5 thought experiments on identity and copies

Canaletto
Thu, 23 Apr 2026 15:19:36 GMT

1 Organ shipment for brain

Suppose your brain is carefully chopped in 4 pieces, cooled to 4 C like they do with hearts and livers right now, and shipped chunk by chunk to some other place and then reassembled here. Then you get booted up from the coma and interviewed.

Do you die in that process? How about N pieces? At some point pieces become small enough to just ship information about them being more convenient.

The only two defensible points where you can think you "die" here in my opinion are, at the moment you go into coma and never. sleep is death actually

(I think this one I saw from Bright One guy 8 years ago, but with different details)

2 Saw-trap copy help

You will be copied, your copy will be placed into a Saw trap and will need to solve a known puzzle to get out. You can spend a lot of time solving it and then memorizing the solution, before copying happens. Would you bother?

3 Copy anticipation weirdness

Suppose you are in an elevator, which can stop either at green carpet floor or red carpet floor. You don't know which one and there is no indicator, it's a pretty broken elevator. So, you anticipate now, that when the door opens you will see either green room or red room, 50:50.

Is this situation equivalent to situation in which you would be copied, and copy would be let out into red room and the original into green room? Should you anticipate equivalently to see green room or red room, 50:50?

Is your copy in your actual, day to day, anticipated future?

Your copy can be seen by me as its own person, created from ground up with fake memories. That person would be ether thinking about itself as new person created with memories of you, or instance of you, or maybe something else. Is there a correct way to think about it? Or alternatively is it all just preferences?

Now, if your copy has some memories deleted, e.g. he doesn't remember your phone number, is that guy still in your anticipated future? Should you still anticipate 50 : 50 exiting from either door? How heavy should be the modification to you stop anticipating exiting the copy door?

4 Theseussing speed

Let's say there is this new drug that makes replacement of all your atoms 100 times faster, all your atoms get replaced every 30 days because someone put it in the water supply. Would you start valuing enjoyment / welfare of your future self less?

5 Copy merge?

There is a copy of you in a room lit with red lamp. You are in a room lit with green lamp. You both were there for a hour.

Now, using advanced neurological tools, you will be modified to remember being in a red room all that time. AND your room changes lighting color green -> red.

You exit the room. What room do you anticipate to exit from, the one labeled copy or the one labeled original? 50:50?

I got inspired to finally publish those from reading this post, which is pretty interesting, I recommend it.

https://www.greaterwrong.com/posts/CchB8MMNDAR3KtkLH/thought-experiments-on-continuity-of-consciousness

Discuss