DanArmak comments on What makes you YOU? For non-deists only. - Less Wrong
You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.
You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.
Comments (92)
The 'you' I used referred only to the pre-duplication person, who is making the choice, and who is singular.
The view you describe is the view I described in the last paragraph of my previous comment (the one you replied to). I understand and agree that you decide things for all identical copies of you who may appear in the next second - because they're identical, they preserve your decisions. But you can only anticipate experiencing some one thing, not a plurality.
If someone creates a clone (or several) of me, I may not even know about it; and I do not expect to experience anything differently due to the existence of that clone.
If someone destroys my body, I presume I'll stop experiencing, although I have no idea what that would be like.
By inference, if someone creates a precise clone of me elsewhere and destroys my body at the same moment, I won't suddenly start experiencing the clone's life. I.e., I don't expect to suddenly experience a complete shift in location. Rather, I would experience the same thing (or lack of it) that I would experience if someone killed me without creating a clone.
Yes, this begs the question of why I experience continuity in this body, since physics has no concept of a continuous body. And why do I experience continuity across sleep and unconsciousness? I don't have an answer, but neither do the alternative you're proposing. The only real answer I've seen is the timeless hypothesis: that at each moment I have a separate moment-experience, which happens to include memories of previous experiences, but they are not necessarily true - they are just the way my brain makes sense of the universe, and it highlights or even invents continuity. But this is too much like the Boltzmann's Brain conjecture - consistent and with explanatory power, but unsatisfying.
"You" sure seemed like it referred to only one of the postduplication individuals here:
(This when one of me seems to be quite seriously affected, in that you plan to torture and kill that one.)
And here:
(This when I do privilege what I actually experience, and simply think of "I" in these futures as a plural.)
(But I'll be all of them! It's not as though 9,999 of these people are p-zombies or strangers or even just brand-new genetically identical twins! They're my futures!)