I would never have guessed that one of the side effects of the computational paradigm of mind would be a new form of proxy immortalism - by this I mean philosophies according to which you live on in your children, your race, your species, in the future consequences of your acts, or in your duplicates elsewhere in the multiverse. I suppose it's just another step beyond the idea that your copy is you, but it's still ironic to see this argument being made, given that it emerges from the same techno-conceptual zeitgeist which elsewhere is employed to urge a person not to be satisfied with living on in their children, their race, et cetera, but rather to seek personal survival beyond the traditional limits, because now it is finally conceivable that something more is possible.
Needless to say, I disagree profoundly with the idea that I "am" also anyone with whom I have some vague similarity. There's also a special appendix to my disagreement, in which I disagree specifically with the idea that Timeless Decision Theory has anything new to add here, except an extra layer of confusion. You don't need Timeless Decision Theory in order to identify with a group; identification with a group is not secretly a case of a person employing Timeless Decision Theory; and "acausal trade", as a phenomenon, is as real as "praying to God". Someone might engage in a thought process for which that is an accurate designation; and somewhere else in some other reality there might even be an entity which views itself as being on the other end of that relationship; but even if there is, it's a folie a deux, a combined madness. If someone in one insane asylum believes that he is the Emperor Napoleon, separated from his beloved Josephine, and if someone in another insane asylum believes that she is Josephine, separated from Napoleon, that doesn't validate the beliefs of either person, it doesn't make those beliefs rational, even if, considered together, the beliefs of those two people are mutually consistent. Acausal trade is irrational because it is acausal. It requires that you imagine, as your counterpart on the other side of the trade, only one, highly specific possible agent that happens to be thinking of you, and happens to respond to your choices in the way that you imagine, rather than any of the zillion other possible agents that would think of you but react according to completely different criteria.
If you do try to take into account the full range of agents that might be imagining you or simulating you, then you're no longer trading, you're just acting under uncertainty. There is a logic to the idea of acting as if you are - or, better, as if you might be - any of the possible entities which are your subjective duplicates (whose experience is indistinguishable from yours), but again, that's just acting under uncertainty: you don't know which possible world you're in, so you construct a probability distribution across the possibilities, and choose accordingly.
As for identifying with entities which are not your subjective duplicates but which share some cognition with you, where do you draw the line? My personal model of the hydrogen atom has something in common with Richard Feynman's; does that mean I should regard my decisions as Feynman's decisions?! I won't absolutely decry the practice of feeling kinship with others, even in remote times and places, far from it; but the moment we start to make this more than a metaphorical identification, a feeling of similarity, and start to speak as if I am you, and you are me, and all of us are one, we are sliding away from awareness of reality, and the fact, welcome or unwelcome as it may be, that I am not you, that we are distinct beings.
I would even say that, existentially, it is important for a person to realize that they are a separate being. You, and only you, will experience your life from inside. You have an interest in how that life unfolds that is not shared by anyone else, because they don't and can't live it for you. It is possible to contemplate one's existential isolation, in all its various dimensions, and then to team up with others, even to decide that something other than yourself is more important than you are; but if you do it that way, at least you'll be doing so in awareness of the actual relationship between you and the greater-than-you with which you identify; and that should make you more, not less, effective in supporting it, unless its use for you really is based on blinding you to your true self.
I would never have guessed that one of the side effects of the computational paradigm of mind would be a new form of proxy immortalism
Odd, this was one of the first things that occurred to me when I learned of it.
it's still ironic to see this argument being made, given that it emerges from the same techno-conceptual zeitgeist which elsewhere is employed to urge a person not to be satisfied with living on in their children, their race, et cetera, but rather to seek personal survival beyond the traditional limits
I am actually already signed up with CI...
This post is not about many worlds. It is somewhat disjointed, but builds to a single point.
If an AI was asked today how many human individuals populate this planet, it may not return a number the several-billions range. In fact I’d be willing to bet it’d return a number in the tens of thousands, with the caveat that the individuals vary wildly in measure.
I agree with Robin Hanson that if two instances of me exist, and one is terminated, I didn’t die, I simply got smaller.
In 1995 Robert Sapolsky wrote in Ego Boundaries “My students usually come with ego boundaries like exoskeletons. […] They want their rituals newly minted and shared horizontally within their age group, not vertically over time,” whereas in older societies “needs transcend individual rights to a bounded ego, and people in traditional communities are named and raised as successive incarnations. In such societies, Abraham always lives 900 years--he simply finds a new body to inhabit now and then. ”
Ego boundaries may be more rigid now, but that doesn’t make people more unique. If anything, people have become more like each other. Memes are powerful shapers of mental agents, and as technology allows memes to breed and compete more freely the most viral ones spread through the species.
Acausal trade allows for amazing efficiencies, not merely on a personal level but also via nationalism and religion. People executing strong acausal trading routines will out-compete those who don’t.
Timeless Decision Theory proscribes making decisions as if choosing the outcome for all actors sufficiently like yourself across all worlds. As competition narrows the field of memeplexes to a handful of powerful and virulent ubermemes, and those memeplexes influence the structure and strength of individual’s mental agents in similar ways, people become more like each other. In so doing they are choosing *as if* a single entity more and more effectively. To an outside observer, there may be very little to differentiate two such humans from each other.
Therefore it may be wrong to think of oneself as a singular person. I am not just me – I am also effectively everyone who is sufficiently like me. It’s been argued that there are only seven stories, and every story can be thought of as an elaboration of one of these. It seems likely there are only a few thousand differentiable people, and everyone is simply one of these with some flare.
If we think of people in these terms, certain behaviors make more sense. Home-schooling is looked down on because institutional schools are about making other people into us. Suicide is considered more sinful than killing outsiders because suicide *always* reduces the size of the Meta-Person that the suicidee belonged to. Argument and rhetoric isn’t just a complete waste of your free time, it’s also an attempt to make Meta-Me larger, and Meta-SomeoneElse smaller. Art finally makes sense.
Added Bonus: You no longer have to have many children to exist. You can instead work on enlarging your Meta-Self’s measure.