[ExI] The Upload Game

[Stathis Papaioannou]

2008/4/26 Lee Corbin <lcorbin at rawbw.com>:

>  But the emotion anticipation cannot be made consistent.
>  If Nurse Ratchet approaches my duplicate with the needle
>  it's that instance of me that must cringe, not this instance,
>  despite what physics is saying about the equivalence of
>  events. Do you believe that anticipation can be made
>  wholly consistent and logical?

No, it can't, because it depends on the assumption that there is an
objective sense in which I am "the same person" as past and future
versions of my present self. There is an objective sense in which I
bear an arbitrarily specified relationship to other entities, but what
this relationship should be to qualify as "survival" is contingent on
evolved psychology, and nature doesn't care about making our
psychology consistent and logical. If for some reason nature had found
it expedient to make us believe that we don't survive sleep, it would
be easy enough to define "survival" objectively given that we can
define "sleep" objectively. However, there is no *objective* reason to
define survival in this way rather than another way. What counts as
survival is a contingent fact of evolution, not a logical or empirical
fact.



-- 
Stathis Papaioannou