[extropy-chat] identity and copies, yet again

[Damien Broderick]

At 07:39 AM 9/17/2004 -0700, Jef wrote:

>Let's set aside the technical/philosophical aspects for a moment.  How 
>would it feel to *find out* that you are the copy?  How would it feel to 
>*be* the copy?  Why?

I can't credit how often this comes up as if it were an objection to 
someone's wish to continue existing.

Obviously a nearly-exact copy would *feel*, from inside, just like you do now.

The copy would also serve everyone else's needs as well as the original did.

None of that has the slightest bearing on whether the original should be 
complicit, indeed happy, in its own termination.

Now it  might be that a kind of displaced egotism would rejoice in the 
prospect of a near-perfect copy continuing on in the world after one's own 
death. This is often held to be one motive for having children, although 
given the really crummy fidelity in the offspring copying process any 
`immortality' involved is rather dubious. But that's an entirely different 
motivation from one's urgent, legacy-code driven wish, from *inside*, to 
stay alive and kicking.

What is so hard to understand about this distinction?

(Granted, it will tend to vanish once we have the opportunity to expand our 
locus of identity beyond our skin, by running an interactive redundant 
backup on some other substrate. But for now, it seems to me absurd to be 
content or even eager to perish *now* on the off-chance that a 
near-perfect--or even repaired and enhanced--copy of you will be compiled 
elsewhere in the future. Good luck to him, I say, but his good fortune in 
existing, should that come about, has very little to do with *me*, here and 
now, here inside.)

Damien Broderick