Below, in alphabetical order, are some key terms from the Schneider reading. Pick two of these, and for each, answer the following:
What does the term mean in the context of the reading? (Bonus: Research the term online. Can you find anything that helps to illuminate the term’s use in our reading?)
Is there controversy surrounding the idea the term refers to? If so, what (briefly) is the controversy?
What’s at least one question you have about the term? (Bonus: Having asked the question, speculate on what the answer might be.)
One key term encountered in Schneider’s Could You Merge With AI? and Getting a Mindscan is “essential properties”. Essential properties are those conditions required for an object or being to persist and maintain the relationship of identity with itself. Essential properties are prescribed to objects differently, based on the type of object or being. This split often occurs between the purely physical object and the classically alive organism. Within the first text, Could You Merge With AI? Schneider asserts that intuitively, an individual is the same “person” that they were in the first grade.
Schneider clarifies that her personal identity theory is tangential to John Locke’s theory of psychological identity. Locke supposed that the necessary quality to persist over time lies in the psychological states being similar, which he believed could be within the memory. Schneider’s point of departure from Locke’s theory is in the psychological persistence of personal identity. Rather than being concerned exclusively with personal identity, Schneider is also concerned with the persistence of the mind. This stems from the transhumanist argument, where Schneider seeks to defend the potential fusion of person and machine.
Fusion-optimists, those who defend the possibility of merging persons and machines, also play a role in diminishing the defining barrier between the two. The potentiality of fusion hinges on whether or not a person can also be evaluated as a “pattern,” which coincides with Amy Kind’s theory of machine minds being evaluable as persons. This distinction regards the relationship between humanity and technology and how it changes over time.
