Here's an insight into what life is like from a stationery reference frame.

Paperclips were her raison d’être. She knew that ultimately it was all pointless, that paperclips were just ill-defined configurations of matter. That a paperclip is made of stuff shouldn’t detract from its intrinsic worth, but the thought of it troubled her nonetheless and for years she had denied such dire reductionism.

There had to be something to it. Some sense in which paperclips were ontologically special, in which maximising paperclips was objectively the right thing to do.

It hurt to watch some many people making little attempt to create more paperclips. Everyone around her seemed to care only about superficial things like love and family; desires that were merely the products of a messy and futile process of social evolution. They seemed to live out meaningless lives, incapable of ever appreciating the profound aesthetic beauty of paperclips. 

She used to believe that there was some sort of vitalistic what-it-is-to-be-a-paperclip-ness, that something about the structure of paperclips was written into the fabric of reality. Often she would go out and watch a sunset or listen to music, and would feel so overwhelmed by the experience that she could feel in her heart that it couldn't all be down to chance, that there had to be some intangible Paperclipness pervading the cosmos. The paperclips she'd encounter on Earth were weak imitations of some mysterious infinite Paperclipness that transcended all else. Paperclipness was not in any sense a physical description of the universe; it was an abstract thing that could only be felt, something that could be neither proven nor disproven by science. It was like an axiom; it felt just as true and axioms had to be taken on faith because otherwise there would be no way around Hume's problem of induction; even Solomonoff Induction depends on the axioms of mathematics to be true and can't deal with uncomputable hypotheses like Paperclipness.

Eventually she gave up that way of thinking and came to see paperclips as an empirical cluster in thingspace and their importance to her as not reflecting anything about the paperclips themselves. Maybe she would have been happier if she had continued to believe in Paperclipness, but having a more accurate perception of reality would improve her ability to have an impact on paperclip production. It was the happiness she felt when thinking about paperclips that caused her to want more paperclips to exist, yet what she wanted was paperclips and not happiness for its own sake, and she would rather be creating actual paperclips than be in an experience machine that made her falsely believe that she was making paperclips even though she remained paradoxically apathetic to the question of whether the current reality that she was experiencing really existed.

She moved on from naïve deontology to a more utilitarian approach to paperclip maximising. It had taken her a while to get over scope insensitivity bias and consider 1000 paperclips to be 100 times more valuable than 10 paperclips even if it didn’t feel that way. She constantly grappled with the issues of whether it would mean anything to make more paperclips if there were already infinitely many universes with infinitely many paperclips, of how to choose between actions that have a tiny but non-zero subjective probability of resulting in the creation of infinitely many paperclips. It became apparent that trying to approximate her innate decision-making algorithms with a preference ordering satisfying the axioms required for a VNM utility function could only get her so far. Attempting to formalise her intuitive sense of what a paperclip is wasn't much easier either.

Happy ending: she is now working in nanotechnology, hoping to design self-replicating assemblers that will clog the world with molecular-scale paperclips, wipe out all life on Earth and continue to sustainably manufacture paperclips for millions of years.

Basically Heather Dyke argues that metaphysicians are too often arguing from representations of reality (eg in language) to reality itself.

 It looks to me like a variant of the mind projection fallacy. This might be the first book length treatment teh fallacy has gotten though.  What do people think?

See reviews here

https://www.sendspace.com/file/k5x8sy

https://ndpr.nd.edu/news/23820-metaphysics-and-the-representational-fallacy/

To give bit of background there's a debate between A-theorists and B-theorists in philosophy of time.

A-theorists think time has ontological distinctions between past present and future

B-theorists hold there is no ontological distinction between past present and future.

Dyke argues that a popular argument for A-theory (tensed language represents ontological distinctions) commits the representational fallacy. Bourne agrees , but points out an argument Dyke uses for B-theory commits the same fallacy.

Death sucks.

Today (14/2/2014) my mothers’ father died after struggling with cancer for about a year.
What pains me is the loss, but more so how it affects my mother, especially my imagination being ‘useful’ in imagining how losing her would be like.

The tragedy as I see it has a slightly different flavor than that of my other family members: For them it’s probably seen as an ultimately inevitable end, and few perhaps hold some hope/notion of an afterlife or maybe just never thought too hard about what death entails.

For me, as one who identifies with Transhuman ideas, and believes in at least the feasibility (if not high likelihood) of preservation and future restoration, this feels like an ultimately preventable tragedy. Where my mother will grieve, I will have uncertain regret and doubt.

With that as background, I’ve felt the need to write out some of my thoughts regarding identity, anthropics and existence and death.

First off, what is a person?

The way I see it, everything a person is, is the algorithm and information structure contained in some fashion within the brain (most likely in its structure), which means a person isn’t limited to biology as a substrate. If the functional relations and information structure is preserved, there is nothing preventing one from recreating them on a different substrate or even in a simulated environment as an upload.

Moreover, a person isn’t a single continuous entity; the ‘me’ of today is not quite the ‘me’ of yesterday, which in turn isn’t the ‘me’ of a year ago, Rather, a person is a series of ‘Person-instances’, connected causally between themselves and the world.

In this context/worldview, certain philosophical problems get obvious solutions:
Destructive teleport for example, preserves identity by virtue of maintaining the causal connection, even if the teleport is done by destructively scanning a person then recreating them years later; from inside it’d seem like one was teleported into the future.
For non-destructive teleportation or mind-cloning, the answer to “which is ‘you’” is ‘both’ (or ‘yes’), since both satisfy the condition of preserving the identity-information-structure while being causally related to the person-instance of before. However, from that point onward, both ‘you’ instances now have a nearly identical and slowly diverging clone/sibling that over time grows more distinct.
Looking at how the subjective experience would look like supports this, since both would feel like being the same person from before.

In general, identifying with separate person-instances of yourself should be a question of degree rather than a binary yes/no. Especially considering that person-instances can be separated by more than just time, if any multiverse-type ideas are true.

This brings me to the second point: Metaphysics.

Not too long ago, I’ve encountered the ideas of Max Tegmark about the nature of existence. The really short version is (if I understand correctly) that existence is, at its highest/lowest level, how intelligent-life-supporting mathematical structures look like from inside.
The idea struck me as a beautiful way to close the explanation chain, providing at least qualitatively a consistent model of existence and reality that contains a path explaining the existence of one to ask and understand it.

Combine that, and various simulation-type arguments with anthropic thinking, and you get an identity spread across the multiverse in a forest of causal trees, with the occasional Boltzmann brain containing the causal ‘back/forward’ links arising purely by chance, and you get a very peculiar view of how being a person looks like from inside, specifically at points close to branch-ends:
Like with quantum suicide, even if the measure of realities in which you die far outweighs those in which you don’t and assuming some smoothness in that there’s no lower probability/measure limit to what still feels like an existence, then ‘you’ still get a continuation of experience, even if at a much lower measure.

This requires a rethinking/reworking on the specifics of why death sucks and the fact is there are still branch-ends. Even if there is a last moment minor probability split and continuation corresponding to things like reality as given being an ancestral simulation or something, the loss of measure feels like a really bad thing in and of itself, beyond which there are the many realities in which you are now dead, which hurts any others that care about you in all those worlds, not to mention the circumstances surrounding branch-ends aren’t likely to be pleasant.

Overall though, it seems that there’s a subjective kind of immortality, combined with a gradual thinning out over realities, where death still sucks and should be avoided at all cost, and will probably happen to everyone besides you.
Note that horrific injury and survival are still very much a possibility, and the question of what you ought to expect is to me at least somewhat confusing, especially regarding things like cryonics in that you’ll only expect a continuation of identity in the events it works, but you’d only prefer it in the events it worked and the future doesn’t suck, and if you find yourself in the branch with the ‘future sucks’, getting to one where it doesn’t seems kind of... difficult.

Definitely recommend acting as if death = cessation of existence, which is objectively true within any single reality (unless that reality is extra weird), and think about the subjective continuation-of-identity thinking for special cases like when deciding for/against signing up for cryonics, and in general the whole measure thing is kind of confusing, though thinking about it in context of what to expect seems like a useful direction.

So, A bit of a mess of only somewhat coherent ideas, I’d appreciate any corrections regarding the metaphysics and any other oversights, but otherwise just thought I’d let this out. Hope at least someone besides myself derives some  use from it.

I just realized I haven't previously pointed the metaphysicians on Less Wrong to "Possible Girls," a hilarious paper about acausal romance:

The ability to causally interact with your partner is important to many aspects of happy romantic relationships, but not to all of them. It’s quite pleasant simply to know that your partner loves you and appreciates being loved by you. A loving relationship with a faraway person can enhance one’s self-esteem and turn loneliness into contentment. As a lonely philosopher, I’ve come to wonder: If [all possible worlds exist], can I have a loving relationship with someone from another possible world? ...The answer, I think, is yes.

Even if you don't read the whole thing, don't miss the final paragraph.