This is an excellent point I should've noticed myself (though it's been long and long since I encountered the parable). Who says you own a baby just by being its genetic mother?

Albeit sufficiently young babies are plausibly not sentient.

Well, if you duplicate an apple (or even another person) there is never any confusion of which one is "real". They are both identical duplicates.

However, when you talk about duplicating yourself, all these smart people are suddenly wondering which "self" they would subjectively experience being inside. And that's pretty ridiculous.

So you need to point out that the self doesn't really exist over time in the strictest technical sense, in order to make people stop wondering which identical copy of their subjective "self" will end up in.

These questions don't make sense because In the same way that you can't subjectively experience other people, you can't subjectively experience yourself from the past or the future.

Apologies for the late response. Grant proposals and exams.

I think the following series of posts really captures how I go about intuitively deconstructing the notion of "individual".

EY discusses his confusion concerning the anthropic trilemma and I think his confusion is a result of implicit Belief In A Soul, and demonstrates many similarities to the problems you outlined in your post. KS tries to explain why this dissonance occurs here and I explain why dissonance need not necessarily occur here in the comments.

To summarize the relevant portions of this discussion, EY(2009) thinks that if you reject the notion that there is a "thread" connecting your past and future subjective experiences, human utility functions become incoherent. I attempt to intuitively demonstrate that this is not the case.

Hopefully people will weigh in on my comment over there, and I can see if it holds water.

Saving the world is by definition reactive

It depends on what you mean by "reactive", I suppose. For example, if you as a superhero dedicate years of your life to reducing hunger in the world, then technically you are reacting to the hunger that exists, but still, this is much more similar to "optimizing the world" than to "stopping Lex Luthor".

The most limiting thing that you have not pointed out is that as a Superhero, you want to save the world. Saving the world [from supervillains] is by definition reactive. A Supervillain's goals have much more room for variation, and one could argue that Supervillains actually are optimizing the world, it just happens to be sub-optimal for everyone else.

t=59 minutes...

AI: Hmm, I have produced in this past hour one paperclip, and the only other thing I did was come up with the solutions for all of humanity's problems, I guess I'll just take the next minute to etch them into the paperclip...

t=2 hours...

Experimenters: Phew, at least we're safe from that AI.

Your computer probably has a badware problem. If you are running Windows, try anti-spyware programs such as Spybot. Otherwise, check your browser proxy settings and browser extensions ....

I'm not seeing any popups?

They are? Which ones?