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eirenicon comments on What makes you YOU? For non-deists only. - Less Wrong
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I don't see any reason to privilege the thread of consciousness - I'm confident it doesn't actually work the way you're supposing. My personal instinct is that I at every instant am identical to this particular configuration of particles, and given that such a configuration of particles will persist after the experiment (though on the other side of the world), it doesn't seem particularly as if I've been killed in any permanent way. (I'm fairly sure I couldn't collect on my estate, for example.) Sure, it's risky, but if sufficient safeguards are in place, it's teleporting, as pengvado said (?).
A note: even if I hadn't had this instinct before, the idea of a persistent and real thread of consciousness is brought into doubt in a number of ways by Daniel Dennett's revolutionary work, Consciousness Explained. My copy is on my shelf at home at the moment, but Dennett explains several instances in which the naive perception of consciousness is shown to be unreliable. I don't think it's a valid marker to use to identify identity.
(Besides, what of spells of unconsciousness? Should someone whose thread of consciousness is interrupted be considered to have been literally killed and reborn as a facsimile?)
Would you still say yes if there was more than 10 seconds between copying you and killing you - say, ten hours? Ten years? What's the maximum amount of time you'd agree to?
...no, I don't think so. It would change what the original RobinZ would do, but not a lot else.
So ten seconds isn't enough time to create a significant difference between the RobinZs, in your opinion. What if Omega told you that in the ten seconds following duplication, you, the original RZ, would have an original thought that would not occur to the other RZs (perhaps as a result of different environments)? Would that change your mind? What if Omega qualified it as a significant thought, one that could change the course of your life - maybe the seed of a new scientific theory, or an idea for a novel that would have won you a Pulitzer, had original RZ continued to exist?
I think the problem with this scenario is that saying "ten seconds" isn't meaningfully different from saying "1 Planck time", which becomes obvious when you turn down the offer that involves ten hours or years. Our answers are tied to our biological perception of time - if an hour felt like a second, we'd agree to the ten hour option. I don't think they're based on any rational observation of what actually happens in those ten seconds. A powerful AI would not agree to Omega's offer - how many CPU cycles can you pack into ten seconds?
I don't quite understand the idea that someone who accepted the original offer (timespan = 10 seconds) would turn down the offer for any greater timespan. Surely more lifespan for the original (or for any one copy) is a good thing? If you favor creation of clones at cost of your life, why wouldn't you favor creation of clones at no immediate cost at all?
I like your point. I think I would accept such an offer with a greater time span, if N was > 1, if I knew how long I had and if I could be with my copies.
For short time spans (1 second), I would accept N=1 for teleportation.
I don't know if I'll claim that.