The question at the end seems like it presupposes that there’s some invisible baton that gets passed around between different copies of you.
When you go to sleep you imagine the baton being passed from your sleeping self to a copy who’s having the same experiences elsewhere in the (hypothetically infinite) universe. And then you ask “But what if that copy forgets to pass the baton back to me when I wake up?”
But of course, there is no baton. This should be reassuring, because if there’s no baton, the baton can’t get lost or misplaced :D You wake up as yourself not because every night the baton manages to make its way back to you, you just wake up and the baton doesn’t exit.
Even if there is no baton, I care about future versions of myself (idk why, humans are weird I guess). Is your proposal that I only care about future versions of myself when I’m awake?
”there is no baton” is fundamental to the question. If there was a baton, we could empirically observe a rule like “the baton is only passed to states that are spatiotemporally nearby”. But if there is no baton, the induction:
present waking me --(cares about)--> future dreaming me ==(is identical to)== a waking person who has the same conscious experience as dreaming me
is locally valid.
Though I suppose I could add some kind of global rule that I refuse to care about such locally valid chains.
The question at the end seems like it presupposes that there’s some invisible baton that gets passed around between different copies of you.
When you go to sleep you imagine the baton being passed from your sleeping self to a copy who’s having the same experiences elsewhere in the (hypothetically infinite) universe. And then you ask “But what if that copy forgets to pass the baton back to me when I wake up?”
But of course, there is no baton. This should be reassuring, because if there’s no baton, the baton can’t get lost or misplaced :D You wake up as yourself not because every night the baton manages to make its way back to you, you just wake up and the baton doesn’t exit.
Even if there is no baton, I care about future versions of myself (idk why, humans are weird I guess). Is your proposal that I only care about future versions of myself when I’m awake?
”there is no baton” is fundamental to the question. If there was a baton, we could empirically observe a rule like “the baton is only passed to states that are spatiotemporally nearby”. But if there is no baton, the induction:
present waking me --(cares about)--> future dreaming me ==(is identical to)== a waking person who has the same conscious experience as dreaming me
is locally valid.
Though I suppose I could add some kind of global rule that I refuse to care about such locally valid chains.
You can care about what you want. For me, I do rate the continuations that preserve my awake self as more me.