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Psy-Kosh comments on Open Thread, November 1 - 7, 2013 - Less Wrong
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There's no brief answer. I've been slowly gravitating towards, but am not yet convinced, by the suspicion that making a computer out of twice as much material causes there to be twice as much person inside. Reason: No exact point where splitting a flat computer in half becomes a separate causal process, similarity to behavior of Born probabilities. But that's not an update to the anthropic trilemma per se.
That seems to be seriously GAZP violating. Trying to figure out how to put my thoughts on this into words but... There doesn't seem to be anywhere that the data is stored that could "notice" the difference. The actual program that is being the person doesn't contain a "realness counter". There's nowhere in the data that could "notice" the fact that there's, well, more of the person. (Whatever it even means for there to be "more of a person")
Personally, I'm inclined in the opposite direction, that even N separate copies of the same person is the same as 1 copy of the same person until they diverge, and how much difference between is, well, how separate they are.
(Though, of course, those funky Born stats confuse me even further. But I'm fairly inclined toward the "extra copies of the exact same mind don't add more person-ness. But as they diverge from each other, there may be more person-ness. (Though perhaps it may be meaningful to talk about additional fractions of personness rather than just one then suddenly two hole persons. I'm less sure on that.)
Why not go a step further and say that 1 copy is the same as 0, if you think there's a non-moral fact of the matter? The abstract computation doesn't notice whether it's instantiated or not. (I'm not saying this isn't itself really confused - it seems like it worsens and doesn't dissolve the question of why I observe an orderly universe - but it does seem to be where the GAZP points.)
Hrm... The whole exist vs non exist thing is odd and confusing in and of itself. But so far it seems to me that an algorithm can meaningfully note "there exists an algorithm doing/perceiving X", where X represents whatever it itself is doing/perceiving/thinking/etc. But there doesn't seem there'd be any difference between 1 and N of them as far as that.