Yeah, okay. You are illustrating my point exactly. Not everyone thinks the way you do about identity and not everyone thinks the way I mentioned about identity. I don't hold hard and fast about it one way or the other.

But the original example of someone who loses 15 minutes being similar to killing off a copy who only lived for 15 minutes implies a whole ton of things about identity. The word "copy" is too ambiguous to say, "Your copy is you."

If I switched in, "X's copy is X" and then started talking about various cultural examples of copying we quickly run into trouble. Why does "X's copy is X" work for people? Unless I missed a definition of terms comment or post somewhere, I don't see how we can just assume that is true.

The first use of "copy" I found in this thread is:

Probably the "friendly" action would be to create an un-drunk copy of them, and ask the copy to decide.

It was followed by:

And what do you do with the copy? Kill it?

As best as I can tell, you take the sentence, "Your copy is you" to be a tautology or definition or something along those veins. (I could obviously be wrong; please correct me if I am.) What would you call a functionally identical version of X with a separate, distinct Identity? Is it even possible? If it is, use that instead of "copy" when reading my comment:

Imagine a scenario where I cut off my arm. I am responsible. If my copy cuts off my arm, he would be responsible, not "me."

When I read the original comment I responded to:

From the point of view of your future self, the fifteen minutes you don't remember is exactly like a short-lived copy that got deleted after fifteen minutes.

I was not assuming your definition of copy. Which could entirely be my fault, but I find it hard to believe that you didn't understand my point enough to predict this response. If you did, it would have been much faster to simply say, "When people at LessWrong talk about copies they mean blah." In which case I would have responded, "Oh, okay, that makes sense. Ignore my comment."