what I care about is the continuation of my inner narrative for as long as possible
Okay -- got it. What I don't grasp is why you would care about the inner narrative of any particular instance of "you" when the persistence of that instance makes negligible material difference to all the other things you care about.
To put it another way: if there's only a single instance of "me" -- the only extant copy of my particular values and abilities -- then its persistence cannot be immaterial to all the other things I care about, and that's why I currently care about my persistence more-or-less unconditionally. If there's more than one copy of "me" kicking around, then "more-or-less unconditionally" no longer applies. My own internal narrative doesn't enter into the question, and I'm confused as to why anyone else would give their own internal narrative any consideration.
ETA: So, I mean, the utility function is not up for grabs. If we both agree as to what would actually be happening in these hypothetical scenarios, but disagree about what we value, then clauses like "patternists could be wrong" refer to an orthogonal issue.
Okay -- got it. What I don't grasp is why you would care about the inner narrative of any particular instance of "you" when the persistence of that instance makes negligible material difference to all the other things you care about.
Maybe the same why as why do some people care more about their families than about other people's families. Why some people care more about themselves than about strangers. What I can't grasp is how one would manage to so thoroughly eradicate or suppress such a fundamental drive.
In June 2012, Robin Hanson wrote a post promoting plastination as a superior to cryopreservation as an approach to preserving people for later uploading. His post included a paragraph which said:
This left me with the impression that the chances of the average cryopreserved person today of being later revived aren't great, even when you conditionalize on no existential catastrophe. More recently, I did a systematic read-through of the sequences for the first time (about a month 1/2 ago), and Eliezer's post You Only Live Twice convinced me to finally sign up for cryonics for three reasons:
I don't find that terribly encouraging. So now I'm back to being pessimistic about current cryopreservation techniques (though I'm still signing up for cryonics because the cost is low enough even given my current estimate of my chances). But I'd very much be curious to know if anyone knows what, say, Nick Bostrom or Anders Sandberg think about the issue. Anyone?
Edit: I'm aware of estimates given by LessWrong folks in the census of the chances of revival, but I don't know how much of that is people taking things like existential risk into account. There are lots of different ways you could arrive at a ~10% chance of revival overall:
is one way. But:
is a very similar conclusion from very different premises. Gwern has more on this sort of reasoning in Plastination versus cryonics, but I don't know who most of the people he links to are so I'm not sure whether to trust them. He does link to a breakdown of probabilities by Robin, but I don't fully understand the way Robin is breaking the issue down.