a) If you anticipated continuity of experience into upload and were right, then you experience being an upload and remember being you and and you believe that your prediction is borne out.
b) If you were wrong and the upload is conscious but isn’t you, then you’re dead and nothing is borne out to you. The upload experiences being an upload and remembers being you and believes that your prediction is borne out.
c) If you were wrong and the upload is not conscious, then you’re dead and nothing is borne out to you. Nothing is borne out to the upload either, since it was never able to experience anything being borne out or not. The upload unconsciously mimics everything you would have done if your prediction had been borne out.
Everyone else sees you continuing as you would have done if your prediction had been borne out.
So in all cases, everyone able to experience anything notices that your prediction is borne out.
The same is true if you had predicted (b).
The only case where there is a difference is if you predicted (c). If (a) or (b) was true then someone experiences you being wrong, whether or not that person is you is impossible to determine. If you’re right then the upload still behaves as if you were wrong. Everyone else’s experience is consistent with your prediction being borne out. Or not borne out, since they predict the same things from everyone else’s point of view.
I do not derive from this the equanimity that you do. It matters to me whether I go on existing, and the fact that I won’t be around to know if I don’t does not for me resolve the question of whether to undergo destructive uploading.
Note that the continuity you feel is strictly backwards-looking; we have no way to call up the you of a year ago to confirm that he still agrees that he’s continuous with the you of now. In fact, he is dead, having been destructively transformed into the you of now. So what makes one destructive transformation different from another, as long as the resulting being continues believing he is you?
The desk in front of me is not being continuously destroyed and replaced by a replica. Neither am I. That is the difference between my ordinary passage through time and these (hypothetical, speculative, and not necessarily even possible) scenarios.
Not in this case.
a) If you anticipated continuity of experience into upload and were right, then you experience being an upload and remember being you and and you believe that your prediction is borne out.
b) If you were wrong and the upload is conscious but isn’t you, then you’re dead and nothing is borne out to you. The upload experiences being an upload and remembers being you and believes that your prediction is borne out.
c) If you were wrong and the upload is not conscious, then you’re dead and nothing is borne out to you. Nothing is borne out to the upload either, since it was never able to experience anything being borne out or not. The upload unconsciously mimics everything you would have done if your prediction had been borne out.
Everyone else sees you continuing as you would have done if your prediction had been borne out.
So in all cases, everyone able to experience anything notices that your prediction is borne out.
The same is true if you had predicted (b).
The only case where there is a difference is if you predicted (c). If (a) or (b) was true then someone experiences you being wrong, whether or not that person is you is impossible to determine. If you’re right then the upload still behaves as if you were wrong. Everyone else’s experience is consistent with your prediction being borne out. Or not borne out, since they predict the same things from everyone else’s point of view.
I do not derive from this the equanimity that you do. It matters to me whether I go on existing, and the fact that I won’t be around to know if I don’t does not for me resolve the question of whether to undergo destructive uploading.
Note that the continuity you feel is strictly backwards-looking; we have no way to call up the you of a year ago to confirm that he still agrees that he’s continuous with the you of now. In fact, he is dead, having been destructively transformed into the you of now. So what makes one destructive transformation different from another, as long as the resulting being continues believing he is you?
The desk in front of me is not being continuously destroyed and replaced by a replica. Neither am I. That is the difference between my ordinary passage through time and these (hypothetical, speculative, and not necessarily even possible) scenarios.