{"id":1140,"date":"2025-12-31T09:40:13","date_gmt":"2025-12-31T07:40:13","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/diurnsky.com\/?p=1140"},"modified":"2025-12-31T10:35:32","modified_gmt":"2025-12-31T08:35:32","slug":"1140","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.diurnsky.com\/?p=1140","title":{"rendered":""},"content":{"rendered":"\n
I saw a YouTube video where they tried to figure what constitutes \"self.\" Surely, if you replace your limbs, or even your entire lower half of the body, \"you\" are still \"you.\" Maybe you can replace some parts of the brain, too? What can't you replace? 

They introduced an interesting thought experiment. Suppose you have an enemy. You hate them and want bad things to happen to them, but you love yourself and don't want bad things to happen to you. A mad scientist captures the two of you to swap your parts of the brain responsible for memories. Before they do so, they reveal to you they're going to torture one of the bodies: either the one with your memories, or the one with your enemy's. And you get to choose which. Imagine: a person wakes up after the operation and remembers that a moment before they were in a different body. Which one would you choose?

In the video, they chose to torture the body with the memories of their enemy, thus, presumably, concluding that the minimum or the central part of self is memory. They were confident \"they\" were in their enemy's body.

There were many undefined variables that would influence my choice. Who is my enemy? What is the condition of their body? Does my wish for bad things happening to them override all my other wishes? When people experience severe amnesia and cannot even remember their name, they usually retain their skills, such as language fluency or bicycle riding, since those are embedded deeper, so I assume those won't be swapped? What if they were born a prodigy easily capable of curing cancer and whatnot? Will the tortured body be traumatized so much it won't ever become a contributing member of society?

All in all, with those variables undefined, I would choose otherwise. I don't associate myself with my memories. I cannot, at this point, reduce self to some single part in the body, or to its bare minimum, but I know that other parts cumulatively are more important.

If my memories are transferred to the body of some retard, they may, for a period, think they believe in what they remember they believed in. But very soon their beliefs will match what they can comprehend. They won't be able to rationalize why rich people or artificial intelligence are good when everyone around them says they are very, very bad. They won't be able to see why stealing from the local store is bad when it's literally free stuff, and when there are so many movies about those badass criminals portrayed in a positive light. Similarly, if my memories are transferred to the body of someone who's way smarter than I, they will quickly see holes in the reasoning they remember they considered bulletproof and change their beliefs, values, and goals accordingly.

Like I said above, skills would likely remain unaffected, which is important. Even if you have some extraordinary piece of memory that can lead to the creation of a legendary song, or painting, or novel, what is it worth if the body can't play the instrument, can't hold the brush, doesn't have the vocabulary, and is incapable of seeing the beauty? It would be difficult to spot the difference. The body would walk like it usually walked, it would talk like it usually talked, with the same strides and words.

And there are so many other things. How well the body is maintained. What hormones it releases under stress. How it responds to a certain drug, or more importantly, to the lack of it. How it responds to hearing certain music or seeing another body in pain\u2014you don't recollect your memories for the automatic response to happen. How well it can focus. How well it can learn. Things like PTSD, OCD, and ADHD will remain, and even many aspects of personality are deeper than memories.

It's important to stress that I'd choose to spare my body not because it's perfect and my enemy's might not be, but because it's what I'd associate myself with more.

There is a side bonus to this choice. The body with my memories would've seen it coming. It would understand the reasons and accept its faith, at least for a period of time, while the body with the foreign memories will jubilate, and maybe consider its \"previous owner\" a useful idiot, at least for a period of time, before that body allows them to see why it happened and appreciate the choice.

People tend to value their memories more than anything else. I don't. And it's not because I didn't climb one hundred mountains or fuck one hundred people or study one hundred cultures, or whatever else they consider the pinnacle of their existence. If you are a worthless piece of shit, you are a worthless piece of shit, regardless of your experiences. Your experience gathering may bring more harm than good: you litter natural sights, you spread disease, you waste people's time. Some people assume all experience is good since it teaches you something. That's also misleading. What if a particular combination of experience and cognitive capacity teaches you heroin is good and must be sold to kids? Is that good to you, or to the world? I hope the answer is obvious.

Memories are incorporeal. With enough dedication you can make yourself believe you had some vivid experience, or forever forget you had some.

We can approach this question from a bunch of other angles. If you replace the memory of your laptop, it is still your laptop. Twin studies show intelligence is something like 70% heritable, meaning the entire lifetime of experience influences how your brain works relatively little. And what is self but the way your brain works? If you put your memories on a hard drive, you think it will become you? What if you put them inside a primitive LLM? I don't think it will. And yet twins had a lifetime of different experiences all of which shaped their brains in a different way, unlike in our thought experiment, where your brain is still your brain perfectly preserved and unshaped by any other experiences or memories. Thus, the old you and the new you (with the new memories) will be far more similar than even twins are similar.

I was somewhat hesitant right after I watched that YouTube video, but now that I wrote everything on paper, it seems ridiculous to consider that a foreign body with your memories is you.<\/pre>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
I saw a YouTube video where they tried to figure what constitutes “self.” Surely, if you replace your limbs, or even your entire lower half of the body, “you” are still “you.” Maybe you can replace some parts of the brain, too? What can’t you replace? They introduced an interesting thought experiment. Suppose you have […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.diurnsky.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1140"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.diurnsky.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.diurnsky.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.diurnsky.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.diurnsky.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1140"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/www.diurnsky.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1140\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1144,"href":"https:\/\/www.diurnsky.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1140\/revisions\/1144"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.diurnsky.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1140"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.diurnsky.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1140"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.diurnsky.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1140"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}