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0 pointsgruez5y ago0 comments

>just because you can label one particular branch “master” doesn’t make it genuinely special, and any special treatment you give to one branch is merely your convention.

It does matter, depending on your motivations. If you think the reason for living is that you're a great person whose continued existence will benefit society and/or your loved ones, then sure, it doesn't matter as long as the copy is identical. If you simply want to stay alive and experience/enjoy more of it, then having a bit-for-bit identical copy might not achieve your goal.

For the latter option, consider the following thought experiment: suppose say you want to do an enjoyable activity, such as going on a one week vacation, but you can't afford it. Would you pay 50% of the cost (which you can afford) so a clone of you go on vacation?

0 pointsgruez5y ago0 comments

>just because you can label one particular branch “master” doesn’t make it genuinely special, and any special treatment you give to one branch is merely your convention.

0 comments

4 comments · 2 top-level

compscistd5y ago· 2 in thread

In many respects, I think you already break your stream of consciousness when you sleep or are knocked out. When a copy of your brain is made, that copy will experience what all of us do after a good night’s rest in a train: waking up to an unfamiliar environment, subtly changed by random firing of your neurons when you were asleep. The “you before sleep” is effectively not the “you after sleep” because there was a break in the chain.

Thus, there’s no benefit to the “you that didn’t go on vacation”. There was a benefit to the “you that did go on vacation”.

gruezOP5y ago

So you acknowledge that in the event of a brain transfer, two versions of your consciousness will exist, and that the "original" one will be lost, but it's fine because neither would be able to tell (ie. the original will be "going to sleep", and the copy will be "waking up")?

danbmil995y ago

Exactly. I would put forth that you can take it even further, and assume that every moment In time represents a recreation of your conscious experience of the past up until the present.

Under that perspective, Consciousness is like the illusion of motion on a computer monitor. There's some sort of framerate, related to the minimum period of time in which you can perceive a conscious thought, and the sequence playing back at a high frequency creates the illusion of continuity.

ben_w5y ago

> Would you pay 50% of the cost (which you can afford) so a clone of you go on vacation?

Surely by symmetry that means they would be able to pay for me to go on holiday?

(This feels like the one-box/two-box argument with a paint job).

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