I’m coming in a bit late, and not reading the rest of the posts, but I felt I had to comment on the third horn of the trilemma, as it’s an option I’ve been giving a lot of thought.
I managed to independently invent it (with roughly the same reasoning) back in high school, though I haven’t managed to convince myself of it or, for that matter, to explain it to anyone else. Your explanation is better, and I’ll be borrowing it.
At any rate. One of your objections seems to be ”...to assert that you can hurl yourself off a cliff without fear, because whoever hits the ground will be another person not particularly connected to you by any such ridiculous thing as a “thread of subjective experience”.
For that to make sense would require that, while you can anticipate subjective experiences from just about anywhere, you would only anticipate experiencing a limited subset of them; 1/N of the total, where N represents.. what? The total number of humans, and why? Of souls?
Things get simpler if you set N to 1. Then your anticipation would be to experience Eliezer+5, Britney+5 and Cliffdiver+5, as well as every other subjective experience available for experiencing; sidestepping the cliffdiver problem, and more importantly removing any need to explain the value of N.
There’s still the alternate option of it being infinity. I feel relatively certain that this is not the case, but I’m not sure this isn’t simply wishful thinking. Help?
I’m coming in a bit late, and not reading the rest of the posts, but I felt I had to comment on the third horn of the trilemma, as it’s an option I’ve been giving a lot of thought.
I managed to independently invent it (with roughly the same reasoning) back in high school, though I haven’t managed to convince myself of it or, for that matter, to explain it to anyone else. Your explanation is better, and I’ll be borrowing it.
At any rate. One of your objections seems to be ”...to assert that you can hurl yourself off a cliff without fear, because whoever hits the ground will be another person not particularly connected to you by any such ridiculous thing as a “thread of subjective experience”.
For that to make sense would require that, while you can anticipate subjective experiences from just about anywhere, you would only anticipate experiencing a limited subset of them; 1/N of the total, where N represents.. what? The total number of humans, and why? Of souls?
Things get simpler if you set N to 1. Then your anticipation would be to experience Eliezer+5, Britney+5 and Cliffdiver+5, as well as every other subjective experience available for experiencing; sidestepping the cliffdiver problem, and more importantly removing any need to explain the value of N.
There’s still the alternate option of it being infinity. I feel relatively certain that this is not the case, but I’m not sure this isn’t simply wishful thinking. Help?