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entirelyuseless comments on Open thread, Nov. 16 - Nov. 22, 2015 - Less Wrong Discussion
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I understand what you are saying, and I think that most people would agree with your analysis (at least, once it is explained to them). But I also think that it is not entirely coherent. For example, imagine that we had the technology to replace neurons with nanocircuits. We inject you with nanobots and slowly, over the course of years, each of your brain cells are replaced with electronic equivalents. This happens so slowly that you do not even notice -- conscious is maintained unbroken. Then, one at a time, the circuits and feedback loops are optimized; this you do notice, as you get a better memory and you can think faster and more clearly; throughout this, however, your consciousness is maintained unbroken. Then your memory is transcribed onto a more efficient storage medium (still connected to your brain, and with no downtime). You can see where this is going. There is no point where it is clear that one you ceases and another begins, but at the end of the process you are a 'computer body'. Moreover, while I set this up to happen over years, there's no obvious reason that you couldn't speed the example up to take seconds.
Wizard has given another example; most of us accept Star Trek style transporters as a perfectly reasonable concept (albeit maybe impossible in practice), but when you look at them closely they present exactly the sort of moral/ontological dilemma you are worried about.This suggests that we do not fully grok even our own concept of personal identity.
One solution, is to conclude that, after much thought, if you cannot define a consistent concept of persistence of personal identity over time, perhaps this is because it is not an intellectual concept, but a lizard-brain panic caused by the mention of death.
In my mind this is exactly the same sort of debate people have over free will. The concept makes no real sense as an ontological concept, but it is one so deeply ingrained in our culture that it takes a lot of thought to accept that.
If you accept this solution, however, you might also say that neither uploading nor life extension technology in general is actually necessary, because many other things, such as having children, are just as good objectively, even if your lizard-brain panic caused by the mention of death doesn't agree.
I like children and want children that are as cool as I am. But no child of mine has a statistically significant chance of being me.
"Just as good objectively" misses the point on two counts:
Lots of things are as good as other things. But just because tiramisu is just as good as chocolate mousse, this does not mean that it is okay to get rid of chocolate mousse. What might make it okay to get rid of chocolate mousse is if you had another dish that tasted exactly like chocolate mousse, to the point that the only way you could tell which is which was by looking at the dish it was in.
This is not a question of objectivity -- this is a question of managing your own subjective feelings. I may well find that I am best off if I keep my highly subjective view that I am one of the most important people in my world, but also be better off if I rejected my subjective view that meatbody death is the same as death of me.
Etid: tpos.
The point is that "so and so is me" is never an objective fact at all. So if the child has no chance of being you, neither does the upload. If you are saying that you can identify with the upload, that is not in any objective sense different from identifying with your child, or identifying with some random future human and calling that a reincarnated version of yourself.
And I don't object to any of that; I think it may well be true that it is objectively just as good to have a child and then to die, as to continue to live yourself, or to upload yourself and die bodily. As you say, the real issue is managing your feelings, and it is just a question of what works for you. There is no reason to argue that having children shouldn't be a reasonable strategy for other people, even if it is not for you.
Granted, and particularly true, I'd like to think, for rationalists.
It is reasonable to argue that any social/practical aspect of yourself also exists in others, and that the most rational thing to do is to a) confirm that this is a objectively good thing and b) work to spread it throughout the population. This is a good reason to view works of art, scientific work, and children as valid forms of immortality. This is particularly useful to focus on if you expect to die before immortality breakthroughs happen, but as a general outlook on life it might be more socially (and economically) productive than any other. As some authors have pointed out, immortality of the individual might equal the stagnation of society.
Accepting death of the self might be the best way forward for society, but it is a hard goal to achieve.