And your edit leaves you with an interesting conundrum.
It can put you in a situation where you see people around yourself adopting one of two strategies, and the people who adopt one strategy consistently win, and the people who adopt another strategy consistently lose, but you still refuse to adopt the winning strategy because you think the people who win are .. wrong.
“Win” by what standards? If I think it is ontologically and factually incorrect—an intellectual mistake—to identify with your copies, then those who do aren’t winning, any more than individual lemmings win when they dive off a cliff. If I am happy to regard a person’s attitude to their copies as a matter of choice, then I may regard their choices as correct for them and my choices as correct or me.
Robin Hanson predicts a Malthusian galactic destiny, in which the posthuman intelligences of the far future are all poorer than human individuals of the present, because selection will favor value systems which are pro-replication. His readers often freak out over Robin’s apparent approval of this scenario of crowded galactic poverty; he approves because he says that these far-future beings will be emotionally adapted to their world; they will want things to be that way.
So this is a similar story. I am under no obligation to adopt an expansive personal identity theory, even if that is a theory whose spread is favored by the conditions of uploaded life. That is merely a statement about how a particular philosophical meme prospers under new conditions, and about the implications of that for posthuman demographics; it is not a fact which would compel me to support the new regime out of self-interest, precisely because I do not already regard my copies as me, and I therefore do not regard their winnings as mine.
Winning by the standard that a person who thinks gaining $1k is worth creating 1023 doomed copies of themselves will, in this situation, get ahead by $1k.
And your edit leaves you with an interesting conundrum.
It can put you in a situation where you see people around yourself adopting one of two strategies, and the people who adopt one strategy consistently win, and the people who adopt another strategy consistently lose, but you still refuse to adopt the winning strategy because you think the people who win are .. wrong.
I’m not sure if you can call that a win.
“Win” by what standards? If I think it is ontologically and factually incorrect—an intellectual mistake—to identify with your copies, then those who do aren’t winning, any more than individual lemmings win when they dive off a cliff. If I am happy to regard a person’s attitude to their copies as a matter of choice, then I may regard their choices as correct for them and my choices as correct or me.
Robin Hanson predicts a Malthusian galactic destiny, in which the posthuman intelligences of the far future are all poorer than human individuals of the present, because selection will favor value systems which are pro-replication. His readers often freak out over Robin’s apparent approval of this scenario of crowded galactic poverty; he approves because he says that these far-future beings will be emotionally adapted to their world; they will want things to be that way.
So this is a similar story. I am under no obligation to adopt an expansive personal identity theory, even if that is a theory whose spread is favored by the conditions of uploaded life. That is merely a statement about how a particular philosophical meme prospers under new conditions, and about the implications of that for posthuman demographics; it is not a fact which would compel me to support the new regime out of self-interest, precisely because I do not already regard my copies as me, and I therefore do not regard their winnings as mine.
Winning by the standard that a person who thinks gaining $1k is worth creating 1023 doomed copies of themselves will, in this situation, get ahead by $1k.