polymathwannabe comments on Your transhuman copy is of questionable value to your meat self. - Less Wrong

12 Post author: Usul 06 January 2016 09:03AM

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Comment author: entirelyuseless 06 January 2016 03:06:54PM 4 points [-]

Consider two possible ways the world might be (or that you might suppose the world could be):

  1. There is no afterlife for human beings. You live and you die and that's it.

  2. There is no afterlife for human beings in the conventional sense, but people are reincarnated, without any possibility of remembering their past lives.

From the subjective point of view of conscious experience, these two situations are subjectively indistinguishable. Are they objectively distinguishable? That depends on the "metaphysics" behind the situation. Perhaps they are, and perhaps they aren't, and if they aren't, then we are not talking about two possible situations, but only one. But let's suppose they are, and that you find out that number 2 is true.

Do you really think you have any reason to be happier than if you found out that number 1 was true? There are certainly subjectively indistinguishable situations where I would prefer one to be objectively the case rather than the other, but it is not clear to me that this is one of them. In this particular case, I don't see why I should care. Likewise, as suggested by James Miller's comment, I don't see why I should care whether I am objectively the same person as I was yesterday, or if this is just a subjective impression which is objectively false. And if I don't care about that, then creating something that would remember being me is just as good as continuing to exist.

Comment author: polymathwannabe 06 January 2016 03:11:52PM 0 points [-]

people are reincarnated, without any possibility of remembering their past lives

What does that even mean? What would be the mechanism?

If you have two competing hypotheses which are experimentally undistinguishable, Occam's Razor requires you prefer the hypothesis that makes fewer assumptions. Positing reincarnation adds a lot of rules to the universe which it doesn't really need for it to function the way we already see it function.

Comment author: seuoseo 06 January 2016 08:15:58PM 0 points [-]

Does occam's razor require you to prefer the likelier hypothesis? I don't see why I should act as if the more likely case is definitely true.

Comment author: entirelyuseless 06 January 2016 03:17:43PM *  0 points [-]

I'm not sure what the point of your comment is. I said myself that it is unclear what the meaning of the situation would be, and I certainly did not say that the second theory was more probable than the first.