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UnholySmoke comments on The Anthropic Trilemma - Less Wrong
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Why not? Imagine that bit is the memory/knowledge of which copy they are. After the copying, each copy naturally is curious what happened, and recall that bit. Now, if you had 1 person appearing in 2 places, it should be that every thought would be identical, right? Yet one copy will think '1!'; the other will think '0!'. As 1 != 0, this is a contradiction.
Not enough of a contradiction? Imagine further that the original had resolved to start thinking about hot sexy Playboy pinups if it was 1, but to think about all his childhood sins if 0. Or he decides quite arbitrarily to become a Sufi Muslim if 0, and a Mennonite if 1. Or... (insert arbitrarily complex mental processes contingent on that bit).
At some point you will surely admit that we now have 2 people and not just 1; but the only justifiable step at which to say they are 2 and not 1 is the first difference.
Actually I won't. While I grok your approach completely, I'd rather say my concept of 'an individual' breaks down once I have two minds with one bit's difference, or two identical minds, or any of these borderline cases we're so fond of.
Say I have two optimisers with one bit's difference. If that bit means one copy converts to Sufism and the other to Mennonism, then sure, two different people. If that one bit is swallowed up in later neural computations due to the coarse-grained-ness of the wetware, then we're back to one person since the two are, once again, functionally identical. Faced with contradictions like that, I'm expecting our idea of personal identity to go out the window pretty fast once tech like this actually arrives. Greg Egan's Diaspora pretty much nails this for me, have a look.
All your 'contradictions' go out the window once you let go of the idea of a mind as an indivisible unit. If our concept of identity is to have any value (and it really has to) then we need to learn to think more like reality, which doesn't care about things like 'one bit's difference'.
Ack. So if I understand you right, your alternative to bit-for-bit identity is to loosen it to some sort of future similarity, which can depend on future actions and outcomes; or in other words, there's a radical indeterminacy about even the minds in our example: are they same or are they different, who knows, it depends on whether the Sufism comes out in the wash! Ask me later; but then again, even then I won't be sure whether those 2 were the same when we started them running (always in motion the future is).
That seems like quite a bullet to bite, and I wonder whether you can hold to any meaningful 'individual', whether the difference be bit-wise or no. Even 2 distant non-borderline mindsmight grow into each other.
Indeed, that's what I'm driving at.
Harking back to my earlier comment, changing a single bit and suddenly having a whole new person is where my problem arises. If you change that bit back, are you back to one person? I might not be thinking hard enough, but my intuition doesn't accept that. With that in mind, I prefer to bite that bullet than talk about degrees of person-hood.
Here's an intuition for you: you take the number 5 and add 1 to it; then you subtract 1 from it; don't you have what you started with?
Well, I can't really argue with that. As long as you realize you're biting that bullet, I think we're still in a situation where it's just dueling intuitions. (Your intuition says one thing, mine another.)