Oh, certainly... I agree that it's possible to care about whether I'm replaced by such an agent.

Heck, it's possible to care about whether I'm replaced with my future self... e.g., I can imagine deciding there's no point to continuing at my job and saving money for retirement, because 70-year-old-Dave is a completely different person and why should he get to spend this money instead of me?

What I'm not sure about is whether I should care.

That said, though, as far as I can tell through imagining scenarios, I don't in fact seem to care.

That is, if I imagine myself in an upload scenario like that, my intuitive sense about it is that I get up from the machine and go on to get cancer and die, and also that I get up from the machine and go on to live in a digitized Utopia, and these are two distinct loci of experience neither of which is each other but both of which are me, and to the extent that I care about my future selves at all (which is considerable) I care about both of them.

Of course, people's judgments of that sort of thing are notoriously unreliable. If I imagine myself being told I have six weeks to live, for example, my intuitive sense is that I would feel relieved and kind of joyful. I find it unlikely that this would actually be my reaction.

I thought I first heard that term from Kurzweil in the TSIN or his earlier work, but I've read or skimmed some of Goertzel's writing, so perhaps I picked it up from there. I'm realizing the term probably has little meaning in philosophy, but suggests computationalism and or functionalism.

There's a big difference between recreating an intelligence that exists/existed large numbers of lightyears away due to sheer statistical chance, and creating one that verifiably existed with high probability in your own history. I suspect the latter are enough more interesting to be created first. We might move on to creating the populations of interesting alternate histories, as well as randomly selected worlds and so forth down the line.

Beings who only experience gradients of pleasure might be interesting, but since they already likely have access to immortality wherever they exist (being transhuman / posthuman and all) it seems like there is less utility to trying to resurrect them as it would only be a duplication. Naturally evolved beings lacking the capacity for extreme suffering could be interesting, but it's hard to say how common they would be throughout the universe -- thus it would seem unfair to give them a priority in resurrection compared to naturally evolved ones.

It's the choice between two kinds of new minds, one modeled after a mind that has existed once, and one modeled after a better design.

If the modeled mind is the same person as the mind that existed once, it is clearly the better choice. And by same person I of course mean that it is related to a preexisting mind in certain ways.

One might also invoke Big Universe considerations to say that even the "new" kind of a mind has already existed in some corner of the universe (maybe as a Boltzmann brain), so they'll be regardless choosing between two kinds of minds that have existed once. Which just goes to show that the whole "this mind has existed once, so it should be given priority over a one that hasn't" argument doesn't make a lot of sense.

We seem too have a moral intuition that things that occur in far distant parts of the universe that have no causal connection to us aren't morally relevant. You seem to think that this intuition is a side-effect of the population ethics principle you seem to believe in (the Impersonal Total Principle). However, I would argue that it is a direct, terminal value.

Evidence for my view is the fact that we tend to also discount the desires of causally unconnected people in distant parts of the universe in nonpopulation ethics situations. For instance, when discussing whether to pave over a forest, we think the desires of those who live near the forest should be considered. However, we do not think the desires of the vast amount of Forest Maximizing AIs who doubtless exist out there should be considered, even though there is likely some part of the Big World they exist in.

Minds that existed once, and were causally connected to our world in certain ways, should be given priority over minds that have only existed in distant, causally unconnected parts of the Big World.

It's the choice between two kinds of new minds, one modeled after a mind that has existed once, and one modeled after a better design.

Still I wonder then, what could I do, to enhance my probability of being resurrected if worse comes to worse and I can't manage to stay alive to protect and ensure the posterity of my own current self if I am not one of those better minds (according to which values though?)

Your wording suggests that I would assume the ITP, which would then imply rejecting the value of identity. But actually my reasoning goes in the other direction: since I don't find personal identity to correspond to anything fundamental, my rejection of it causes me to arrive at something ITP-like. But note that I would not say that my rejection of personal identity necessarily implies ITP: "the total amount of positive and negative experience is all that matters" is a much stronger claim than a mere "personal identity doesn't matter". I have only made the latter claim, not the former.

I have the same reductionist views of personal identity as you. I completely agree that it isn't ontologically fundamental or anything like that. The difference between us is that when you concluded it wasn't ontologically fundamental you stopped caring about it. I, by contrast, just replaced the symbol with what it stood for. I figured out what it was that we meant by "personal identity" and concluded that that was what I had really cared about all along.

That does provide a possible reason to prefer the child with the more ambitious preferences, if the net outcome for the world as a whole could be expected to be positive. But if it can't, then it seems obvious to me that we should prefer creating the non-ambitious child.

I can't agree with this. If I had the choice between a wireheaded child who lived a life of perfect passive bliss, or a child who spent their life scientifically studying nature (but lived a hermitlike existence so their discoveries wouldn't benefit others), I would pick the second child, even if they endured many hardships the wirehead would not. I would also prefer not to be wireheaded, even if the wireheaded me would have an easier life.

When considering creating people who have different life goals, my first objective is of course, making sure both of those people would live lives worth living. But if the answer is yes for both of them then my decision would be based primarily on whose life goals were more in line with my ideals about what humanity should try to be, rather than whose life would be easier.

I suppose I am advocating something like G.E. Moore's Ideal Utilitarianism, except instead of trying to maximize ideals directly I am advocating creating people who care about those ideals and then maximizing their utility.

Even if we accepted IPT, we would still have good reasons to prefer not killing existing people: namely that society works much better and with much lower levels of stress and fear if everyone has strong guarantees that society puts a high value on preserving their lives.

I agree, but I also think killing and replacing is wrong in principle.

I stopped consdering the Repugnant Conclusion a problem after reading John Maxwell's, Michael Sullivan's and Eliezer's comments to your "Mere Cable Channel Addition Paradox" post.

I did too, but then I realized I was making a mistake. I realized that the problem with the RC was in it's premises, not it's practicality. I ultimately realized that the Mere Addition Principle was false, and that that is what is wrong with the RC.

While this phrasing indeed doesn't make any mention of "persons", it still seems to me primarily motivated by a desire to create a moral theory based on persons.

No, it is motivated a desire to create a moral theory that accurately maps what I morally value, and I consider the types of relationships we commonly refer to as "personal identity" to be more morally valuable than pretty much anything. Would you rather I devise a moral theory based on stuff I didn't consider morally valuable?

If not, demanding the "link" criteria seems like an arbitrary decision.

You can make absolutely anything sound arbitrary if you use the right rhetoric. All you have to do is take the thing that I care about, find a category it shares with things I don't care about nearly as much, and then ask me why I am arbitrarily caring for one thing over the other even though they are in the same category.

For instance, I could say "Pain and pleasure are both brain states. It's ridiculously arbitrary to care about one brain state over another, when they are all just states that occur in your brain. You should be more inclusive and less arbitrary. Now please climb into that iron maiden."

I believe personal identity is one of the cornerstones of morality, whether you call it by that name, or replace the name with the things it stands for. I don't consider it arbitrary at all.