[ExI] The Anticipation Dilemma (Personal Identity Paradox)

[Lee Corbin]

Stathis writes


> Lee wrote:
> 
>> That is, you really are better off by choosing to have your
>> instance perish so that your duplicate gets rich.  Or, as an
>> alternative, you are better off today if at 3pm last night a copy
>> was made, and at 4pm the original you was disintegrated,
>> and at 5pm your duplicate was substituted for the original
>> instance, and voila!  you awake to discover you're rich.
> 
> You assume that the similarity criterion for survival trumps the
> anticipation criterion.

Guilty as charged!  :-)   Begging the question as usual, though,
I'm afraid.  :-)      (Gee, I sure hope that certain persons won't
put that in the dossier they keep on me to pull out for ammunition
later.)

> I could put it the other way around: the similarity criterion is only
> important to the extent that it allows us to anticipate the experiences
> of future selves. I am similar to my copies in the past and in parallel
> universes, but as I don't anticipate their experiences, I don't consider
> that I survive through them.

I claim that I can come up with (and have done so before, either
here or elsewhere) two entirely identical physical outcomes
wherein your feelings are not clear and unambiguous. Under one
description of the proceedings (memory erasure, teleportation,
copying, etc.) we end up with a physical system completely
identical to another (obtained through memory additions,
teleportation, etc.), and yet you might strongly anticipate being
one of them and not being the other.

If so, would this count against your system?  I.e., do you believe
that anticipation is a firm enough ground upon which to base a
concept of survival?

> This is just the way human minds have evolved to think. You have
> said that you would change this aspect of your mind if you get the
> chance, but then it would be just as easy to change the will to
> survive in any other sense.

I meant to say that I would only try to continue the progress that I've
already begun:  namely to identify with and anticipate the experiences
of all duplicates past and future whose physical states closely 
resemble mine now.   Or, failing that, to regard anticipation as an
unreliable guide, and to upon occasion ignore its built-in urgings
when they conflict with the patternist notion of identity.

It might be easier to discard the notion of surviveability, or, as you
suggest, to eliminate the desire to survive, but I don't want to do 
that! No, no no!   :-)     Reasonable or not, "being alive is better
than being dead, all other things equal" is something pretty hard-
wired in me, at least for now.

Lee