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DanArmak comments on Holden's Objection 1: Friendliness is dangerous - Less Wrong
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That's a very good point. People not only change over long periods of time; during small intervals of time we can also model a person's values as belonging to competing and sometimes negotiating agents. So you're right, merging isn't secondary or dispensable (not that I suggested doing away with it entirely), although we might want different merging dynamics sometimes for sub-person fragments vs. for whole-person EVs.
Sure, the specifics of the aggregation process will depend on the nature of the monads to be aggregated.
And, yes, while we frequently model people (including ourselves) as unique coherent consistent agents, and it's useful to do so for planning and for social purposes, there's no clear reason to believe we're any such thing, and I'm inclined to doubt it. This also informs the preserving-identity-across-substrates conversation we're having elsethread.
Where relevant - or at least when I'm reminded of it - I do model myself as a collection of smaller agents. But I still call that collection "I", even though it's not unique, coherent, or consistent. That my identity may be a group-identity doesn't seem to modify any of my conclusions about identity, given that to date the group has always resided together in a single brain.
For my own part, I find that attending to the fact that I am a non-unique, incoherent, and inconsistent collection of disparate agents significantly reduces how seriously I take concerns that some process might fail to properly capture the mysterious essence of "I", leading to my putative duplicate going off and having fun in a virtual Utopia while "I" remains in a cancer-ridden body.
I would gladly be uploaded rather than die if there were no alternative. I would still pay extra for a process that slowly replaced my brain cells etc. one by one leaving me conscious and single-instanced the whole while.
That sounds superficially like a cruel and unusual torture.
The whole point is to invent an uploading process I wouldn't even notice happening.