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Mark_Friedenbach comments on Timeless Identity - Less Wrong
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Mm. I'm not sure I understood that properly; let me echo my understanding of your view back to you and see if I got it.
Suppose I get in something that is billed as a transporter, but which does not preserve computational continuity. Suppose, for example, that it destructively scans my body, sends the information to the destination (a process which is not instantaneous, and during which no computation can take place), and reconstructs an identical body using that information out of local raw materials at my destination.
If it turns out that computational or physical continuity is the correct answer to what preserves personal identity, then I in fact never arrive at my destination, although the thing that gets constructed at the destination (falsely) believes that it's me, knows what I know, etc. This is, as you say, an issue of great moral concern... I have been destroyed, this new person is unfairly given credit for my accomplishments and penalized for my errors, and in general we've just screwed up big time.
Conversely, if it turns out that pattern or causal continuity is the correct answer, then there's no problem.
Therefore it's important to discover which of those facts is true of the world.
Yes? This follows from your view? (If not, I apologize; I don't mean to put up strawmen, I'm genuinely misunderstanding.)
If so, your view is also that if we want to know whether that's the case or not, we should look for the simplest answer to the question "what does my personal identity comprise?" that does not introduce new confusion and which adds to our predictive capacity. (What is there to predict here?)
Yes?
EDIT: Ah, I just read this post where you say pretty much this. OK, cool; I understand your position.
Yes, that is not only 100% accurate, but describes where I'm headed.
I am looking for the simplest explanation of the subjective continuity of personal identity, which either answers or dissolves the question. Further, the explanation should either explain which teleportation scenario is correct (identity transfer, or murder+birth), or satisfactorily explain why it is a meaningless distinction.
If I, the person standing in front of the transporter door, will experience walking on Mars, or oblivion.
Yes, it is perhaps likely that this will never be experimentally observable. That may even be a tautology since we are talking about subjective experience. But still, a reductionist theory of consciousness could provide a simple, easy to understand explanation for the origin of personal identity (e.g., what an computational machine feels like from the inside) and which predicts identity transfer or murder + birth. That would be enough for me, at least as long as there's not competing equally simple theories.
Well, you certainly won't experience oblivion, more or less by definition. The question is whether you will experience walking on Mars or not.
But there is no distinct observation to be made in these two cases. That is, we agree that either way there will be an entity having all the observable attributes (both subjective and objective; this is not about experimental proof, it's about the presence or absence of anything differentially observable by anyone) that Mark Friendebach has, walking on Mars.
So, let me rephrase the question: what observation is there to predict here?
That's not the direction I was going with this. It isn't about empirical observation, but rather aspects of morality which depend on subjective experience. The prediction is under what conditions subjective experience terminates. Even if not testable, that is still an important thing to find out, with moral implications.
Is it moral to use a teleporter? From what I can tell, that depends on whether the person's subjective experience is terminated in the process. From the utility point of view the outcomes are very nearly the same - you've murdered one person, but given “birth” to an identical copy in the process. However if the original, now destroyed person didn't want to die, or wouldn't have wanted his clone to die, then it's a net negative.
As I said elsewhere, the teleporter is the easiest way to think of this, but the result has many other implications from general anesthesia, to cryonics, to Pascal's mugging and the basilisk.
OK. I'm tapping out here. Thanks for your time.