[ExI] The plural of "me" is not "us"

[Rafal Smigrodzki]

On Fri, May 15, 2020 at 7:12 AM Re Rose via extropy-chat <
extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org> wrote:

>
> But the real concern here is YOU being YOU! Just consider that you violate
> no physical law of anything by existing contemporaneously with this new
> being with your uploaded copy of your brain. So, la la la, you are hanging
> out with your copy one day. Having coffee, maybe. And a scone. It's
> pleasant and the coffee is good. You want to die now? Do you think you will
> magically inhabit this nice new being made from your upload, seeing from
> its eyes and gathering information from its sensors, because you now die?
> Nope. That won't happen, sadly. All that will happen is that you will die.
>

### I would not see it as anything really sad, if I knew with sufficient
degree of confidence that the person I share scones with contains enough of
my memories and proclivities. It's a bit like living through your children
- most of us like the idea of our children living on, in part because of
the shared genes, in part because of the shared memories. Of course, your
child is also quite different from you, so the consolation you gain from
the child's survival is weak. But a fresh copy of me shares almost all that
makes me into me, so I would not be much upset about the death of me, if I
knew there is another me left alive.

You notice how I am using language in a strange way - we and our language
have not evolved ways of analyzing uploaded copies, since copies do not
happen in nature. Our inbuilt, dedicated self-analysis circuitry which is
located in the parietal cortex is not equipped to look at copies and
correctly categorize them. It throws a divide by zero error and quits,
leaving you with a feeling of something being wrong. It's hard to think
about a plural of "me" as a single identity - we automatically default to
using "us", a collection of distinct entities, more-or-less diverse people
rather than exact copies of one person.

In the world with uploading the plural of "me" is not "us". Once uploading
become possible we'll need to invent a new collective/singular pronoun to
refer to multiples of one person.

Rafal
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