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.
The point is, “you” are exactly the following and nothing else: You’re (i) your mind right now, (ii) including its memory, and (iii) its forward-looking care, hopes, dreams for, in particular, its ‘natural’ successor. Now, in usual situations, the ‘natural successor’ is obvious, and you cannot even think of anything else: it’s the future minds that inhabit your body, your brain, that’s why you tend to call the whole series a unified ‘you’ in common speak.
Now, with cloning, if you absolutely care for a particular clone, then, for every purpose, you can extend that common speak to the cloning situation, if you want, and say my ‘anticipation will be borne out’/‘I’ll experience...‘. But, crucially, note, that you do NOT NEED to; in fact, it’s sloppy speak. As in fact, these are separate future units, just tied in various (more or less ‘natural’) ways to you, which offers vagueness, and choice. Evolution leaves you dumbfounded about it, as there is no strictly speaking ‘natural’ successor anymore. Natural has become vague. It’ll depend on how you see it.
Crucially, there will be two persons, say after a ‘usual’ after cloning, and you may ‘see yourself’ - in sloppy speak—in either of these two. But it’s just a matter of perspective. Strictly speaking, again, you’re you right now, and your anticipation of one or future person.
It’s a bit like evolution makes you confused about how much you care for strangers. Do you go to a philosophers to ask how much you want to give to the faraway poor? No! You have your inner degree of compassion to them, it may change at any time, and it’s not wrong or right.*[1]
Of course, on another level, from a utilitarian perspective, I’d love you to love these faraway beings more, and its not okay that we screw up the world because of not caring, but that’s a separate point.
The point is, “you” are exactly the following and nothing else: You’re (i) your mind right now, (ii) including its memory, and (iii) its forward-looking care, hopes, dreams for, in particular, its ‘natural’ successor.
You have mentally sliced the thing up in this way, but reality does not contain any such divisions. My left hand yesterday and my left hand today are just as connected as my left hand and my right hand.
As I write, call it a play on words; a question of naming terms—if you will. But then—and this is just a proposition plus a hypothesis—try to provide a reasonable way to objectively define what one ‘ought’ to care about in cloning scenarios; and contemplate all sorts of traditionally puzzling thought experiments about neuron replacements and what have you, and you’ll inevitable end up with hand-waving, stating arbitrary rules that may seem to work (for many, anyhow) in one though experiment, just to be blatantly broken by the next experiment… Do that enough and get bored and give up—or, ‘realize’, eventually, maybe: There is simply not much left of the idea of a unified and continuous, ‘objectively’ traceable self. There’s a mind here and now and, yes of course, it absolutely tends to care about what it deems to be its ‘natural’ successors in any given scenario. And this care is so strong, it feels as if these successors were one entire, inseparable thing, and so it’s not a surprise we cannot fathom there are divisions.
What I give up on is the outré thought experiments, not my own observation of myself that I am a unified, continuous being. A changeable being, and one made of parts working together, but not a pile of dust.
A long time ago I regularly worked at a computer terminal where if you hit backspace 6 times in a row, the computer would crash. So you tried to avoid doing that. Clever arguments that crash your brain, likewise.
There is something more to know: whether your anticipation will be borne out when the thing comes to pass. That is what an anticipation is.
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.
The point is, “you” are exactly the following and nothing else: You’re (i) your mind right now, (ii) including its memory, and (iii) its forward-looking care, hopes, dreams for, in particular, its ‘natural’ successor. Now, in usual situations, the ‘natural successor’ is obvious, and you cannot even think of anything else: it’s the future minds that inhabit your body, your brain, that’s why you tend to call the whole series a unified ‘you’ in common speak.
Now, with cloning, if you absolutely care for a particular clone, then, for every purpose, you can extend that common speak to the cloning situation, if you want, and say my ‘anticipation will be borne out’/‘I’ll experience...‘. But, crucially, note, that you do NOT NEED to; in fact, it’s sloppy speak. As in fact, these are separate future units, just tied in various (more or less ‘natural’) ways to you, which offers vagueness, and choice. Evolution leaves you dumbfounded about it, as there is no strictly speaking ‘natural’ successor anymore. Natural has become vague. It’ll depend on how you see it.
Crucially, there will be two persons, say after a ‘usual’ after cloning, and you may ‘see yourself’ - in sloppy speak—in either of these two. But it’s just a matter of perspective. Strictly speaking, again, you’re you right now, and your anticipation of one or future person.
It’s a bit like evolution makes you confused about how much you care for strangers. Do you go to a philosophers to ask how much you want to give to the faraway poor? No! You have your inner degree of compassion to them, it may change at any time, and it’s not wrong or right.*[1]
Of course, on another level, from a utilitarian perspective, I’d love you to love these faraway beings more, and its not okay that we screw up the world because of not caring, but that’s a separate point.
My reply to clone of saturn applies here also.
You have mentally sliced the thing up in this way, but reality does not contain any such divisions. My left hand yesterday and my left hand today are just as connected as my left hand and my right hand.
As I write, call it a play on words; a question of naming terms—if you will. But then—and this is just a proposition plus a hypothesis—try to provide a reasonable way to objectively define what one ‘ought’ to care about in cloning scenarios; and contemplate all sorts of traditionally puzzling thought experiments about neuron replacements and what have you, and you’ll inevitable end up with hand-waving, stating arbitrary rules that may seem to work (for many, anyhow) in one though experiment, just to be blatantly broken by the next experiment… Do that enough and get bored and give up—or, ‘realize’, eventually, maybe: There is simply not much left of the idea of a unified and continuous, ‘objectively’ traceable self. There’s a mind here and now and, yes of course, it absolutely tends to care about what it deems to be its ‘natural’ successors in any given scenario. And this care is so strong, it feels as if these successors were one entire, inseparable thing, and so it’s not a surprise we cannot fathom there are divisions.
What I give up on is the outré thought experiments, not my own observation of myself that I am a unified, continuous being. A changeable being, and one made of parts working together, but not a pile of dust.
A long time ago I regularly worked at a computer terminal where if you hit backspace 6 times in a row, the computer would crash. So you tried to avoid doing that. Clever arguments that crash your brain, likewise.