Then I’d like to see some explanation why it doesn’t have an answer, which would be adding back to normality.
I’m not saying it doesn’t, I’m saying it’s not obvious that it does. Normalcy requirements don’t mean all our possibly-confused questions have answers, they just put restrictions on what those answers should look like. So, if the idea of successors-of-experience is meaningful at all, our normal intuition gives us desiderata like “chains of sucessorship are continuous across periods of consciousness” and “chains of successorship do not fork or merge with eachother under conditions that we currently observe.”
If you have any particular notion of successorship that meets all the desiderata you think should matter here, whether or not a teleporter creates a successor is a question of fact. But it’s not obvious what the most principled set of desiderata is, and for most sets of desiderata it’s probably not obvious whether there is a unique notion of successorship.
OP is advocating for something along the lines of “There is no uniquely-most-principled notion of successorship; the fact that different people have different desiderata, or that some people arbitrarily choose one idea of succesorship over another that’s just as logical, is a result of normal value differences.” There is no epistemic relativism; given any particular person’s most valued notion of successorship, everyone can, in principle, agree whether any given situation preserves it.
The relativism is in choosing which (whose) notion to use when making any given decision. Even in a world where souls are real and most people agree that continuity-of-consciousness is equivalent to continuity-of-soul-state, which is preserved by those nifty new teleporters, some curmudgeon who thinks that continuity-of-physical-location is also important shouldn’t be forced into a teleporter against their will, since they expect (and all informed observers will agree) that their favored notion of continuity of consciousness will be ended by the teleporter.
I’m not saying it doesn’t, I’m saying it’s not obvious that it does. Normalcy requirements don’t mean all our possibly-confused questions have answers, they just put restrictions on what those answers should look like. So, if the idea of successors-of-experience is meaningful at all, our normal intuition gives us desiderata like “chains of sucessorship are continuous across periods of consciousness” and “chains of successorship do not fork or merge with eachother under conditions that we currently observe.”
If you have any particular notion of successorship that meets all the desiderata you think should matter here, whether or not a teleporter creates a successor is a question of fact. But it’s not obvious what the most principled set of desiderata is, and for most sets of desiderata it’s probably not obvious whether there is a unique notion of successorship.
OP is advocating for something along the lines of “There is no uniquely-most-principled notion of successorship; the fact that different people have different desiderata, or that some people arbitrarily choose one idea of succesorship over another that’s just as logical, is a result of normal value differences.” There is no epistemic relativism; given any particular person’s most valued notion of successorship, everyone can, in principle, agree whether any given situation preserves it.
The relativism is in choosing which (whose) notion to use when making any given decision. Even in a world where souls are real and most people agree that continuity-of-consciousness is equivalent to continuity-of-soul-state, which is preserved by those nifty new teleporters, some curmudgeon who thinks that continuity-of-physical-location is also important shouldn’t be forced into a teleporter against their will, since they expect (and all informed observers will agree) that their favored notion of continuity of consciousness will be ended by the teleporter.