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loqi comments on What makes you YOU? For non-deists only. - Less Wrong
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A challenge to all doubters.
Omega comes to you with a proposition - heck, I may be able to do it myself in a few decades. I offer to create N atomically precise clones of yourself on the other side of the planet, and give each one the dollar value of all your assets. You can set N as high as you like, provided there's a value that will make you accept the bargain. The price is that I'll kill you ten seconds later.
I assure you that, from past experience, you will not notice the creation of these clones during the ten seconds you have to live. Your extreme similarity will not cause any magical sharing of experiences. And the clones will not notice anything when, ten seconds from their creation, you die; no empirically measurable (including self-reported) consciousness transfers from you to them.
Do you accept the offer?
If you do, and you don't care about your own death, and you don't give as the reason the accomplishment of some external goals that are more important to you than life - then there's a fundamental disconnect between me and you. Indeed, between you and what I naively consider to be universal human ways of thinking. (Of course, if this is the case, the fault lies in my understanding; I'm not trying to denigrate anyone who responds.)
If someone thinks the external goals thingy is a problem (e.g., that all decisions are ultimately taken to satisfy external goals, because you believe a continuous self does not exist) then I can try to formulate a version of the scenario where this is not a consideration.
I accept. After which I may possibly decide to execute a coordinated suicide of something like N-3 or N-4 copies so as to increase the subjective payoff.
I certainly do acknowledge a subjective experience of consciousness. However, I don't understand why you treat its interruption as so catastrophic. Sleep does it all the time. If you define "I" solely in terms of consciousness, do you agree that "you" have only truly existed since you last awoke?
The intuition behind my acceptance of the local death you propose is based very much in my subjective experience of consciousness. Have you ever awakened in the middle of the night, had a verbal exchange with someone, and then fell asleep and forgot the entire experience, even when reminded of it? This seems entirely analogous to local death: You experience a few minutes of subjective existence, but then your thread then gets "reverted" to a previous state, and continues from there.
That's also why I'd have no problem suiciding most of the copies. If someone came to me right now and offered me a large sum of money in exchange for reverting all trace and memory of the previous two hours of my existence, I'd accept in a heartbeat.
It does seem probable. Certainly if I didn't need to sleep, I wouldn't agree to start sleeping, on these grounds - it looks much too dangerous!
As I just wrote in another reply, I am convinced that my way of looking at things is incomplete and does not extend to new types of experiences (e.g., cloning), but I am not at all convinced that any of the alternative theories proposed in this thread are better.