This chain of experience is the thing I care most to preserve.
Okay, think of it this way.
You go to sleep tonight, your “chain of experience” is briefly broken. You wake up tomorrow morning, chain of experience is back, you’re happy.
But what makes you say “chain of experience is back”? Only that a human being wakes up, notices it has the memories of being pleeppleep, and says “Hey, my chain of experience is back! Good!”
Suppose Omega killed you in your sleep, then created a perfect clone of you. The perfect clone would wake up, notice it has the memories of being pleeppleep, and say “Hey, my chain of experience is back! Good!” Then it would continue living your life.
Right now you have zero evidence that Omega hasn’t actually done this to you every single night of your life. So the idea of a “chain of experience”, except as another word for your memories, is pretty tenuous.
And if I told you today that Omega had really been doing this to you your whole life, then you would be really scared before going to sleep tonight, but eventually you’d have to do it. And then the next day, your clone would still be pretty scared before going to sleep, but he’d do it too. And by the thousandth day, you’d probably have forgotten all about it except when someone reminds you.
(what if it were every time you blinked, instead of every time you slept?)
Since this would be totally indistinguishable from the way we are right now, and since there’s no logical basis for me-ness, at some point you just have to think, “screw it, there’s no continuity of experience or identity and I don’t really care”, at least as regards blinking and sleeping.
Cryonicists say we can extend this indifference to freezing and thawing. I’m saying that as long as we’re extending it, might as well extend it all the way.
I suppose you’re right. If A clone of me appeared next to me he would also think it curious that he could not experience exactly the same sensations as the identical person next to him. Still, I don’t think that a “me” from another world coming into existence and living through an apparently identical series of events to me life would count as a resurrection, as the events he lives through are not the same events that I live. In order for it to be a resurrection, I would have to return with the specific set of memories I have from this section of causality. It would be more like reincarnation than anything.
Also I have evidence that I have not been intentionally deleted every night because I have zero evidence that this has occurred.
Okay, think of it this way.
You go to sleep tonight, your “chain of experience” is briefly broken. You wake up tomorrow morning, chain of experience is back, you’re happy.
But what makes you say “chain of experience is back”? Only that a human being wakes up, notices it has the memories of being pleeppleep, and says “Hey, my chain of experience is back! Good!”
Suppose Omega killed you in your sleep, then created a perfect clone of you. The perfect clone would wake up, notice it has the memories of being pleeppleep, and say “Hey, my chain of experience is back! Good!” Then it would continue living your life.
Right now you have zero evidence that Omega hasn’t actually done this to you every single night of your life. So the idea of a “chain of experience”, except as another word for your memories, is pretty tenuous.
And if I told you today that Omega had really been doing this to you your whole life, then you would be really scared before going to sleep tonight, but eventually you’d have to do it. And then the next day, your clone would still be pretty scared before going to sleep, but he’d do it too. And by the thousandth day, you’d probably have forgotten all about it except when someone reminds you.
(what if it were every time you blinked, instead of every time you slept?)
Since this would be totally indistinguishable from the way we are right now, and since there’s no logical basis for me-ness, at some point you just have to think, “screw it, there’s no continuity of experience or identity and I don’t really care”, at least as regards blinking and sleeping.
Cryonicists say we can extend this indifference to freezing and thawing. I’m saying that as long as we’re extending it, might as well extend it all the way.
I suppose you’re right. If A clone of me appeared next to me he would also think it curious that he could not experience exactly the same sensations as the identical person next to him. Still, I don’t think that a “me” from another world coming into existence and living through an apparently identical series of events to me life would count as a resurrection, as the events he lives through are not the same events that I live. In order for it to be a resurrection, I would have to return with the specific set of memories I have from this section of causality. It would be more like reincarnation than anything. Also I have evidence that I have not been intentionally deleted every night because I have zero evidence that this has occurred.