Very interesting question to me coming from the perspective I outline in the post—sorry a bit lengthy answer again:
According to the basic take from the post, we’re actually +- in your universe, except that the self is even more ephemeral than you posit. And as I argue, it’s relative, i.e. up to you, which future self you end up caring about in any nontrivial experiment.
Trying to re-frame your experiment from that background as best as I can, I imagine a person having an inclination to think of ‘herself’ (in sloppy speak; more precisely: she cares about..) as (i) her now, plus (ii) her natural successors, as which she, however, qualifies only those that carry the immediate succession of her currently active thoughts before she falls asleep. Maybe some weird genetic or cultural tweak or drug in her brain has made her—or maybe all of us in that universe—like that. So:
Is expecting to die as soon as you sleep a rational belief in such a universe?
I’d not call it ‘belief’ but simply a preference, and a basic preference is not rational or irrational. She may simply not care about the future succession of selves coming out at the other end of her sleep, and that ‘not caring’ is not objectively faulty. It’s a matter of taste, of her own preferences. Of course, we may have good reasons to speculate that it’s evolutionarily more adaptive to have different preferences—and that’s why we do usually have them indeed—but we’re wrong to call her misguided; evolution is no authority. From a utilitarian perspective we might even try to tweak her behavior, in order for her to become a convenient caretaker for her natural next-day successors, as from our perspective they’re simply usual, valuable beings. But it’s still not that we’d be more objectively right than her when she says she has no particular attachment for the future beings inhabiting what momentarily is ‘her’ body.
Very interesting question to me coming from the perspective I outline in the post—sorry a bit lengthy answer again:
According to the basic take from the post, we’re actually +- in your universe, except that the self is even more ephemeral than you posit. And as I argue, it’s relative, i.e. up to you, which future self you end up caring about in any nontrivial experiment.
Trying to re-frame your experiment from that background as best as I can, I imagine a person having an inclination to think of ‘herself’ (in sloppy speak; more precisely: she cares about..) as (i) her now, plus (ii) her natural successors, as which she, however, qualifies only those that carry the immediate succession of her currently active thoughts before she falls asleep. Maybe some weird genetic or cultural tweak or drug in her brain has made her—or maybe all of us in that universe—like that. So:
I’d not call it ‘belief’ but simply a preference, and a basic preference is not rational or irrational. She may simply not care about the future succession of selves coming out at the other end of her sleep, and that ‘not caring’ is not objectively faulty. It’s a matter of taste, of her own preferences. Of course, we may have good reasons to speculate that it’s evolutionarily more adaptive to have different preferences—and that’s why we do usually have them indeed—but we’re wrong to call her misguided; evolution is no authority. From a utilitarian perspective we might even try to tweak her behavior, in order for her to become a convenient caretaker for her natural next-day successors, as from our perspective they’re simply usual, valuable beings. But it’s still not that we’d be more objectively right than her when she says she has no particular attachment for the future beings inhabiting what momentarily is ‘her’ body.