I think consciousness arises from physical processes (as Denett says), but that's not really solving the problem or proving it doesn't exist.

Anyway, I think you are right in that if you think being mind-uploaded does or does not constitute continuing your personal identity or whatever, it's hard to say you are wrong. However, what if I don't actually know if it does, yet I want to be immortal? Then we have to study that to figure out what things we can do keep the real 'us' existing and what don't.

What if the persistence of personal identity is a meaningless pursuit?

If there's no objective right answer, then what does it mean to seek immortality? For example, if we found out that a simulation of 'you' is not actually 'you', would seeking immortality mean we can't upload our minds to machines and have to somehow figure out a way to keep the pink fleshy stuff that is our current brains around?

If we found out that there's a new 'you' every time you go to sleep and wake up, wouldn't it make sense to abandon the quest for immortality as we already die every night?

(Note, I don't actually think this happens. But I think the concept of personal identity is inextricably linked to the question of how separate consciousnesses, each feeling their own qualia, can arise.)

The thing is, I'm just not sure if it's even a reasonable thing to talk about 'immortality' because I don't know what it means for one personal identity ('soul') to persist. I couldn't be sure if a computer simulated my mind it would be 'me', for example. Immortality will likely involve serious changes to the physical form our mind takes, and once you start talking about that you get into the realm of thought experiments like the idea that if you put someone under a general anaesthetic, take out one atom from their brain, then wake them up, you have a similar person but not the one who originally went under the anaesthetic. So from the perspective of the original person, undergoing their operation was pointless, because they are dead anyway. The person who wakes from the operation is someone else entirely.

I guess I'm just trying to say that immortality makes heaps of sense if we can somehow solve the question of personal identity, but if we can't, then 'immortality' may be pretty nonsensical to talk about, simply because if we cannot say what it takes for a single 'soul' to persist over time, the very concept of 'immortality' may be ill-defined.

I like your post about the heat death of the universe, if you ever figure anything out regarding the persistence of a personal identity, I'd like you to message me or something.

Doesn't anthropics strongly push us to figure that the universe is infinite?

I'll come in to say yes I agree these problems are confusing, although my ethics are weird and I'm only kind if a consequentialist.

(I identify as amoral, in practice what it means is I act like an egoist but give consequentialist answers to ethical questions)

Past surveys show that most LessWrongers are consequentialists, and many are also effective altruism advocates. What do they think of infinities in ethics?

As I've intuitively always favoured some kind of negative utilitarianism, this has caused me some confusion.

Unfortunately, we can't.

I am sure we can. Peak oil said we'd run out of oil Real Soon Now, full stop. The cost of oil has been rising since early XX century, as you point out, that's not what peak oil was all about.

those rebuilding the civilization from scratch today

Again, we have confusion of technology and scale. The average cost of oil extraction is higher than it used to be. But that cost varies, considerably. If you are trying to rebuild you don't need much oil, so you only use the cheapest oilfields (e.g. the Saudi ones) and don't try to pave over the North Sea with oil rigs or set them up all over the Arctic.

Indefinitely, in the scenario I described -- we'd have lost the technology necessary to rebuild the technology.

We built it from scratch to start with.

abundant energy

I think you're confusing technology and scale. Besides, can we now finally admit peak oil was wrong?

I think your last paragraph is the key point here. Forget about QI; MWI says some small fraction of your future measure will be alive very far into the future (for ever? depends on difficult cosmological questions); even objective-collapse theories say that this holds with nonzero but very small probability (which I suggest you should feel exactly the same way about); every theory, quantum or otherwise, says that at no point will you experience being dead-and-unable-to-experience things; all QI seems to me to add to this is a certain attitude.

So it mostly used as universal objection to any strange things.

Well, for the avoidance of doubt, I do not endorse any such use and I hope I haven't fallen into such sloppiness myself.

Your interpretation of Egan's law is that everything useful should already be used by evolution.

No, I didn't intend to say or imply that at all. I do, however, say that if evolution has found some particular mode of thinking or feeling or acting useful (for evolution's goals, which of course need not be ours) then that isn't generally invalidated by new discoveries about why the world is the way that's made those things evolutionarily fruitful.

(Of course it could be, given the "right" discoveries. Suppose it turns out that something about humans having sex accelerates some currently unknown process that will in a few hundred years make the earth explode. Then the urge to have sex that evolution has implanted in most people would be evolutionarily suboptimal in the long run and we might do better to use artificial insemination until we figure out how to stop the earth-exploding process.)

In case of QI it has some similarities to anthropic principle, by the way

You could have deduced that I'd noticed that, from the fact that I wrote

what I'm claiming is that those things aren't invalidated by saying words like "anthropic" or "quantum".

but no matter.

You also suggest to use Egan's law as normative: don't do strange risky things.

I didn't intend to say or imply that, either, and this one I don't see how you got out of what I wrote. I apologize if I was very unclear. But I might endorse as a version of Egan's law something like "If something is a terrible risk, discovering new scientific underpinnings for things doesn't stop it being a terrible risk unless the new discoveries actually change either the probabilities or the consequences". Whether that applies in the present case is, I take it, one of the points under dispute.

so my best strategy should not be normal

I take it you mean might not be; it could turn out that even in this rather unusual situation "normal" is the best you can do.

even if QI doesn't work

I have never been able to understand what different predictions about the world anyone expects if "QI works" versus if "QI doesn't work", beyond the predictions already made by physics. (QI seems to me to mean: standard physics, plus a decision to condition probabilities on future rather than present epistemic state. The first bit is unproblematic; the second bit -- which is what you need to say e.g. "I will survive" -- seems to me like a decision rather than a proposition, and I don't know what it would mean to say that it does or doesn't work.)

cryonics

I'm not really seeing any connection to speak of between cryonics and QI. (Except for this. Suppose you reckon that cryonics has a 5% chance of working on other people, but QI considerations lead you to say that for you it will almost certainly work. No, sorry, I see you give QI a 10% chance of working. So I mean that for you it will work with probability more like 10%. Does that mean that you'd be prepared to pay about twice as much for cryonics as you would be without bringing QI into it? (Given the presumably regrettable costs for whatever influence you might have hoped to have post mortem using the money: children, charities, etc.)