This is an interesting argument that I have been giving a lot of thought to lately. Are all randomly occuring me-like entities out there in the big universe just as much me as the ones I anticipate in the future?
Well, there’s one difference: causality. I’m not so sure a me with no causal relationship to my current self is something I can justifiably consider a future me. When I step in a teleporter that vaporizes my molecules and reconstructs me, I still have a very well-defined causal relationship with that future self—despite the unorthodox path by which the relationship was maintained, the likelihood of there being such a me after the event approaches 100% almost as closely as ordinary continuity generally does.
I don’t have that kind of relationship with a Boltzman Brain or a 3D grid of “all possible humanoids” that some AI is doubtless running with quantum dice in a completely uncorrelated universe.
On the other hand, I’m having a hard time coming up with a consequence-based reason that it matters, apart from the fact that such beings seem like they must be awfully rare compared to straight up continuations of me.
If that’s the only reason it matters—relative scarcity—then it follows that as aging and other (perhaps more constant) risk factors make my life less likely to experience ordinary continuity, these other forms of continuity become increasingly likely to represent my future experiences. If so, we can speculate as to what form that actually takes. Perhaps being spontaneously cured of aging due to a freak biological accident is much more common than any of the competing possibilities, resulting in most people spending large portions of their existence as a “lonely immortal” watching their friends die but never aging (or at least never croaking of old age). On the other hand, perhaps the lonely brain dying of explosive decompression is a much more common fate, because there’s just so much space out there that it happens much more often.
Perhaps the way to sell cryonics is as a way to avoid a lonely and unpredictable future existence. Even if you only survive cryonics with one in a billion probability or something like that, it is still a better chance than the competing scenarios and thus more likely to win the existence lottery in a way that gives you a link to the history and world you actually remember coming from.
This is an interesting argument that I have been giving a lot of thought to lately. Are all randomly occuring me-like entities out there in the big universe just as much me as the ones I anticipate in the future?
Well, there’s one difference: causality. I’m not so sure a me with no causal relationship to my current self is something I can justifiably consider a future me. When I step in a teleporter that vaporizes my molecules and reconstructs me, I still have a very well-defined causal relationship with that future self—despite the unorthodox path by which the relationship was maintained, the likelihood of there being such a me after the event approaches 100% almost as closely as ordinary continuity generally does.
I don’t have that kind of relationship with a Boltzman Brain or a 3D grid of “all possible humanoids” that some AI is doubtless running with quantum dice in a completely uncorrelated universe.
On the other hand, I’m having a hard time coming up with a consequence-based reason that it matters, apart from the fact that such beings seem like they must be awfully rare compared to straight up continuations of me.
If that’s the only reason it matters—relative scarcity—then it follows that as aging and other (perhaps more constant) risk factors make my life less likely to experience ordinary continuity, these other forms of continuity become increasingly likely to represent my future experiences. If so, we can speculate as to what form that actually takes. Perhaps being spontaneously cured of aging due to a freak biological accident is much more common than any of the competing possibilities, resulting in most people spending large portions of their existence as a “lonely immortal” watching their friends die but never aging (or at least never croaking of old age). On the other hand, perhaps the lonely brain dying of explosive decompression is a much more common fate, because there’s just so much space out there that it happens much more often.
Perhaps the way to sell cryonics is as a way to avoid a lonely and unpredictable future existence. Even if you only survive cryonics with one in a billion probability or something like that, it is still a better chance than the competing scenarios and thus more likely to win the existence lottery in a way that gives you a link to the history and world you actually remember coming from.