It’s probably relevant to think about why we tend to value our future selves in the first place. I think it’s that each of us has memories (and the resulting habits) of thinking “wow, past self really screwed me over. I hate that. I think I’ll not screw future self over so that doesn’t happen again”. We care because there’s a future self that will hate us if we do, and we can imagine it very vividly. In addition, there’s an unspoken cultural assusmption that it’s logical to care about our future selves.
I included some of how other people regard our identity, but that’s not my point. My point is that, for almost any reason whatsoever you could come up with to value your physically continuous future self, you’d also value a physically discontinuous future self that maintains the same mind-pattern. That’s except for deciding “I no longer care about anything that teleports”, which is possible and consistent, but no more sensible than stopping caring about anything wearing blue hats.
So sure, people aren’t necessarily logically wrong if they value their physically continuous future self over a perfect clone (or upload). But they probably are making a logic error, if they have even modestly consistent values.
I agree with all of that.
It’s probably relevant to think about why we tend to value our future selves in the first place. I think it’s that each of us has memories (and the resulting habits) of thinking “wow, past self really screwed me over. I hate that. I think I’ll not screw future self over so that doesn’t happen again”. We care because there’s a future self that will hate us if we do, and we can imagine it very vividly. In addition, there’s an unspoken cultural assusmption that it’s logical to care about our future selves.
I included some of how other people regard our identity, but that’s not my point. My point is that, for almost any reason whatsoever you could come up with to value your physically continuous future self, you’d also value a physically discontinuous future self that maintains the same mind-pattern. That’s except for deciding “I no longer care about anything that teleports”, which is possible and consistent, but no more sensible than stopping caring about anything wearing blue hats.
So sure, people aren’t necessarily logically wrong if they value their physically continuous future self over a perfect clone (or upload). But they probably are making a logic error, if they have even modestly consistent values.