I think what lies here is that LW finally has to admit that Buddhists were right: there is no such thing as selfhood, it is illusionary, it is just a convenient way to give a name to what amounts of a sack full of diverse and ever-changing parts. Selfs exist only in the sense of how shaving kits exist. A convenient name for a group, a set.
If someone would make a million copies of my brain and torture them, it would not be a bad thing for “me”, or not worse for “me” than doing it with the brain of others. There is no good reason to feel otherwise. Even “this me” is only a poor, oversimplified term for the combined experience of the awareness of various phenomena inside one head, even to call this one here a “me” is already wildly inaccurate, exact copies of this set of personality bits are not “me” by any stretch of imagination. They are separate sacks of personality bits that happen to exactly resemble this sack here.
The closest things we have to selfhood -and they do not actually consitute a full selfhood—are volition for the future and memories of the past, so because we remember things, and want future things to turn out differently or similarly, and this creates some sort of a process. Copies of a brain have memories, but they break at the volition for the future part. If whatever sorry excuse we have for a “future me” is “that which will remember the results of the decisions I make now”, the copies stop being a “future me” a second after they are copied, as they won’t remember anything I do after the copy.
I think what lies here is that LW finally has to admit that Buddhists were right: there is no such thing as selfhood, it is illusionary, it is just a convenient way to give a name to what amounts of a sack full of diverse and ever-changing parts. Selfs exist only in the sense of how shaving kits exist. A convenient name for a group, a set.
If someone would make a million copies of my brain and torture them, it would not be a bad thing for “me”, or not worse for “me” than doing it with the brain of others. There is no good reason to feel otherwise. Even “this me” is only a poor, oversimplified term for the combined experience of the awareness of various phenomena inside one head, even to call this one here a “me” is already wildly inaccurate, exact copies of this set of personality bits are not “me” by any stretch of imagination. They are separate sacks of personality bits that happen to exactly resemble this sack here.
The closest things we have to selfhood -and they do not actually consitute a full selfhood—are volition for the future and memories of the past, so because we remember things, and want future things to turn out differently or similarly, and this creates some sort of a process. Copies of a brain have memories, but they break at the volition for the future part. If whatever sorry excuse we have for a “future me” is “that which will remember the results of the decisions I make now”, the copies stop being a “future me” a second after they are copied, as they won’t remember anything I do after the copy.