It has been years since I’ve last thought about personal identity. The last time it seemed a pretty reasonable and obvious conclusion to slightly less value the “me” stored in my body and value humans who where similar to me a bit more.
There seemed to be little point in (ceteris paribus) me being willing to spending more to save “my” life compared to saving the life a of a random average human A and not also expending at least something extra on person B who is say half way in “meness” between said random average human A and the part of me currently stored in my brain. And then expending a bit extra over that on person C who is halfway between me and person B. ect.
Like Robin Hanson said, if there is a imperfect copy of his brain running on a computer and you shot meant-Hanson in the head, Robin didn’t really die but he did get smaller. Dying is in the modern era basically getting a lot smaller in the world and time you happen to care about.
Nearly all other humans dying or my culture & value-set going extinct might as a step actually make “me” much smaller than the death of my body would.
Edit: Some feedback besides the down votes or a counter argument would be very much welcomed. As I said it has been a some time and I need to review this cached opinion.
Well yes to a very small extent. However when I get to very small amounts of me I don’t give away any extra effort, much for the same reason animals responding to the pay offs of kin selection don’t:
Kin selection is emphatically not a special case of group selection. … If an altruistic animal has a cake to give to relatives; there is no reason at all for it to give every relative a slice, the size of the slices being determined by the closeness of relatedness. Indeed this would lead to absurdity since all members of the species, not to mention other species, are at least distant relatives who could therefore each claim a carefully measured crumb! To the contrary, if there is a close relative in the vicinity, there is no reason to give a distant relative any cake at all. Subject to other complications like laws of diminishing returns, the whole cake should be given to the closest relative available.
Pretty ok article.
It has been years since I’ve last thought about personal identity. The last time it seemed a pretty reasonable and obvious conclusion to slightly less value the “me” stored in my body and value humans who where similar to me a bit more.
There seemed to be little point in (ceteris paribus) me being willing to spending more to save “my” life compared to saving the life a of a random average human A and not also expending at least something extra on person B who is say half way in “meness” between said random average human A and the part of me currently stored in my brain. And then expending a bit extra over that on person C who is halfway between me and person B. ect.
Like Robin Hanson said, if there is a imperfect copy of his brain running on a computer and you shot meant-Hanson in the head, Robin didn’t really die but he did get smaller. Dying is in the modern era basically getting a lot smaller in the world and time you happen to care about.
Nearly all other humans dying or my culture & value-set going extinct might as a step actually make “me” much smaller than the death of my body would.
Edit: Some feedback besides the down votes or a counter argument would be very much welcomed. As I said it has been a some time and I need to review this cached opinion.
Every man’s death diminishes you, because you are involved in all mankind?
Well yes to a very small extent. However when I get to very small amounts of me I don’t give away any extra effort, much for the same reason animals responding to the pay offs of kin selection don’t:
(p. 290, The Selfish Gene by Richard Dawkins)