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pragmatist comments on 2012 Less Wrong Census/Survey - Less Wrong
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This seems to rely on a controversial theory of personal identity. I'm of the opinion that personal identity requires some sort of causal continuity: for a future person to be me, his mental states must have appropriate causal links to my mental states. That wouldn't be true of a Boltzmann brain. To put it another way, if the universe is spatially infinite, there are presumably Boltzmann brains qualitatively identical to my brain somewhere out there right now (where the "now" is relative to some foliation of space-time, of course). I don't consider those spatially distant BBs to be identical to me, and I'm guessing you wouldn't either. Why should I judge differently if the BB's are not just spatially but also temporally separated from me?
I have no problem with the idea that there are Boltzmann brains out there right now who are as much me as this body is.
Really? If someone (very trustworthy and very powerful) offered you a choice between a minute of intense pleasure administered to the body reading this right now or to a qualitatively identical but spatially very distant body, would you be indifferent?
If someone offered this brain a choice between pleasure for this brain and pleasure for that brain, I would no doubt choose the former.
Does that mean that nothing but this brain is me?
It might also turn out that if someone offered my right brain hemisphere a choice between pleasure for my right-brain and pleasure for my left-brain, I consistently choose pleasure for my right hemisphere. If that turns out to be true, does that mean that nothing but my right hemisphere is me? (If the analogous thing also turns out to be true for my left hemisphere, does that also mean that nothing but my left hemisphere is me? Does it mean there are two of me that don't share an identity? I'm not sure that question even means anything.)