Hmm. I previously mentioned that in my model of personal identity, our brains include planning machinery that's based on subjective expectation ("if I do this, what do I expect to experience as a result?"), and that this requires some definition of a "self", causing our brains to always have a model for continuity of self that they use in predicting the future.

Similarly, in the comments of The Anthropic Trilemma, Eliezer says:

It seems to me that there's some level on which, even if I say very firmly, "I now resolve to care only about future versions of myself who win the lottery! Only those people are defined as Eliezer Yudkowskys!", and plan only for futures where I win the lottery, then, come the next day, I wake up, look at the losing numbers, and say, "Damnit! What went wrong? I thought personal continuity was strictly subjective, and I could redefine it however I wanted!"

Translating those notions into the terminology of this post, it would seem like "personal identity" forms an important part of humans' bridge hypothesis: it is a rule that links some specific entity in the world-model into the agent's predicted subjective experience. If I believe that there is a personal continuity between me today and me tomorrow, that means that I predict experiencing the things that me-tomorrow will experience, which means that my bridge hypothesis privileges the me of tomorrow over other agents.

I get the feeling that here lies the answer to Eliezer's question, but I can't quite put my finger on the exact formulation. Something like "you can alter your world-model or even your model of your own bridge hypothesis, but you can't alter..." the actual bridge hypothesis? The actual bridge? Something else?