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Vladimir_Nesov comments on I want to save myself - Less Wrong Discussion
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What absurdity? Here's you, Neil, and that's Tyler. It's possible to tell who of you two is Neil and who is not. A copy-Neil might be about the same thing as Neil, but this doesn't interfere with the simplicity of telling that Tyler is not the same thing. You can well care about Neil-like things more than about Tyler-like things. It's plausible from an evolutionary psychology standpoint that humans care about themselves more than other people. By "myself" I mean "a thing like the one I'm pointing at", and the rest is a process of evaluating this symbolic reference into a more self-contained definition; this simple reference is sufficient to specify the intended meaning.
What I meant was that the common situation whereby a person both (i) believes in persisting subjective identity (sameness of Cartesian Theater over time) and (ii) attaches massive importance to it (e.g. using words like 'death' to refer to its extinction), doesn't obviously or frequently give rise to irrational decision-making until we start talking about things like cryonics, teleportation and cloning.
I apologise for the unclarity of my final sentence if you took me to be saying something stronger.