[ExI] simulation as an improvement over reality

[Ben Zaiboc]

Damien Broderick <thespike at satx.rr.com> wrote:

> On 12/31/2010 11:21 AM, Ben Zaiboc wrote:

>> a copy of you*is a you*, exactly as a copy of Beethoven's 5th is Beethoven's 5th.  The copy will be experiencing being you.  How could it possibly be otherwise?

> Dear dog in Himmel! NOBODY HAS EVER DENIED THIS! An exact copy of you
MUST experience himself as you. That's not the problem. The real issue
nobody ever seems to answer was posed by Stuart:

> "you should be
alright with your long lost twin brother showing up, locking you in the
cellar,
and assuming your identity. Or cheating death by brainwashing someone
else into
honestly believing they are you."

> You'd be okay with that, Ben? You'd be mollified by the report that the
Benified twin or brainwashee was a really, really good copy of you?
You'd hand over your savings, house, spouse, children to this
as-perfect-as-possible substitute, and sit quietly in the cellar knowing
that "you" were having a really great time?

> I don't think so.


And you'd be quite right.

Your argument is the same as the old one about a person who, after being copied, should be quite happy to shoot himself.  Naturally that is silly.  Nobody would be happy to shoot themselves, regardless of how many identical copies of them were in existence.  The 'real issue' you pose above is not an issue at all.  The issue being discussed is whether a person survives uploading or not.  By the very definition of uploading, they must.  A copied person would diverge from the 'original' in the very first instant they exist.  There would now be two individual people, each with a common 'mind-ancestor', each with just as much claim to being the 'original', if that means anything, as the other.


> It's a non-Abelian proposition. It's intransitive. Yes, the copy
experiences self and world exactly as you do and is therefore *a*  you.
No, *you* here and now have no stake (other than empathy or envious
hatred) in that replica consciousness, certainly not to the extent that
you'd feel happy to be killed or locked in the cellar in order for that
other Ben to remain alive and free.

All I can say is this:

---------<===========

The single dashed line represents the original person.  
The Less-Than represents the point at which the copying occurs.
The two dashed lines represent the two resulting copies. (The diagram is not meant to imply that the 'copies' are exactly in synchrony.  They *will* diverge, even if only as a consequence of occupying different positions in space)
Tell me, which of them is the 'original'?

Can you see that question makes no sense?  That the original only exists before the point of copying?
After the copying, there are two descendants of this past original, in the same sense that right now there is a single descendant of *your* original of two minutes ago.

To say that the copying process preserves the atoms of the historical original in one case, and not in the other, and that this makes all the difference, is to assert that atoms are embodying something essential about the self, something /that cannot be transferred to other atoms/. If this is the case, then it means we are all doomed.  About every 7 days*. Doooooomed!

Now I'm quite prepared to entertain, as an entertaining hypothesis, that I die every 7 days and am reborn as a completely different person, but I have to say that if this is the case, I really don't mind.  

A perfected uploading process should be no different to the periodic replacement of various essential molecules in the brain: Change the matter, preserve the pattern.  That pattern (dynamic and enormously complex, but still a pattern) is THE SELF.  Wherever your pattern is, there you are.  It doesn't matter what types of atoms it is instantiated in, it doesn't matter how many instances of it there are.  

This "make a copy, then kill the original, he won't mind" concept is a red herring.  Or rather, a straw man.  It's definitely not 'the real issue'.


Ben Zaiboc


* Yes, I know that's a gross simplification.  But it illustrates the principle.