etc.

Even something like 'your soul is you, and because we get to define the fiction souls are indivisible, impossible to duplicate, etc' - well, that's pretty unfortunate when a total mindwipe or rewrite happens and the actions of that resulting person are associated with the same soul for all such judgments that may need to take place. Okay, so now the fiction is 'your soul is you, and your mind is your soul - brains are just connectors' - so how much change is death? Or are people all totally static personae that aren't influenced by the events of their lives in that setting? Etc...



Well what I'm saying is that even if you care deeply that reality give you a way to answer that question, to the extent that it seems like the most important thing, that does not obligate a correct answer to exist. Existential dread: you care, you cannot conceive of not caring, yet you have proven to yourself that it is actually impossible to resolve. No matter how important it might be, its also hopeless. That plus usually the trope of seeing people who have passed through that veil by deciding to stop caring about the thing that is obviously irrelevant to true reality, and finding their behaviors and motivations totally alien - so even if realizing that caring about this nonexistent thing is irrational, you also are faced with what you would become were you to give that up.

More to the point, any given person will make a choice as to what 'counts' for them - the person shows shared memories, acts towards them like the person they remember, passes some kind of artificial test, whatever makes them comfortable really - and will be able to be at varying levels of comfort with that choice from then on. Not as a reflection of how close their choice was to the truth, but rather as a reflection of how introspective they are - those more prone to think things through carefully and consider all evidence seriously will be more at risk for having the bottom drop out of under their confidence in that resurrection than those who live in the moment.



There's also 'What you called your consciousness was never really a thing the way you thought of it, no one ever had the thing you imagined your consciousness to be in the first place. Instead they had something else which, for the mind in the first body, resulted in memories consistent with that idea of a consciousness.'

Replying to “I just realized how naive I’ve been” with “you’re still naive” is ouch, but fair if you demonstrate that you understand my current naïveté.

I’m just not 100% sure we’re there yet.

So… yes, there are multiple ways to define the “self”. I’m not willing to concede that which definition one uses is or should be arbitrary, though. I’m not convinced that it’s purely a matter of politics and society, rather than science or “fact”, in all cases. So we might have some interesting discussions there.

But, regardless of the preceding paragraph, my… criteria for the “self” (at least for “normal”, non-“True Name” beings (again, future post (senility willing))) wrt an “Immortality” test, or a “you’re not my Hanna!” test involves what I call (very poorly) “continuity of consciousness”.

And, yes, my concept runs afoul of “every time you sleep”, “secret universe-wide destruction and recreation”, and maybe even “but you never existed - you were just a character in an RPG / thought experiment / simulator” rabbit holes that I’m not ready to go down just yet.

But, basically, would an omniscient observer see a Person A whose consciousness terminates, regardless of the existence of a Person B who is indistinguishable from Person A? This is how the Transhumanist Eclipse Phase very obviously fails my test - the beings in universe don’t even need special tools, as it’s their explicit intent to wipe the consciousness of the “Person A”.

But even that, as relevant as it is, is a step removed from the question, are there any RPGs that, rather than encouraging us to ask such questions, exist in a time after the denizens have already asked such questions, and found answers?

[NichG]

Replying to “I just realized how naive I’ve been” with “you’re still naive” is ouch, but fair if you demonstrate that you understand my current naïveté.

I’m just not 100% sure we’re there yet.

So… yes, there are multiple ways to define the “self”. I’m not willing to concede that which definition one uses is or should be arbitrary, though. I’m not convinced that it’s purely a matter of politics and society, rather than science or “fact”, in all cases. So we might have some interesting discussions there.

Not arbitrary exactly. Maybe a better term would be 'not fundamental'? Physical reality puts us into a context in which certain boundaries are really hard to violate except conceptually, and other boundaries are really easy to violate. Its not hard to experience changing our mind. It's pretty hard to experience fusing with a double of ourselves that has had a different life. Those things inform our choices and reasons for choosing certain things as being important to the 'self' and other things as not.

But that doesn't make 'the self' a concept at the level of physics. If you had a different civilization on the other side of the universe that evolved a more plant-like form of organization, with multiple individuals connected in root networks or mycelium-equivalents, a kind of biology that would let them cut off their arm and grow another them from it freely - and where that other them would share experiences and memories and so on. Well, the definition of 'self' that would be suggested by their context would not be the same as the definition that is suggested by ours. Take a human and put them in their society though, and the definition of 'self' will not serve that human well. Take one of them and put them in human society, and human society's definitions of self will not serve them well.

It's sort of like talking about water as being liquid or gas, and then going to a planet where the ambient pressure is far past water's critical point and talking about the water there as a liquid or gas is nonsensical. If you just asked 'well, at a fundamental conceptual level and ignoring the conditions it's found in, is water matter in which theres a distinction between liquid and gas phases or not?'. Without context, the answer is mu.

But, regardless of the preceding paragraph, my… criteria for the “self” (at least for “normal”, non-“True Name” beings (again, future post (senility willing))) wrt an “Immortality” test, or a “you’re not my Hanna!” test involves what I call (very poorly) “continuity of consciousness”.

And, yes, my concept runs afoul of “every time you sleep”, “secret universe-wide destruction and recreation”, and maybe even “but you never existed - you were just a character in an RPG / thought experiment / simulator” rabbit holes that I’m not ready to go down just yet.

People tend to like this concept, and its a stance widely taken in this kind of discussion. My problem with it is that it's hiding behind something that is already a perceptual illusion. Phenomenally, you don't notice interruptions in your consciousness, so it feels 'my consciousness has not been interrupted'. But that's definitional in some sense - if you could notice an interruption, you would have been conscious during it, so it would not have been interrupted. Lots of cognitive psych experiments show that basically we reconstruct an integrated recollection of past events after the fact, rather than experiencing them in the now. This goes even to the extent of making up excuses for things which don't make sense in those reconstructions.

For example, people who have their corpus callosum severed lack integration of information between hemispheres of their brain. Since motor control and vision are divided such that one hemisphere predominately controls low-level motor stuff on one side and processes visual stuff on one side, you can do experiments like showing someone something only to their left eye and then ask 'tell me if you see anything verbally, and also write it down', and what they say in response disagrees with what they write in response, but if asked to explain that they'll come up with some reason and strongly believe it. (Incidentally, in monkeys it has been possible to temporarily or even just partially disconnect the corpus callosum by chilling it, so those monkeys can have the experience of having their consciousness split and re-integrated, such as it is...)

Some humans have a condition called 'blindsight' in which they lose the ability to say whether they are seeing anything or what they are seeing, but their visual system 'still works' in some sense. They can for example navigate a cluttered room, but they cannot explain how they managed to do so without bumping into things or tripping. If you show them a task like 'raise your hand if you see a circle', they get higher than chance level but (for a few decades after the onset of the condition at least) they tend to insist that they cannot possibly be doing the task. After a couple decades, they tend to learn a sort of meta-perception - perceiving that they're perceiving, but without actually having access to the contents.

So if you're constantly reconstructing your perception of events, you wouldn't actually be able to know if your consciousness was being interrupted constantly. Nor could anyone else. At best you could say 'I didn't perceive an interruption', but if consciousness as a process is basically taking a bunch of disparate flashes of stimulus and thought and weaving them together into a plausible narrative, you wouldn't perceive an interruption even if it was engineered to happen. Nor would any outside observer be able to measure something that is truly uninterrupted in humans except at death, so long as they were willing to slice events finely enough and go down to timescales faster than neurons fire at - basically anything sub-millisecond.

But, basically, would an omniscient observer see a Person A whose consciousness terminates, regardless of the existence of a Person B who is indistinguishable from Person A? This is how the Transhumanist Eclipse Phase very obviously fails my test - the beings in universe don’t even need special tools, as it’s their explicit intent to wipe the consciousness of the “Person A”.

But even that, as relevant as it is, is a step removed from the question, are there any RPGs that, rather than encouraging us to ask such questions, exist in a time after the denizens have already asked such questions, and found answers?

I mean, anything with souls, at least if you don't look too closely or ask the uncomfortable questions.

[OldTrees1]

But even that, as relevant as it is, is a step removed from the question, are there any RPGs that, rather than encouraging us to ask such questions, exist in a time after the denizens have already asked such questions, and found answers?

Question: Do the answers the denizens found need to be correct?

For example D&D has multiple groups that assume the soul is the correct answer and they can use soul magic (or divinations) to double check the soul's presence and continuity. Other denizens in D&D (for example inheritance) have a vested interest in assuming the correct answer is the continuity of the body's lifespan (and then hide any times they needed to be revived).

[Herbert_W]

But let’s see if I can give use cases for the question I was trying to ask. Hmmm… your “fear of dying” I think matches my “Immortality” definition. Maybe. . . . So the question of, “is this the real them?”, “is this the same them?” matters a bit.

I think I see where you're coming from - but I also think that we need to dig a little deeper into the question of why we care before we hit answers. You're concerned with not "killing" - i.e. not killing "the original" of - other people, but why? This is going to sound a little weird, but what specific bad things follow from killing people that you're trying to avoid?

I can identify two:

• People instinctively fear death, becasue people in the past who feared death had more kids. Fear is an emotion, and emotions are not beholden to reason or to matters of fact. Maybe this fear is ill-founded, and maybe this "self" which we seek to preserve is ill-defined such that it's not clear what sort of copy would be a continuation, but this is nonetheless a real far that we have. Fear is both inherently unpleasant and therefore (from a utilitarian or even just "I have functioning mammalian empathy" perspective) bad, and also leads people to behave in counterproductive ways. Less death means less fear of death (and likewise, less anxiety over loosing loved ones, etc.)
• Death leaves a hole in the social fabric. When a person dies, the people who love them miss them - plus, on a practical level, some amount of expertise and wisdom is lost.

I'm going to go out on a limb and say that these are the only bad things that result from death, if we assume that we're talking about proper actual no-afterlife death. Being dead is something that people cannot experience, almost by definition, becasue the dead have no experiences. The now-dead are no worse off than the never-born.

So, since we have two problems, we need two solutions. There are two definitions of "same person" that are useful in this context:

• First, a person is the "same" if the first entity accepts the second as a continuation of themselves. I may have changed greatly 20 years from now; but as that change will be gradual I can accept my future self as a continuation of my present self and therefore do not regard this as a form of death. Likewise, I accept my future self when I wake up in the morning as a continuation of myself and therefore do not fear sleep. If I were to accept a clone or uploaded backup as being "me" then I'd get the same valuable reassurance.
  This means, significantly, that there is no one-size-fits-all answer. Different people may have different opinions on what counts as being "them" and may or may not trust their backups or even choose to make backups at all.
  
• Second, a person is the "same" if they can fill the hole that the departed left - and I here I mean actually and properly fill the hole. (Things like rebound relationships with parallel-universe-clones who are actually significantly different definitely don't count!) There's two criteria here: the person must be similar enough that they will be able to fill the role, and others must be prepared to accept them as the original.
  Once again, there's no one-size-fits-all answer, especially considering the need for others to accept the "resurrected" person, and doubly especially as they may have beliefs regarding souls/afterlives/etc. which prevent that.

I was asking, I suppose, what worlds have already asked such questions, have already developed appropriate toolkits to evaluate the “self”?

Perhaps I've gotten ahead of myself by offering practical solutions. Let's talk about some fictional ones.

There's many stories that have raised this question. Not all of them have toolkits which provide answers - and not all of those have toolkits which the author expects the reader to agree provide appropriate answers. I think that's significant. A writer who proposes a single definitive answer to this question risks loosing readers who don't agree with that answer, and looses the opportunity to provoke thought in readers who do.

This is a list of examples off the top of my head; I may come up with more later.

• SMBC occasionally touches on this among other philosophical issues. (And yes, each comic does IMO technically count as a story albeit a brief one.) Here's an example of a recent comic which seems more interested in laughing at the problem than solving it - but hey, this is one problem where laughing at it kinda is a solution, if only for the individual who is laughing.
• Schlock Mercenary is a completed webcomic which starts as campy sci-fi action comedy and slowly turns into more philosophical sci-fi action. It's very, very good - even if it takes a little while to get going. It has a very lengthy archive. During the run of the webcomic, technology is discovered which allows digital backup copies of people to be made and then either put into lab-grown clone bodies or run in simulation. While the author expresses no view on whether these clones are "really" the people that they copy and the cast expresses or implies various views, pragmatism wins out - there's philosophical hand-wringing over the question, but ultimately clones are people who fill person-shaped holes in society and whether they're "the original" or not doesn't matter. Schlock Mercenary also has several themes and plot threads that are coincidentally relevant to this thread - there's no slime girls but the main character is a carbosylicate amorph, for example.
• The Age of EM (link is to a book review) mostly doesn't deal with this issue, but it does provide a framework for constructing hypothetical situations useful for picking apart intuitions relating to it such as this.
• The very first episode of Existential Comics takes a different approach to this question - and it's so short that I'll avoid describing it at all to avoid spoilers. If this comic advocates for anything at all, then it's advocating for an unexpected answer to your question that leads to a sort of radical empathy that's . . . uh, probably better explained by just directing you to the comic. (The rest of this webcomic is philosophy jokes. They're good jokes, but only sometimes and only tangentially relevant to the topic at hand.)

I’m just not 100% sure we’re there yet.

So… yes, there are multiple ways to define the “self”. I’m not willing to concede that which definition one uses is or should be arbitrary, though. I’m not convinced that it’s purely a matter of politics and society, rather than science or “fact”, in all cases.

I'm not NichG, but I'd like to make it clear that I'm not suggesting that the definition of "self" is arbitrary, or purely a matter of politics or society. Human instinct plays a strong role here; we have an instinct for self-preservation which drives us to preserve some concept of "self." There are important purposes for which some definitions of "self" work and others do not.

The intuition that there is a singular indivisible persistent essence which defines a person's real self is one that's buried deeply in our minds. It's not an easy one to give up. This is partially because the question "which copy is the original?" is a disguised query, partially becasue our survival instinct forces us to have a sense of self, and partially becasue giving up this idea kinda feels like death, which is the very thing that we're afraid of.

Going back to your central point:

But even that, as relevant as it is, is a step removed from the question, are there any RPGs that, rather than encouraging us to ask such questions, exist in a time after the denizens have already asked such questions, and found answers?

I'll acknowledge that the worlds I referenced above don't contain the sort of answer that you're looking for. None of them show answers to the question of the definition of self; perhaps some show answers to the problem of the definition of self.

I think any story which proposes a singular and concrete answer to this question runs into the issue that people will disagree with that answer - if not people in the story, then readers. NichG already gave examples of stories with answers where disagreement exists, and examples of answers with horrifying implications. Even if a fictional world has a tool for detecting some indivisible essence of self-ness, there's no guarantee that the thing detected will correspond with a concept of "self" that all humans find sufficient for the purpose of quelling self-preservation fear or social identification.

Such as:

'Anyone who can perform 2FA to log into your account is by definition you', 'anyone whose decisions correlate to within 98% of the copy we have on record is that person - you are only allowed to change your mind at a rate of 10kb of entropy each day, anything more is an anomaly and you aren't you'

Oh yes. That, right there, is excellent horrifying worldbuilding.

[Quertus]

Ok, I see I’ve asked the wrong question: “and found answers” should be replaced with, “and created tools sufficient to find answers”? That is, sure, people can disagree on the definition of the “self”, or not recognize that there are many simultaneous definitions, some is which are or may be “being type dependent”. So, sure, the question should be less about answers and more about tools.

Question: Do the answers the denizens found need to be correct?

For example D&D has multiple groups that assume the soul is the correct answer and they can use soul magic (or divinations) to double check the soul's presence and continuity. Other denizens in D&D (for example inheritance) have a vested interest in assuming the correct answer is the continuity of the body's lifespan (and then hide any times they needed to be revived).

I mean, anything with souls, at least if you don't look too closely or ask the uncomfortable questions.

Yeah, fair to say, “souls” was my answer in some systems, before I started asking those uncomfortable questions. So I guess I’m interested in systems with adequate tools, even if the denizens of that system used those tools to come to a faulty answer (or even one that someone with a different PoV might disagree with).

Not arbitrary exactly. Maybe a better term would be 'not fundamental'? Physical reality puts us into a context in which certain boundaries are really hard to violate except conceptually, and other boundaries are really easy to violate. Its not hard to experience changing our mind. It's pretty hard to experience fusing with a double of ourselves that has had a different life. Those things inform our choices and reasons for choosing certain things as being important to the 'self' and other things as not.

Dreams and dementia make it not impossible in a trivial sense, at least.

But that doesn't make 'the self' a concept at the level of physics. If you had a different civilization on the other side of the universe that evolved a more plant-like form of organization, with multiple individuals connected in root networks or mycelium-equivalents, a kind of biology that would let them cut off their arm and grow another them from it freely - and where that other them would share experiences and memories and so on. Well, the definition of 'self' that would be suggested by their context would not be the same as the definition that is suggested by ours. Take a human and put them in their society though, and the definition of 'self' will not serve that human well. Take one of them and put them in human society, and human society's definitions of self will not serve them well.

I’m… not sure I agree?

If, like Waller believed that the world needs a Batman, I believed that the world needed a Quertus (the poster, not the Wizard), *and* 3e magic was accessible to me in this world? And I developed a counterpart to the Elan, a “Me-lan”, that have the subject my memories and mindset? Or just used that psionic power (Mind Seed?) that did basically the same thing? I see that giving me a similar state to the plants… and not really changing the core logic by which I define the self.

Yes, the laws of the two cultures, created in ignorance of the conceptual existence of the other type of life, may be erroneous. But the underlying principles and definitions by which the laws were written (“murder is bad because…”) should still be applicable, and unable to create updated laws.

Several of my characters have become a third type of life, such that they exist independent of their body or bodies, simply viewing “life” as that meat puppet by which they interact with the meat world (or whatever). IMO, if “murder” is defined correctly, it doesn’t apply to their bodies (killing those would be more akin to “destruction of property”).

So, yes, code hard-coded by idiots (ignoramuses, I suppose) will fail, but I don’t see why properly written code would necessarily have the same problem.

People tend to like this concept, and its a stance widely taken in this kind of discussion. My problem with it is that it's hiding behind something that is already a perceptual illusion. Phenomenally, you don't notice interruptions in your consciousness, so it feels 'my consciousness has not been interrupted'. But that's definitional in some sense - if you could notice an interruption, you would have been conscious during it, so it would not have been interrupted. Lots of cognitive psych experiments show that basically we reconstruct an integrated recollection of past events after the fact, rather than experiencing them in the now. This goes even to the extent of making up excuses for things which don't make sense in those reconstructions.

For example, people who have their corpus callosum severed lack integration of information between hemispheres of their brain. Since motor control and vision are divided such that one hemisphere predominately controls low-level motor stuff on one side and processes visual stuff on one side, you can do experiments like showing someone something only to their left eye and then ask 'tell me if you see anything verbally, and also write it down', and what they say in response disagrees with what they write in response, but if asked to explain that they'll come up with some reason and strongly believe it. (Incidentally, in monkeys it has been possible to temporarily or even just partially disconnect the corpus callosum by chilling it, so those monkeys can have the experience of having their consciousness split and re-integrated, such as it is...)

Some humans have a condition called 'blindsight' in which they lose the ability to say whether they are seeing anything or what they are seeing, but their visual system 'still works' in some sense. They can for example navigate a cluttered room, but they cannot explain how they managed to do so without bumping into things or tripping. If you show them a task like 'raise your hand if you see a circle', they get higher than chance level but (for a few decades after the onset of the condition at least) they tend to insist that they cannot possibly be doing the task. After a couple decades, they tend to learn a sort of meta-perception - perceiving that they're perceiving, but without actually having access to the contents.

Scarily enough, I grok this concept way better than you’d probably think I should. That said, I handle my version of this with acceptance, and straight-faced comments that, were I not projecting “the utmost calm” (nobody believed that, right?), I think the people I’ve told I needed help would have panicked. I’ve never tried simultaneously saying and writing, to determine whether there’s a “split consciousness” effect - and, if so, whether my rationalization of my actions is equally irrational. Next time it happens, I’ll see if my senility will let me remember to try this experiment.

So if you're constantly reconstructing your perception of events, you wouldn't actually be able to know if your consciousness was being interrupted constantly. Nor could anyone else. At best you could say 'I didn't perceive an interruption', but if consciousness as a process is basically taking a bunch of disparate flashes of stimulus and thought and weaving them together into a plausible narrative, you wouldn't perceive an interruption even if it was engineered to happen. Nor would any outside observer be able to measure something that is truly uninterrupted in humans except at death, so long as they were willing to slice events finely enough and go down to timescales faster than neurons fire at - basically anything sub-millisecond.

I’m not sure whether to label this “important” or “nonsense” yet, but I do know that I’m tagging it “not fully understood”. Like, even the first phrase (ignoring that it’s an “If” clause) of “constantly reconstructing your perception of events”, I’m already lost.

I think I see where you're coming from - but I also think that we need to dig a little deeper into the question of why we care before we hit answers. You're concerned with not "killing" - i.e. not killing "the original" of - other people, but why? This is going to sound a little weird, but what specific bad things follow from killing people that you're trying to avoid?

I can identify two:

• People instinctively fear death, becasue people in the past who feared death had more kids. Fear is an emotion, and emotions are not beholden to reason or to matters of fact. Maybe this fear is ill-founded, and maybe this "self" which we seek to preserve is ill-defined such that it's not clear what sort of copy would be a continuation, but this is nonetheless a real far that we have. Fear is both inherently unpleasant and therefore (from a utilitarian or even just "I have functioning mammalian empathy" perspective) bad, and also leads people to behave in counterproductive ways. Less death means less fear of death (and likewise, less anxiety over loosing loved ones, etc.)
• Death leaves a hole in the social fabric. When a person dies, the people who love them miss them - plus, on a practical level, some amount of expertise and wisdom is lost.

I'm going to go out on a limb and say that these are the only bad things that result from death, if we assume that we're talking about proper actual no-afterlife death. Being dead is something that people cannot experience, almost by definition, becasue the dead have no experiences. The now-dead are no worse off than the never-born.

So, since we have two problems, we need two solutions. There are two definitions of "same person" that are useful in this context:

• First, a person is the "same" if the first entity accepts the second as a continuation of themselves. I may have changed greatly 20 years from now; but as that change will be gradual I can accept my future self as a continuation of my present self and therefore do not regard this as a form of death. Likewise, I accept my future self when I wake up in the morning as a continuation of myself and therefore do not fear sleep. If I were to accept a clone or uploaded backup as being "me" then I'd get the same valuable reassurance.
  This means, significantly, that there is no one-size-fits-all answer. Different people may have different opinions on what counts as being "them" and may or may not trust their backups or even choose to make backups at all.
  
• Second, a person is the "same" if they can fill the hole that the departed left - and I here I mean actually and properly fill the hole. (Things like rebound relationships with parallel-universe-clones who are actually significantly different definitely don't count!) There's two criteria here: the person must be similar enough that they will be able to fill the role, and others must be prepared to accept them as the original.
  Once again, there's no one-size-fits-all answer, especially considering the need for others to accept the "resurrected" person, and doubly especially as they may have beliefs regarding souls/afterlives/etc. which prevent that.

Huh. So… legally… I can see cultures existing on both sides of, “if I kill your X, but replace it with an equal X, I am / am not liable for the charges that would otherwise be leveled against me”.

I feel that this analysis only covers the societies that would accept a clone President as proper recompense and adequate to remove charges for… regicide is just kings, right? Anyway, I don’t feel that this line of thought would save a cloner’s skin if society still held them accountable for murder.

But if everyone were “patched” to this morality “upgrade”? Ok, yeah, I think at that point a hypothetical “double snap” individual, or my “genocide-powered Resurrection” might be accepted.

Perhaps I've gotten ahead of myself by offering practical solutions. Let's talk about some fictional ones.

There's many stories that have raised this question. Not all of them have toolkits which provide answers - and not all of those have toolkits which the author expects the reader to agree provide appropriate answers. I think that's significant. A writer who proposes a single definitive answer to this question risks loosing readers who don't agree with that answer, and looses the opportunity to provoke thought in readers who do.

This is a list of examples off the top of my head; I may come up with more later.

• SMBC occasionally touches on this among other philosophical issues. (And yes, each comic does IMO technically count as a story albeit a brief one.) Here's an example of a recent comic which seems more interested in laughing at the problem than solving it - but hey, this is one problem where laughing at it kinda is a solution, if only for the individual who is laughing.
• Schlock Mercenary is a completed webcomic which starts as campy sci-fi action comedy and slowly turns into more philosophical sci-fi action. It's very, very good - even if it takes a little while to get going. It has a very lengthy archive. During the run of the webcomic, technology is discovered which allows digital backup copies of people to be made and then either put into lab-grown clone bodies or run in simulation. While the author expresses no view on whether these clones are "really" the people that they copy and the cast expresses or implies various views, pragmatism wins out - there's philosophical hand-wringing over the question, but ultimately clones are people who fill person-shaped holes in society and whether they're "the original" or not doesn't matter. Schlock Mercenary also has several themes and plot threads that are coincidentally relevant to this thread - there's no slime girls but the main character is a carbosylicate amorph, for example.
• The Age of EM (link is to a book review) mostly doesn't deal with this issue, but it does provide a framework for constructing hypothetical situations useful for picking apart intuitions relating to it such as this.
• The very first episode of Existential Comics takes a different approach to this question - and it's so short that I'll avoid describing it at all to avoid spoilers. If this comic advocates for anything at all, then it's advocating for an unexpected answer to your question that leads to a sort of radical empathy that's . . . uh, probably better explained by just directing you to the comic. (The rest of this webcomic is philosophy jokes. They're good jokes, but only sometimes and only tangentially relevant to the topic at hand.)

Much to read, senility willing. Thanks!

I'm not NichG, but I'd like to make it clear that I'm not suggesting that the definition of "self" is arbitrary, or purely a matter of politics or society. Human instinct plays a strong role here; we have an instinct for self-preservation which drives us to preserve some concept of "self." There are important purposes for which some definitions of "self" work and others do not.

Oh, yes, I’m all about different definitions of “self” for different purposes (legal property vs Immortality test being the two big / obvious ones).

The intuition that there is a singular indivisible persistent essence which defines a person's real self is one that's buried deeply in our minds. It's not an easy one to give up. This is partially because the question "which copy is the original?" is a disguised query, partially becasue our survival instinct forces us to have a sense of self, and partially becasue giving up this idea kinda feels like death, which is the very thing that we're afraid of.

Eh…

Ok, imagine if we - or some subset of “we” could perceive multiple realities (maybe finite, maybe infinite. Shrug.)

This set of beings has the power to sacrifice their body; if they do so, *two* copies of themselves appear in two different universes.

With a little testing (two beings from the same reality both do this, and appear in the same world), they learn that they pass every test of memory and personality… except that details learned between the start and end of the “reality duplication” process are lost.

Unless there’s a clear “short term memory is lost” obvious science answer, even if it’s only 1 body, and to a world of choice, I’d still expect that the “self” of my Immortality test has died.

Whereas my goo girl split… is trickier for me to talk about. Under case #1 (the one I was picturing being true), both are “me” for the me that existed before the split; each is individually “me” - and a different “me” from one another - after the split.

Killing one is still murder, as they each have their own identity, in addition to both having the identity of their pre-split selves.

(Not sure if that made sense)

Going back to your central point:


I'll acknowledge that the worlds I referenced above don't contain the sort of answer that you're looking for. None of them show answers to the question of the definition of self; perhaps some show answers to the problem of the definition of self.

I think any story which proposes a singular and concrete answer to this question runs into the issue that people will disagree with that answer - if not people in the story, then readers. NichG already gave examples of stories with answers where disagreement exists, and examples of answers with horrifying implications. Even if a fictional world has a tool for detecting some indivisible essence of self-ness, there's no guarantee that the thing detected will correspond with a concept of "self" that all humans find sufficient for the purpose of quelling self-preservation fear or social identification.

Such as:


Oh yes. That, right there, is excellent horrifying worldbuilding.

Yeah, horror is definitely… easy here. But, yeah, do the tools suffice to let each individual make that judgment on whether the thing detected meets their criteria?

[OldTrees1]

Ok, I see I’ve asked the wrong question: “and found answers” should be replaced with, “and created tools sufficient to find answers”? That is, sure, people can disagree on the definition of the “self”, or not recognize that there are many simultaneous definitions, some is which are or may be “being type dependent”. So, sure, the question should be less about answers and more about tools.

Yeah, fair to say, “souls” was my answer in some systems, before I started asking those uncomfortable questions. So I guess I’m interested in systems with adequate tools, even if the denizens of that system used those tools to come to a faulty answer (or even one that someone with a different PoV might disagree with).

Okay, so there are 2 main models (matching vs continuity) and several metrics that could be tracked (although remember what NichG said about dystopias. When a metric is tracked it stops being a good metric.)

Pattern matching of body is common enough. You just need some semi unique identifier of the body and you can use that to check 2 bodies match. IRL this is used a lot (DNA, Fingerprint) including when the identifier is not very good (Fingerprint).

Like all cases of continuity, continuity of the body is a bit harder to confirm. You need records, witnesses, or recordings tracking the movements of the body. This lets you rule out cases with identical bodies where one wanders off and another shows up. Sometimes the "tools" used to confirm continuity actually only show pattern matching but their merit comes from increasing the correlation between the two. Imagine getting chipped and using the chip as evidence you had body continuity (despite the unlikely case of a forged duplicate chip).

Pattern matching of the mind is similar but more sci fi than pattern matching of the body. Just use a mind scan, telepathy, reading thoughts, etc.

Continuity of the mind ends with sleep. So it is unlikely to be used as a standalone metric. To account for sleep it would probably also extend to inheritors the previous mind consented to. People would assume this automatically for sleep, so it would mostly come up with significant deviations of mind pattern matching. Those significant deviations would be assumed as a lack of continuity and require proof the previous mind pattern consented to the new mind pattern inheriting the mind. This can be accomplished as easily as a Will/Waiver with a Witness.

Of course the body and mind are also each a medley of individual entities. For example a brain transplant would be continuity of brain but not complete continuity of body. If a denizen cares about a specific subset, then similar toolkits can be used for that subset. Value pattern matching is just a subset of mind pattern matching.



Edit:
As an aside, if someone can be killed multiple times, then their continued existence after being murdered does not contradict the fact they were murdered. Likewise if nobody can be killed multiple times, then someone's continued existence after someone else was murdered does not contradict the fact that someone else was murdered. Our moral intuitions about murder don't really help differentiate cases like murdering a googirl. That might be a multi-lives person being murdered once, or a single-life person being murdered once.

[NichG]

Dreams and dementia make it not impossible in a trivial sense, at least.

I’m… not sure I agree?

If, like Waller believed that the world needs a Batman, I believed that the world needed a Quertus (the poster, not the Wizard), *and* 3e magic was accessible to me in this world? And I developed a counterpart to the Elan, a “Me-lan”, that have the subject my memories and mindset? Or just used that psionic power (Mind Seed?) that did basically the same thing? I see that giving me a similar state to the plants… and not really changing the core logic by which I define the self.

Yes, the laws of the two cultures, created in ignorance of the conceptual existence of the other type of life, may be erroneous. But the underlying principles and definitions by which the laws were written (“murder is bad because…”) should still be applicable, and unable to create updated laws.

Several of my characters have become a third type of life, such that they exist independent of their body or bodies, simply viewing “life” as that meat puppet by which they interact with the meat world (or whatever). IMO, if “murder” is defined correctly, it doesn’t apply to their bodies (killing those would be more akin to “destruction of property”).

So, yes, code hard-coded by idiots (ignoramuses, I suppose) will fail, but I don’t see why properly written code would necessarily have the same problem.

I think you're still thinking like a 'plant-human' rather than like a plant-as-an-alien-species.

So for example, take something like a fruit tree. It looks like a single organism, but each bit of growth from its nodes is essentially a conjoined clone that happens to share a vascular system. If you cut off and plant a branch, a twig, the stem of a leaf, then you can end up getting a second tree that's a clone of the first. These units are called 'phytomers', same kind of meaning as monomers vs polymers - they're the units of the plant. The thing is though that existing as a single phytomer isn't how plants go through their lifecycle. Some phytomers will need to branch into roots. Others will need to support leaves. Others still will flower. It's all the same plant, but effectively its 'identity' in every way that actually matters to it in an evolutionary sense is a colony.

So the very idea of worrying about 'which phytomer is the original' is nonsensical from the perspective of a plant. It's not like 'one individual, now two individuals' - its 'one genome, in multiple places, doing multiple things; but also organized into vascular networks which may be the same, or divided over space'.

Also those two boundaries - genetic and vascular - aren't one contained inside the other, but more like a Venn diagram. That's why you can do something like use grafting to make a single tree that bears 40 kinds of fruit at once. The self/other detection of plants is flexible enough to basically say 'oh, those cells are in the same genus as me? Okay, that's enough - my body will recognize them as me'.

So its not just 'hey I can make a copy', it would be like having your entire existence and relationship with the world built around an extended self rather than an individuated body under top-down mental control.

Scarily enough, I grok this concept way better than you’d probably think I should. That said, I handle my version of this with acceptance, and straight-faced comments that, were I not projecting “the utmost calm” (nobody believed that, right?), I think the people I’ve told I needed help would have panicked. I’ve never tried simultaneously saying and writing, to determine whether there’s a “split consciousness” effect - and, if so, whether my rationalization of my actions is equally irrational. Next time it happens, I’ll see if my senility will let me remember to try this experiment.

You'd need to have irreversible brain surgery to get the effect, so I don't recommend trying to do this experiment yourself.

I’m not sure whether to label this “important” or “nonsense” yet, but I do know that I’m tagging it “not fully understood”. Like, even the first phrase (ignoring that it’s an “If” clause) of “constantly reconstructing your perception of events”, I’m already lost.

Well, the extreme version of it is easy to experience. For most people if they read a story once through, try to explain what happened in the story to someone else, then compare what they said with the original story, they'll often find that rather than just missing or leaving out details, they will have invented stuff that wasn't actually in the story. This also shows up with witnesses to crimes and things like that. I seem to recall there being an experiment that tested the assertion that people made about sharply remembering strongly emotional events (like the Challenger explosion), and the evidence was basically that they had a higher degree of confidence in their memory of those events, but not a higher accuracy of recall.

Then there's stuff like optical illusions, which are a lower-level version of this. Human vision only has color perception near the center of the visual field and is monochrome in the periphery. If you draw a red dot on one piece of paper and a green dot on another, and slowly move the red dot out of your vision without moving your focus, then move the green dot paper back in its place, there will be a small interval in which you perceive that dot as red. Your brain is filling in the blanks with what it can infer about the world, rather than actually perceiving the world as it is.

[Vahnavoi]

NichG is talking about representational realism versus direct realism - that is, the question whether our senses give us direct information of the world-as-it-is, or merely a filtered representation.

This links to some of the above discussion points, including the funny Saturday Morning Cartoon Cereal strip:

As material beings, humans are subject to natural selection. But, on a grand scale, natural selection does not care about who is right. It cares about who is left. Should there ever be conflict between understanding reality and propagating existence, natural selection will pick the latter. If the secret of life is that life is bad, then those who see the world-as-it-is are inclined to remove themselves from the gene pool, leaving only those who would believe in comforting lies instead. Blind idiot god of evolution is an evil demiurge or demon of Descartes pulling a veil of ignorance over the eyes of living being.

[Devils_Advocate]

the real you is in your first body. The first time that body’s mind gets overwritten, you’re dead.

What is this "you" that is in, rather than simply is, a body? I'd have thought that it would be a mind, and your second sentence supports that supposition. But in that case, in what way is the same mind in a different body not also "you"?

But, basically, would an omniscient observer see a Person A whose consciousness terminates, regardless of the existence of a Person B who is indistinguishable from Person A?

Indistinguishable to whom?

An omniscient being knows everything by definition. If there's a difference between Person A and Person B, an omniscient being is aware of that difference and can distinguish them from each other on that basis. If even an omniscient being can't distinguish between Person A and Person B, then there is no difference between them; they're the same; Person A is Person B.

This is how the Transhumanist Eclipse Phase very obviously fails my test - the beings in universe don’t even need special tools, as it’s their explicit intent to wipe the consciousness of the “Person A”.

Well, sure, but then they put it somewhere else. As I once saw it put, "Yeah, teleportation technically kills you, but it brings you back to life again afterwards."

If you want to check whether Person B is Person A, there are lots of tests you can do. I recommend asking a question that only that person would know the answer to. Sure, they could theoretically have been replaced by a telepathic shapeshifter, but at that point we're dealing with the problem of induction. Ain't like complete certainty only being justified for tautologies is something special to this case, y'know?

[NichG]

NichG is talking about representational realism versus direct realism - that is, the question whether our senses give us direct information of the world-as-it-is, or merely a filtered representation.

This links to some of the above discussion points, including the funny Saturday Morning Cartoon Cereal strip:

As material beings, humans are subject to natural selection. But, on a grand scale, natural selection does not care about who is right. It cares about who is left. Should there ever be conflict between understanding reality and propagating existence, natural selection will pick the latter. If the secret of life is that life is bad, then those who see the world-as-it-is are inclined to remove themselves from the gene pool, leaving only those who would believe in comforting lies instead. Blind idiot god of evolution is an evil demiurge or demon of Descartes pulling a veil of ignorance over the eyes of living being.

Its even worse in some sense, since basically nothing has access to the world-as-it-is. Even physical interactions between particles are mediated by other force-carrying particles, and the degrees of freedom that any given particle possesses are not enough to actually encode the difference between distinct histories or far-field universes that the particle exists in, due to there being a noise floor from quantum mechanics on those quantities. So basically even a physical particle is at best seeing shadows on the wall of a cave in the way that it interacts with the rest of the universe.

Of course that need not be the case for fictional universes. In a fictional universe you can say 'what if abstract concepts like truth are actually first-order members of the rules that govern how events proceed'.

[Yuki Akuma]

It's important to remember that Eclipse Phase is a horror game, and it's supposed to make you ask these questions. There's a reason you take sanity damage from resleeving.

[Mechalich]

It's important to remember that Eclipse Phase is a horror game, and it's supposed to make you ask these questions. There's a reason you take sanity damage from resleeving.

It is a horror game, but Eclipse Phase is generally extremely pro-transhumanity overall. The horror elements are mostly sourced to either third party actors - the TITANs, aliens, etc. - or are the result of nasty systems interactions restricting the freedom of the post-scarcity environment, especially market capitalism. The game wears its politics on its sleeve and even organizes things astrographically, to the point that simply getting to Uranus is basically punching your ticket to a (limited) paradise.

Additionally, the way the game is written the mental damage aspect of resleeving seems to be far less related to existential questions and more centered on 'crap I was just killed and omg that hurt' and 'crap, this is a completely different body and its giving me a huge headache,' and similar more immediate issues.