I think the most practical / accurate way of conceiving of individuality is through the connection of your perceptions through memory. You are the same person as 3 years ago, because you remember being that person (not only rationally, but on a deeper level of knowing and feeling that you were that person). Of course different persons will not share the memory of being the same person. So if we conceive of individuality in the way we actually experience individuality (which I think is most reasonable), there is not much sense in saying that many persons living right know are the same person, no matter how much they share certain memes. Even for an outside observer this is true, since people express enough of their memory to the outside world to understand that their memories form distinct life stories. It may be true to say that many persons share a cultural identity or share a meme space, but this does make them the same person, since they do not share their personal identity. So unless your AI is dumb and does not understand what individuality consists of it won't say that there are only thousands of people.
I might be true though that at some point in the future some people that have different memories right know will merge into one entity and thus share the same memory (if the singularity happens I think it is not that unlikely). Then we could say that different persons living right now might not be different persons ultimately, but they still are different persons right now.
You are the same person as 3 years ago, because you remember being that person (not only rationally, but on a deeper level of knowing and feeling that you were that person)
Two things:
1) Can you clarify what you mean by "rationally remembering" here?
2) If you're actually talking about "knowing and feeling that I am that person," then you aren't talking about memory at all. There are many, many events that I do not remember, but which I "know and feel" I was involved in -- my birth, for example.
If you define my "persona...
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.