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benelliott comments on Copying and Subjective Experience - Less Wrong Discussion
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What if they can't agree.
For instance, suppose the prior to the procedure I, like many people, believed that I was guaranteed to continue on as the original, so the original, being the one that acquired the assets, should get all of them.
However, the copy, upon realizing they are the copy, quickly revises this opinion and now believes assets should be shared equally (this does not even have to be self-serving, it is easy to imagine that since the copy has the same memories as the original, will have a powerful intuition that they are the original, or at least one of two originals). The original remains unsympathetic to this, since he assumes that's just what a self-interested clone who only wanted to sponge off someone else would say.
That's the same as inheritance when there's no will: should it all go to the eldest son? Be split equally among sons? Should even daughters get a share? How about the widow? Adopted children? Nephews? Siblings? Non-married companions? Lovers? Children born out of wedlock and not formally recognized? It's not rare for the children to disagree on this.
If the parent didn't specify a will, the law usually has a default case, which hasn't been the same from one society to another, or from one epoch to another.
The difference here is that heirs are different people using different reasoning, and they can appeal to various factors depending on their capacity for reasoning and their implicit privileges (age, degree of relation, etc.)
Here we are arguing about a case where the "heirs" are not only not privileged over each other in any intrinsic sense, but they are also copies of the same thought process, with access to the exact same threads of reasoning.
This logic works in the scenario where nobody knows who the original is. It doesn't work as well when there is a known original, since this difference in subjective experience between the two may be enough to break symmetry in terms of which arguments are appealing, and the analogy to heirs probably works best. I myself favour a default case of equal splitting, since it means we don't have to argue about who is the 'original'.
Given that the copies (we suppose) use the same thought algorithms at the forking point, it may be helpful to imagine yourself as either version in such a scenario, or mentally roleplay a dialogue between them.