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Dentin comments on I notice that I am confused about Identity and Resurrection - Less Wrong
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Thank you for the story. It succinctly describes my stance on identity, and similarly describes my frustration with people who do not understand the lessons in the story.
1) Who cares if it's a wind-up toy or not, if it provides indistinguishable outputs for a given set of inputs? Does it really matter if the result of a mathematical calculation is computed on an abacus, a handheld calculator, in neural wetware, or on a supercomputer?
2) Where you draw the line is up to you. If you have a stroke and lose a big chunk of your brain, are you still you? If you're reduced to an unthinking blob due to massive brain damage, is that still you? It's up to you to decide where you draw the line, so long as you recognize that you're putting it in an arbitrary place determined by you, and that other people may decide to put it elsewhere.
A good set of thought experiments that helped me work through this is to imagine that you have a magical box you can step into that will create a perfect copy of you. Said box will also magically destroy copies that enter it and press the 'destruct' button.
What mindset would you need to have to be able to properly use the box?
Under what circumstances would be able to create a copy, then enter the box and press the destruct button yourself?
Personally, I have trouble accepting that I'm still the same "me" that went to bed last night, when I wake up in the morning.
I suspect you act quite differently towards your future self compared to other people who will wake up tomorrow morning.
Wheras I'm the same '"me" that I was a year ago. The "me" of five and ten years ago are farther from that, while the "me" I was at age 10 is probably not very close at all. I'd allow a pretty big amount of slop to exist in different copies of myself.
This thought always gets me thinking. When I come across variations of the above thought experiment it makes me wonder if a magical box is even necessary. Are copies of me being destroyed as I type? Haven't I died an infinite number of deaths from the time I started typing till now? Couldn't me hitting the return key at the end of this sentence be sufficient to replicate the copy/kill box a la MWI?
I am having a hard time distinguishing what MWI says about my death at branch points, and simultaneously copy/kill yourself in a copy machine.
Was that also your point or am I mistaken?
I think having an explicit box, which allows for two or more simultaneous copies of you to exist and look at each other, is pretty important. Just being created and destroyed in the normal course of things, when everything looks normal, doesn't have the same impact.
My interpretation is that MWI says precisely nothing about you at branch points, because you don't die there - or rather, I don't necessarily consider a single branch point change to be sufficient to make me not 'me'. Further, creating a copy, or multiple copies, doesn't mean anything died in my view.
Where do you draw the line as in not caring about destroying yourself versus your copy? How did you make that decision?
For me, whether or not I'm me is an arbitrary line in the sand, a function of the mental and physical 'distance' or difference between copies. I think that's part of the point of the story - which version of the daughter is the daughter? Which one is close enough? You can't get it exact, so draw a line in the sand somewhere, according to your personal preferences and/or utility functions.
My line is apparently pretty unusual. I'm not sure I can define exactly where it is, but I can give you some use cases that are in the 'clear and obvious' category. Understand that the below is predicated on 1) I have extremely high belief that the box is creating 'good enough' copies and will not fail, and 2) the box has a failsafe that prevents me from destroying the last copy, if only one copy exists, and 3) it's better if there's a small number of copies, from a resource conservation standpoint.
I step in the box and create another copy. I lose a coin toss, which means I get to do the bills and take out the trash, wheras the copy continues gets to do interesting work that is expected to be of value in the long run. In this case, I do the bills and take out the trash, then return to the box and destroy myself.
In the above situation, I win the coin toss and begin doing interesting work. Later, my copy returns and tells me that he witnessed a spectactular car crash and rushed to the scene to aid people and probably saved somebody's life. His accumulated experience exceeds what I gained from my work, so I write down or tell him the most critical insights I uncovered, then return to the box and destroy myself.
I step into the box and create a copy. One of us wins the coin toss and begins a major fork: the winner will dedicate the next ten years to music and performance. In a year, the two of us meet and discuss things. We've both had incredible experiences, but they're not really comparable. Neither of us is willing to step into the box to terminate, and neither asks the other to do so.
Upon losing a coin toss, I take a trip to a third world country and am imprisoned unfairly and indefinitely for reasons beyond my control. The cost, time, and effort to fix the situation is prohibitive, and I do not have access to a destruction box. If possible, I communicate my status to my other copies, then commit suicide using whatever means necessary.
There are much more questionable cases between these, where the question of which one to destroy ends up weighting one against the other as best I can - but frankly if I had said box, I'd be very careful and strict about it, so as to keep the situations as clear as possible.
You sir, have a very strange sense of identity. I'm not sure I'd give my copy anything more than the time of day. And I certainly don't extend self-preservation to be inclusive of him. I'm not even going to touch the suicide. A line of thinking which leads you to suicide should be raising all sorts of red flags, IMHO.
Imagine that you're a program, and creating a new copy of you is as simple as invoking fork().
Voluntarily stepping into the box is no different than suicide, and frankly if you're resource constrained, it's a better option than murdering a copy. IMHO, you shouldn't be allowed to make copies of yourself unless you're willing to suicide and let it take your place. People unable to do that lack the mindset to properly manage copy creation and destruction.