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Sly comments on Cryonics without freezers: resurrection possibilities in a Big World - Less Wrong
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Of course you can differentiate between them. I can differentiate between me-in-five-years and me-in-twenty-years, as well. There exist differences between these things.
I initially thought you were asking how one could identify with a different-but-similar person, given the absence of feedback ("If they have a shitty day, I feel nothing. If they have a good day, I feel nothing.").
With respect to that, it seems to me that my ability to identify with myself-in-the-future despite the lack of feedback suggests that the lack of feedback isn't a showstopper, and more generally that what I identify with is more a function of my capacity for empathy than it is of any "me"-ness in the world.
I'm no longer sure I understood you correctly in the first place, though.
The point I was trying to convey was that there is a huge difference between if I die vs a copy elsewhere of me dying.
Hence me using the programming metaphor. If I am an instance, it matters a hell of a lot if it is this particular instance that gets scrapped vs some other instance of Sly.
My argument is that ageing is more like modifying the variables, whereas the Big Universe copy of sly is a separate instance.
Therefore it makes a lot of sense why I do not consider the copy of Sly to be me. I do not equate the two as other people here really want too. I also reject the idea that ageing identity loss is comparable to death identity loss, this seems to be completely wishful thinking.
You started out by asking how you were supposed to relate in any way to a copy of you . What I'm gathering from our subsequent discussion is that this was a rhetorical question; what you actually meant to express was that you don't relate in any way to such a copy, and you don't feel obligated to.
I accept that you don't, and I agree that you aren't obligated to.
Identity in the sense we're discussing is a fact about the mind, not a fact about the world. If you choose to identify solely with your present self and future selves in the same body, and treat everything else that could conceivably exist as not-you, that's fine. It's a perfectly reasonable choice, and I've no doubt that you can come up with lots of perfectly valid arguments to support making that choice.
The fact that other people make different choices about their identity than you do doesn't mean that either of you is wrong about what your identity "really" is, or that either of you is ignoring reality in favor of "wishful thinking".
There are consequences to those choices, of course: if I choose to identify with me-now but not with me-in-ten-years, for example, I will tend to make decisions such that ten years from now I am worse off. If I choose to identify with me-in-this-body but not copies of me, I will tend to make decisions such that copies of me are worse off. (Obviously, this doesn't actually create consequences in cases where none of my decisions can affect copies of me that exist.) Etc.
Yes, it was rhetorical.
I see now, I was operating on the fact about the world level.