I like the analogy of alcohol and decision-making! In addition to "Don't Drink and Drive," here's a new slogan "Don't Drink and Decide."

An analogous question that I encountered recently when buying a powerball lottery ticket just for the heck of it (also because its jackpot was $1.5 billion and the expected value of buying a ticket was actually approaching a positive net reward) :

I was in a rush to get somewhere when I was buying the ticket, so I thought, "instead of trying to pick meaningful numbers, why not just pick something like 1-1-1-1-1-1? Why would that drawing be strictly more improbable than any other random permutations of 6 numbers from 1 to 60, such as 5-23-23-16-37-2? But then the store clerk told me that I could just let the computer pick the numbers on my ticket, so I said "OK."

Picking 1-1-1-1-1-1 SEEMS like you are screwing yourself over and requiring an even more improbable outcome to take place in order to win...but are you REALLY? I don't see how....

I'm sure if 1-1-1-1-1-1 were actually drawn, there would be investigations about whether that drawing was rigged. And if I won with ANY ticket (such as 5-23-23-16-37-2), I would start to wonder whether I was living in a simulation centered around my life experience. But aren't these intuitions going astray? Aren't the probabilities all the same?

I define consciousness as a passively aware thing, totally independent of memory, thoughts, feelings, and unconscious hardwired or conditioned responses. It is the hard-to-get-at thing inside the mind which is aware of the activity of the mind without itself thinking, feeling, remembering, or responding. The demented, the delirious, the brain damaged all have (unless those brain structures performing the function of consciousness are damaged, which is not a given) the same consciousness, the same Self, the same I and You, as I define it, as they did when their brains were intact. Dream Self is the same Self as Waking Self to my thinking. I assume consciousness arises at some point in infancy. From that moment on it is Self, to my thinking.

Thought experiment for you, most of which may actually be physically possible:

Imagine that you went to sleep and someone anesthetized one hemisphere of your brain. Ignore any practicalities like interruptions to your heart and breathing, lets assume whatever medical support needed is provided.

"you" wake up running on only your right hemisphere.

This is possible and it happens to people who've had a Hemispherectomy. Is that consciousness you? it has a continuous line from your former self.

Next, you're put back to sleep and the other half of your brain is anesthetized.

"you" wake up running on only your left hemisphere with no memory of waking up as the right-hemisphere you (since any memories are in the right hemisphere). Left hemisphere you has no continuous line of consciousness with right hemisphere you that was awake a little while ago. There is no continuous line from that former self. They're running on 2 different chunks of hardware next to each other.

They could even communicate through letters or recordings. Should right and left hemisphere you care about each other beyond taking care of the body?

Should it matter that at some future point they might be merged back together into one?

What if they're reasonably sure they'll never be allowed to merge back into whole-brain you?

Which body do you expect to wake up in the next morning?

Both.

Good point: I should address the inside view. So from the inside view, I remember my past life and I conclude, for example, "things are better for me now than a year ago." But none of what I can observe from the inside view tells me whether I'm still me because of meat, or because of pattern. Further complicating matters, I can take the inside view on other people's experiences, i.e. have empathy. I can have empathy for the past, present, or future experiences of other people. If I'm looking forward to the experiences of the teleported person, is that a selfish anticipation or an empathetic one? The inside view doesn't tell me.

"But when I wake up in the destination teleporter, then I will know!" No. It's a given that "I" will wake up there, the only question is whether to use the word "I". If I look forward to a happy life after teleportation, I-before-teleporting will have been correct, regardless of pattern vs meat. The only question is whether to count that as selfish or empathetic looking-forward. And when "I" wake up, "I" still don't know whether to count "myself" a survivor or a newbie.

This - that there is no Simple Truth about whether a future experience will be mine - can be hard to believe. That's because "mine" is a very central neural category as Yudkowsky would have it. So, even when neither the inside nor outside views gives us a handle on the question, it can still seem that "will it be me?" is a factual question. But it's a verbal one.

I'm with Usul on this whole topic.

Allow me to pose a different thought experiment that might elucidate things a bit.

Imagine that you visit a research lab where they put you under deep anesthesia. This anesthesia will not produce any dreams, just blank time. (Ordinarily, this would seem like one of those "blink and you're awake again" types of experiences).

In this case, while you are unconscious, the scientists make a perfect clone of you with a perfect clone of your brain. They put that clone in an identical-looking room somewhere else in the facility.

The scientists also alter your original brain just ever-so-slightly by deleting a few memories. Your original brain is altered no more than it originally is when, let's say, it has a slight alcohol hangover. But it is altered more than the clone, which has a perfect copy of your brain from before the operation.

Which body do you expect to wake up in the next morning? My intuition: the original with the slightly impaired memories—despite the fact that the pattern theory of identity would expect that one would wake up as the clone, would it not?

Of course, both will believe they are the original, and by all appearances it will be hard for outsiders who were not aware of the room layout of the building to figure out which one was the original. I don't care about any of those questions for the purpose of this thought-experiment.

It seems to me that there can be five possibilities as to what I experience the next morning: 1. The body of the (ever-so-slightly) impaired original. 2. The body of the perfect clone.
3. Neither body (non-experience). 4. Neither body (reincarnation in a different body, or in an entirely different organism with an entirely different sort of consciousness, with no memory or trace of the previous experiences). 5. Somehow, both bodies at once.

So if you explained this setup to me before this whole operation and offered to pay either the original or the clone a million dollars after the experience was finished, my pre-operation self would very much prefer that the original get paid that million dollars because that's the body I expect to wake up in after the operation.

Why? Well, we will wake up in our original bodies after dreaming or having a hangover that changes our brains a bit, no?

Are you telling me that, next time I go to sleep, if there happens to be a configuration of matter, a Boltzmann brain somewhere, that happens to pattern-match my pre-sleep brain better than the brain that my original body ends up with after the night, that my awareness will wake up in the Boltzmann brain, and THAT is what I will experience? Ha!

I have a very strong feeling that this has not happened ever before. So that means one of three things: 1. Boltzmann brains or copies of me somewhere else don't exist. The brain in my bedroom the next morning is always the closest pattern-match to the brain in my bed the previous night, so that's what my awareness adheres to all the time. 2. My feelings are fundamentally misleading (how so?)

Just think: if the pattern theory of identity is true, then here is what I logically expect to happen when I die:

My awareness will jump to the next-as-good clone of my original mental pattern. Whoever had the most similar memories to what my original brain had before it died, that's whose body and brain and memories I will experience after the death of my original brain.

In that case: no cryonics needed! (As long as you are prepared to endure the world's worst hangover where you lose all memories of your previous life, gain new memories, and basically think that you have been someone else all along. But hey: assuming that this new person has had a pretty good life up until now, I would say that this still beats non-existence!)

This also implies that, if you are a, let's say, Jewish concentration camp prisoner who dies, the closest pattern-match to your mind the next moment that you will experience will be...probably another Jewish concentration camp prisoner. And on and on and on! Yikes!

No, I think concepts like "belief in belief" or "belief in self-deception" have more to do with people who are slightly on the autism spectrum having difficulty understanding neurotypical brains than anything else. Yes, I am specifically thinking EY here.

Basically neurotypical brains are way more social. A religion is professed and that means there are statements repeated aloud, in company, basically like a password for gaining social acceptance. When done early enough from childhood and often enough, you learn to repeat them also inward, inside your brain. It becomes part of your inner voice. It also has a certain emotional effect, maybe reassuring, or frightening.

But at no point in the process does truth play much of a role. You don't believe it in the sense you believe things that require immediate action. You just hear this inner voice saying it. And you repeat it aloud for other people.

The best parallel is probably music. Like song lyrics stuck in your ear. Do you really wonder what is the probability that Rick Astley is never gonna give her up? No, it is just a chain of words heard outside from the radio or inside your brain with a certain emotional effect.

People who are slightly autistic tend to think beliefs are private, you really, seriously decide if X is true or false. But for neurotypicals beliefs aren't private and thus they are not really beliefs in this sense, they do not carry a big stamp putting "this is true" on their beliefs, it is passwords, word-memes repeated aloud for a social function and also heard inward. Since they do not require immediate action, they also do not require actually deciding if they are true.

This is why "I believe people are nicer than they actually are" makes perfect sense. It means "I enjoy hearing an inner voice telling me people are nice. I know it is not really true. But I enjoy this tape so I keep playing it. I will also say it aloud so that others can also enjoy hearing it."

Human intelligence evolved as social intelligence. We are far better equipped to win political debates and get elected than to find truth. This is why Newton type truth-finders tend to be slightly autistic, having Asperger, you need to turn off the social in order to be really interested in truth.

Uh, plenty of born are born into worse-than-death situations already, at least by our standards, yet they generally make a go of their lives instead of committing suicide. We call many of them our "ancestors."

Can you elaborate? Your statement seems self-contradictory. By definition, situations "worse than death" would be the ones in which people prefer to kill themselves rather than continue living.

In the context of the original post, I take "worse-than-death" to mean (1) enough misery that a typical person would rather not continue living, and (2) an inability to commit suicide. While I agree many of our ancestors have had a rough time, relatively few of them have had it that hard.

I took the survey.

The only part I wasn't sure about how to answer was the P(God) and P(supernatural) part. I put a very low probability on P(supernatural) because it sounded like it was talking about supernatural things happening "since the beginning of the universe" which I took as meaning "after the big bang." But for P(God) I put 50% because, hey, who knows, maybe there was a clockmaker God who set up the big bang?

If one were to interpret these survey responses in a certain way, though, they could seem illogical because one might think that P(supernatural) (which includes God in addition to many other possibilities) would strictly have to have a higher probability than the more-specific P(God). But like I said, I took P(supernatural) as referring to stuff after the big bang, whereas I took P(God) as including any time even before the big bang.

I take iron (I'm pretty careless about what dose I grab) to control anemia, and vitamin D (gelcaps because Dr. My Uncle told me they're better, 5000 IU/day because a blood test showed me D-insufficient on a lower dose). You're supposed to take iron with food but I don't get the stomach upset problem if I just take it before bed and it's easier to remember that way. I don't care about brands qua brands, although I'm probably influenced by packaging when there are several options within my parameters.

For a while I took magnesium to see if that would help reduce fasciculations. It didn't help so I stopped when I ran out. I think that's the only one.