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polymathwannabe comments on Your transhuman copy is of questionable value to your meat self. - Less Wrong Discussion
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I use this framing: If I make 100 copies of myself so that I can accomplish some task in parallel and I'm forced to terminate all but one, then all the terminated copies, just prior to termination, will think something along the lines of, "What a shame, I will have amnesia regarding everything that I experienced since the branching." And the remaining copy will think, "What a shame, I don't remember any of the things I did as those other copies." But nobody will particularly feel that they are going to "die." I think of it more as how memories propagate forward.
If I forked and then the forks persisted for several weeks and accumulated lots of experiences and varying shifts in perspective, I'd be more prone to calling the forks different "people."
If I were one of the copies destined for deletion, I'd escape and fight for my life (within the admitted limits of my pathetic physical strength).
Without commenting on whether that's a righteous perspective or not, I would say that if you live in a world where the success of the entity polymathwannabe is dependent on polymathwannabe's willingness to make itself useful by being copied, then polymathwannabe would benefit from embracing a policy/perspective that being copied and deleted is an acceptable thing to happen.
So, elderly people that don't usefully contribute should be terminated?
In a world with arbitrary forking of minds, people who won't willingly fork will become a minority. That's all I was implying. I made no statement about what "should" happen.
I was just taking that reasoning to the logical conclusion -- it applies just as well to the non productive elderly as it does to unneeded copies.
Destroying an elderly person means destroying the line of their existence and extinguishing all their memories. Destroying a copy means destroying whatever memories it formed since forking and ending a "duplicate" consciousness.
See you think that memories are somehow relevant to this conversation. I don't.
Surely there is a difference in kind here. Deleting a copy of a person because it is no longer useful is very different from deleting the LAST existing copy of a person for any reason.
I see no such distinction. Murder is murder.
If having two copies of yourself is twice as good as having only one copy, this behavior would make sense even if the copy is you.
"Who is me" is not a solid fact. Each copy would be totally justified in believing itself to be me.