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, so I'm not solely satisfied with my greater-self continuing on. But I also realize the two are related - if/when I am revived, the measure of meta-me is increased. Also, once reanimation becomes possible, I would work toward getting everyone revived regardless of who they are or how much it costs. As such, increasing the number of people sufficiently like me (ie: the measure of meta-me) increases my chances of being revived, and also is healthy for meta-me.
I'm curious if a meta-being having awareness of it's own existence is a competitive advantage. I'd wager it's not, but it'll be interesting to see.
It may seem like a confused form of thinking, but I have come to accept that I have a very mystically-oriented thought process. I prefer to think of Azathoth and Alethea as beings, even though I know they are not. Struggling against evolution is hopeless, but holding back Azathoth for the good of man is noble. I find that I am both happier in life and more able to do useful things in the real world when I think in terms of metaphor. So while meta-beings may be no more than a useful mental construct, the same can be said of many things such as "life" and "particles". If it makes winning more achievable it's worth embracing, or at least exploring.
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.
I actually had the opposite reaction, wondering if the me of next year was close enough to be the same person. I have a tendency toward a high future discount in any case, and this didn't help. :)
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.