I don’t yet see how the possible existence of “duplicates” of me 10^(10^29) (is this different than 10^30?) light years away or “decohered amplitude-blobs of me” has an effect on my subjective conscious experience. Is the known/extrapolatable universe 10^(10^29) years old? That sounds a bit older than popularly presented ages of the universe.
It sounds like you’re writing that these “duplicates” have no effect on our subjective conscious experience. And that does seem to me to be the case (I assume “decohered amplitude-blobs of me” are likely being tortured, but I don’t seem to be experiencing it), although I think a lot more rigorous exploration may be required.
I’m wary, Eliezer, about you moving from “hey we know this thing about quantum mechanics and cosmology” to “hey, we can be confident that the subjective conscious experience won’t be lost post-cryonics or uploading”. It’s good news if it’s true, but I’m concerned by (1) lack of expert consensus on this, and (2) at a gut/intuitive level I sense cues that you want to believe this separate from what the best empiricism tells us, which may simply be that we don’t know yet.
I don’t yet see how the possible existence of “duplicates” of me 10^(10^29) (is this different than 10^30?) light years away or “decohered amplitude-blobs of me” has an effect on my subjective conscious experience. Is the known/extrapolatable universe 10^(10^29) years old? That sounds a bit older than popularly presented ages of the universe.
It sounds like you’re writing that these “duplicates” have no effect on our subjective conscious experience. And that does seem to me to be the case (I assume “decohered amplitude-blobs of me” are likely being tortured, but I don’t seem to be experiencing it), although I think a lot more rigorous exploration may be required.
I’m wary, Eliezer, about you moving from “hey we know this thing about quantum mechanics and cosmology” to “hey, we can be confident that the subjective conscious experience won’t be lost post-cryonics or uploading”. It’s good news if it’s true, but I’m concerned by (1) lack of expert consensus on this, and (2) at a gut/intuitive level I sense cues that you want to believe this separate from what the best empiricism tells us, which may simply be that we don’t know yet.