I’m a vegetarian, though not because I particularly care about the suffering of meat animals.
Sebastian Hagen, people change. Of course you may refuse to accept it, but the current you will be dead in a second, and a different you born.
Of course people change; that’s why I talked about “future selves”—the interesting aspect isn’t that they exist in the future, it’s that they’re not exactly the same person as I am now. However, there’s still a lot of similarity between my present self and my one-second-in-the-future self, and they have effectively the same optimization target. Moreover, these changes are largly non-random and non-degenerative: a lot of them are a part of my mind improving its model of the universe and getting more effective at interacting with it.
I don’t think it is appropriate to term such small changes “death”. If an anvil drops on my head, crushing my brain to goo, I immediately lose more optimization power than I do in a decade of living without fatal accidents. The naive view of personal identity isn’t completely accurate, but the reason that it works pretty well in practice is that (in our current society) humans don’t change particularly quickly, except for when they suffer heavy injuries.
The anvil-dropped-on-head-scenario is what I envisioned in my last post: something annihilating or massively corrupting my mind, destroying the part that’s responsible for evaluating the desirability of hypothetical states of the universe.
I don’t think it is appropriate to term such small changes “death”. If an anvil drops on my head, crushing my brain to goo, I immediately lose more optimization power than I do in a decade of living without fatal accidents. The naive view of personal identity isn’t completely accurate, but the reason that it works pretty well in practice is that (in our current society) humans don’t change particularly quickly, except for when they suffer heavy injuries.
The anvil-dropped-on-head-scenario is what I envisioned in my last post: something annihilating or massively corrupting my mind, destroying the part that’s responsible for evaluating the desirability of hypothetical states of the universe.