“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.
“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.