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lucidfox comments on Copying and Subjective Experience - Less Wrong Discussion

5 Post author: lucidfox 20 December 2010 12:14PM

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Comment author: lucidfox 20 December 2010 04:06:30PM 1 point [-]

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.

Comment author: benelliott 20 December 2010 04:59:13PM 0 points [-]

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'.