Eliezer_Yudkowsky comments on Congratulations to Paris Hilton - Less Wrong

-2 Post author: Eliezer_Yudkowsky 19 October 2007 12:31AM

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Comment author: Eliezer_Yudkowsky 19 October 2007 04:06:39PM 1 point [-]

The results of a successful cryonics experiment seem to me to be the creation of a very good copy of me.

This is a black hole that sucks up arguments. Beware.

I'll deal with this on Overcoming Bias eventually, but I haven't done many of the preliminary posts that would be required.

Meanwhile, I hope you've noticed your confusion about personal identity.

In underlying physics, there are no distinct substances moving through time: all electrons are perfectly interchangeable, the only fundamentally real things are points in configuration space rather than individual objects, and a strong argument has been made (by Julian Barbour) that these points never change amplitudes. In timeless physics the future is itself an informational copy of the past, rather than anything "moving" from the past to the future. Your spatiotemporal intuitions which tell you that objects are persistent, distinct from one another, and move through time, are simply lying to you.