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Tenoke comments on Identity and Death - Less Wrong Discussion
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Yeah, no doubt there. However, I don't really care if something identical to me thinks its me though - I care if the me right now (which is to be teleported/copied in some years) will itself continue to experience things after the teleportation occurs (and the answer is yes if you believe that in Pattern Identity Theory and no if you believe Folk Identity Theory).
The you-right-now (which I label U1 for clarity) won't even continue to experience things after you finish reading this comment. Some other entity, very similar to but not quite identical to U1, will be experiencing things instead... call it U2.
Fortunately, neither U1 nor U2 consider the difference between U1 and U2 particularly important, so both entities will agree that identity was preserved.
And I agree with chaosmage here: that's all there is to say about that. There is no special objectively correct essence of youness that can be preserved or fail to be preserved; there are simply two systems at different times that share some properties and fail to share others.
Which of those properties we consider definitive of usness is not the sort of thing we can be wrong about, any more than we can be wrong about our own aesthetic judgments.
We both do actually and we are both not very impressed that such a large amount of entities similar to us (including us) are dying. And if I really accept that this is the case (as it seems to be) then most of the reason for wanting to stay alive at all seems to logically vanish.
Not exactly. What's called for is a reinterpretation of your values, given that you have previously couched them in incoherent terms (insofar as those terms presuppose a metaphysical fact of "identity" that got shaved away by Occam's Razor).
A good place to start in that reinterpretation is with TheOtherDave's questions about the vast set of possible U2 states.
I wouldn't exactly describe what U1 and U2 are doing as "dying", any more than if U1 could somehow continue to exist in perpetuity -- if you were frozen in stasis forever, for example, such that you never got to the end of this comment -- I would exactly describe that as "living". Our normal understanding of life and death is defined by the continual transition between one state and another; those terms don't apply too readily to conditions like indefinite stasis.
But, terminology notwithstanding, if the passage of time constitutes the destruction of the same value that using a hypothetical transporter does, I'm not sure how your original thought experiment holds up. Why not use the transporter, in that case? Refusing to doesn't actually preserve anything.
As for reasons to stay alive... well, that depends on what we value.
There's a vast set of possible histories. In some of them U1 ceases to exist and U2 comes into existence (what we normally call "you stay alive"), in others U1 ceases to exist and U2 doesn't come into existence (what we normally call "you die"). Do you have a preference between those?
A different way of putting it: there's a vast set of possible U2s. Some of them are living beings and some of them are corpses. Do you have a preference between those?
EDIT: Whoops! I just realized that I got your OP confused with someone else's comment. Ignore the stuff about the transporter...
How do you distinguish between "me" and "something identical to me"? You're implying it can be done, but I really don't see how. As soon as you find a difference, that something isn't identical to you anymore.
We are just going in circles now. Yes, I believe that too... which is why this post is about arguing whether changing yourself sufficently is 'killing yourself'.. since there are some observable differences between 'me' and 'enhanced me'.
Or to put it in another way (a bit of a false dichotomy) - you either kill yourself when you 'teleport' as the 'original' is no longer there or alternatively you are data and you kill yourself when you change that data significantly.
I don't think we're going in circles. It is just that problems related to the Anthropic Trilemma aren't easy.
Pattern Identity Theory does not have a distinction between "me" and "something identical to me". You believe in the existence of such a distinction, so you want Pattern Identitfy Theory to not be true. So you are, quite rightly, pointing out the absurdities of Pattern Identity Theory: Sufficient changes being like "killing yourself" and other such nonsense.
I agree Pattern Identity Theory is false, if for entirely different reasons. I do not agree that the falsehood of Pattern Identity Theory means that the distinction exists.
I do? Since when?