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byrnema comments on Open Thread: February 2010 - Less Wrong
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Daniel Varga wrote
What I started wondering about when I began assimilating this idea of merging, copying and deleting identities, is what kind of legal/justice system could we depend upon if this was possible to enforce non-criminal behavior?
Right now we can threaten to punish people by restricting their freedom over a period of time that is significant with respect to the length of their lifetime. However, the whole equation might change if a would-be criminal thinks there's a p% chance they won't get caught, and a (1-p)% chance that one of their identities will have to go to jail...
Even a death penalty would be meaningless to someone who knows they could upload themselves to another vessel at any time. (If I had criminal intentions, I would upload myself just before the criminal act, so that the upload would be innocent.)
(I am posting this comment here because it is off-topic with respect to the thread, which was about whether we're in a simulation or not.)
In a world with an FAI Singleton, actions that would violate another individual's rights might be simply unavailable, making the concept of a legal/justice system obsolete.
In other scenarios, uploading/splitting would still take resources, which might be better used than in absorbing a criminal punishment. A legal/justice system could apply punishments to multiple instances of the criminal, and could be powerful enough to likely track them down.
I am not convinced that the upload would be innocent. Maybe, if the upload was rolled back to before the criminal intentions. Any attempt by the upload to profit from the crime would definitely make it complicit.
Criminal punishment could also take the form of torture, effective if the would be criminal fears any of its instances being tortured, even if some are not.