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pengvado comments on Timeless Identity - Less Wrong
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Well, if the idea is unimportant to the OP, presumably that also helps explain how they can sleep at night.
WRT the tangent... my own position wrt preservation of personal identity is that while it's difficult to articulate precisely what it is that I want to preserve, and I'm not entirely certain there is anything cogent I want to preserve that is uniquely associated with me, I'm pretty sure that whatever does fall in that category has nothing to do with either continuity of computation or similarity of physical substrate. I'm about as sanguine about continuing my existence as a software upload as I am about continuing it as this biological system or as an entirely different biological system, as long as my subjective experience in each case is not traumatically different.
I wrote up about a page-long reply, then realized it probably deserves its own posting. I'll see if I can get to that in the next day or so. There's a wide spectrum of possible solutions to the personal identity problem, from physical continuity (falsified) to pattern continuity and causal continuity (described by Eliezer in the OP), to computational continuity (my own view, I think). It's not a minor point though, whichever view turns out to be correct has immense ramifications for morality and timeless decision theory, among other things...
What relevance does personal identity have to TDT? TDT doesn't depend on whether the other instances of TDT are in copies of you, or in other people who merely use the same decision theory as you.
It has relevance for the basilisk scenario, which I'm not sure I should say any more about.