> If a mad scientist ground my body into paste each night and replaced me with a copy that nobody (including me) could tell was different in the morning, how much would that actually suck over the long term?
Why can the utility differ with no upper bound between two worlds with epsilon observed difference? If I did die every time I slept, there would be certain physical differences that could in theory be measured with a sleep EEG… but I’ve never had a sleep EEG done. In a less convenient world there would be humans whose person died every night to be replaced by a new person, and unless they are happier every day than some people are in their entire life, those humans should be shot permanently dead right away, because they are so damaging to total utility.
If a mad scientist ground you into paste and replaced you by a literally indistinguishable copy, then it doesn’t suck, the copy is still you in the relevant sense. The more different is the copy from the original, the more it sucks, until some point of maximal suckiness where it’s clearly a different person and the old you is clearly dead (it might be asymptotic convergence rather than an actual boundary).
I’m more completely confused- based on that, it would not matter if I died every time I fell asleep, and was replaced by someone identical to me. And If I did decide to make a major personality change, that would be intrinsically bad.
If you “died” in your sleep and were replaced by someone identical to you, then indeed it wouldn’t matter: it doesn’t count as dying in the relevant sense. Regarding a major personality change, I’m not sure what you have in mind. If you decide to take on a new hobby, that’s not dying. If you take some kind of superdrug that reprograms your entire personality then, yes, that’s pretty close to dying.
Why have a strong preference against a world with a few humans who take such a drug repeatedly?
If someone is in a rut and could either commit suicide or take the reprogramming drug (and expects to have to take it four times before randomizing to a personality that is better than rerolling a new one), why is that worse than killing them and allowing a new human to be created?
If someone is in a rut and could either commit suicide or take the reprogramming drug (and expects to have to take it four times before randomizing to a personality that is better than rerolling a new one), why is that worse than killing them and allowing a new human to be created?
If such a drug is so powerful that the new personality is essentially a new person, then you have created a new person whose lifespan will be a normal human lifespan minus however long the original person lived before they got in a rut. By contrast, if they commit suicide and you create a new human, you have created a new person who will likely live a normal human lifespan. So taking the drug even once is clearly worse than suicide + replacement since, all else being equal, it is better to create a someone with a longer lifespan than a shorter one (assuming their lifespan is positive, overall, of course).
It takes extra resource to grow up and learn all the stuff that you’ve learned like K-12 and college education. You can’t guarantee that the new person will be more efficient in using resources to grow than the existing person.
Point taken, but for the average person, the time period of growing up isn’t just a joyless period where they do nothing but train and invest in the future. Most people remember their childhoods as a period of joy and their college years as some of the best of their lives. Growing and learning isn’t just preparation for the future, people find large portions of it to be fun. So the “existing” person would be deprived of all that, whereas the new person would not be.
That can be said about any period in life. It’s just a matter of perspective and circumstances. The best years are never the same for different people.
Most people remember their childhoods as a period of joy and their college years as some of the best of their lives.
This seems more anecdotal, and people becoming jaded as they grow older is a similar assertion in nature
That can be said about any period in life. It’s just a matter of perspective and circumstances. The best years are never the same for different people.
That’s true, but I think that for the overwhelming majority of people, their childhoods and young adulthoods were at the very least good years, even if they’re not always the best. They are years that contain significantly more good than bad for most people. So if you create a new adult who never had a childhood, and whose lifespan is proportionately shorter, they will have a lower total amount of wellbeing over their lifetime than someone who had a full-length life that included a childhood.
Ethics is subjective. I’m not sure what argument I could make that would persuade you, if any, and vice versa. Unless you have some new angle to approach this, it seems pointless to continue the debate.
> If a mad scientist ground my body into paste each night and replaced me with a copy that nobody (including me) could tell was different in the morning, how much would that actually suck over the long term?
Why can the utility differ with no upper bound between two worlds with epsilon observed difference? If I did die every time I slept, there would be certain physical differences that could in theory be measured with a sleep EEG… but I’ve never had a sleep EEG done. In a less convenient world there would be humans whose person died every night to be replaced by a new person, and unless they are happier every day than some people are in their entire life, those humans should be shot permanently dead right away, because they are so damaging to total utility.
If a mad scientist ground you into paste and replaced you by a literally indistinguishable copy, then it doesn’t suck, the copy is still you in the relevant sense. The more different is the copy from the original, the more it sucks, until some point of maximal suckiness where it’s clearly a different person and the old you is clearly dead (it might be asymptotic convergence rather than an actual boundary).
I’m more completely confused- based on that, it would not matter if I died every time I fell asleep, and was replaced by someone identical to me. And If I did decide to make a major personality change, that would be intrinsically bad.
If you “died” in your sleep and were replaced by someone identical to you, then indeed it wouldn’t matter: it doesn’t count as dying in the relevant sense. Regarding a major personality change, I’m not sure what you have in mind. If you decide to take on a new hobby, that’s not dying. If you take some kind of superdrug that reprograms your entire personality then, yes, that’s pretty close to dying.
Why have a strong preference against a world with a few humans who take such a drug repeatedly?
If someone is in a rut and could either commit suicide or take the reprogramming drug (and expects to have to take it four times before randomizing to a personality that is better than rerolling a new one), why is that worse than killing them and allowing a new human to be created?
If such a drug is so powerful that the new personality is essentially a new person, then you have created a new person whose lifespan will be a normal human lifespan minus however long the original person lived before they got in a rut. By contrast, if they commit suicide and you create a new human, you have created a new person who will likely live a normal human lifespan. So taking the drug even once is clearly worse than suicide + replacement since, all else being equal, it is better to create a someone with a longer lifespan than a shorter one (assuming their lifespan is positive, overall, of course).
It takes extra resource to grow up and learn all the stuff that you’ve learned like K-12 and college education. You can’t guarantee that the new person will be more efficient in using resources to grow than the existing person.
Point taken, but for the average person, the time period of growing up isn’t just a joyless period where they do nothing but train and invest in the future. Most people remember their childhoods as a period of joy and their college years as some of the best of their lives. Growing and learning isn’t just preparation for the future, people find large portions of it to be fun. So the “existing” person would be deprived of all that, whereas the new person would not be.
That can be said about any period in life. It’s just a matter of perspective and circumstances. The best years are never the same for different people.
This seems more anecdotal, and people becoming jaded as they grow older is a similar assertion in nature
That’s true, but I think that for the overwhelming majority of people, their childhoods and young adulthoods were at the very least good years, even if they’re not always the best. They are years that contain significantly more good than bad for most people. So if you create a new adult who never had a childhood, and whose lifespan is proportionately shorter, they will have a lower total amount of wellbeing over their lifetime than someone who had a full-length life that included a childhood.
Ethics is subjective. I’m not sure what argument I could make that would persuade you, if any, and vice versa. Unless you have some new angle to approach this, it seems pointless to continue the debate.