The problem with allowing such wills (and especially wills which allow specific reference to “the original”) is that there will be people who believe they are guaranteed to continue on solely as the original; and who will thus be willing to create copies who’re, well, slightly screwed.
You need a lot of protections for the copies. And laws regarding when copying is legal.
Why would such people have a motive for making copies in the first place?
This doesn’t need to be a hypothetical question. There are people who read this site, who subscribe to the thread theory of identity. If any of them are reading this comment: would you want to start copying yourself? If so, why? And what percentage of your assets would you allocate to the copy, and why?
I can see one possible answer: make a backup to start running only if I die. The backup wouldn’t be me, but would be able to take my place for the benefit of my family and friends, some of whom may subscribe to the pattern theory of identity. But that wouldn’t require the backup to be running concurrently.
Another possible answer: create a person who is not me but shares my goals, increasing the probability of those goals being fulfilled. But to be effective at this, the copy will probably need some resources. Do those of you who subscribe to the thread theory of identity, regard this as a useful thing to do?
If you create the backup at a single point and reuse it a potentially infinite number of times, then you become susceptible to the (for lack of a better term) “diverging Sleeping Beauty” scenario described above: you somehow have a uniform probability of waking up between now and the end of time, even though the probability of each specific point tends towards zero as “the end of time” approaches infinity.
Note that this paradox doesn’t arise in the classic Sleeping Beauty, even an indefinitely iterated version, because it’s constructed as a limit of finite probability distributions and thus always converges.
If you create the backup at incrementally increasing biological age, then at some point you’ll have to find a way to cheat death, or accept that your lifespan will be finite even with backups.
The problem with allowing such wills (and especially wills which allow specific reference to “the original”) is that there will be people who believe they are guaranteed to continue on solely as the original; and who will thus be willing to create copies who’re, well, slightly screwed.
You need a lot of protections for the copies. And laws regarding when copying is legal.
Why would such people have a motive for making copies in the first place?
This doesn’t need to be a hypothetical question. There are people who read this site, who subscribe to the thread theory of identity. If any of them are reading this comment: would you want to start copying yourself? If so, why? And what percentage of your assets would you allocate to the copy, and why?
I can see one possible answer: make a backup to start running only if I die. The backup wouldn’t be me, but would be able to take my place for the benefit of my family and friends, some of whom may subscribe to the pattern theory of identity. But that wouldn’t require the backup to be running concurrently.
Another possible answer: create a person who is not me but shares my goals, increasing the probability of those goals being fulfilled. But to be effective at this, the copy will probably need some resources. Do those of you who subscribe to the thread theory of identity, regard this as a useful thing to do?
If you create the backup at a single point and reuse it a potentially infinite number of times, then you become susceptible to the (for lack of a better term) “diverging Sleeping Beauty” scenario described above: you somehow have a uniform probability of waking up between now and the end of time, even though the probability of each specific point tends towards zero as “the end of time” approaches infinity.
Note that this paradox doesn’t arise in the classic Sleeping Beauty, even an indefinitely iterated version, because it’s constructed as a limit of finite probability distributions and thus always converges.
If you create the backup at incrementally increasing biological age, then at some point you’ll have to find a way to cheat death, or accept that your lifespan will be finite even with backups.