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ShardPhoenix comments on Dragon Ball's Hyperbolic Time Chamber - Less Wrong
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One important aspect of uploads is that they can (presumably) be easily copied - this is enough for them to have a huge economic impact even if they only run at normal human speed. If you have one upload that is willing and able to do a job, suddenly you have as many as you need, and can displace all human workers in that job (at least once the hardware gets cheap enough).
This assumes that uploaded people would agree to being copied or that the world turned so dystopian that no one would ask them for permission. I for one wouldn't want several instances of me running around.
Can you say more about why not?
Not that you're obligated to; preferences are preferences. But this particular preference is sufficiently alien to me that I'd like to understand it better.
I like my personal identity and creating several causally interacting copies of me would feel like diluting it. I could anticipate a future in which there would be several instances of me with different life experiences since the moment of splitting. All of those experiences would be 'mine' in a way, yet 'I' wouldn't own most of them.
This would be less of a problem if there was a way to merge back into a single person after doing whatever needed doing but that's not a given. Copying is straightforward in an uploading scenario while merging requires progress in conceptual understanding of the mind. And if we knew how to merge back together, we might also know how to make it an ongoing process, so instead of splitting into separate personalities we could launch several communicating threads of attention that would still match my intuition of being a single person, which I would find preferable.
(And yes, I know about many worlds. That's different because the world splits with me.)
Cool; thanks.
Agreed that merging different-but-similar minds is a vastly different (and more complicated) problem from creating copies. And agreed that ongoing synchronization among minds is yet a third problem, and that both of those would be awesome.