Thanks for the reply. I don’t really follow how the two parts of your statement fit together, but regardless, my first instinct is to agree with part one. I did as a younger (LSD-using) man ascribe to a secular magical belief that reincarnation without memory was probable, and later came to your same conclusion that it was irrelevant, and shortly thereafter that it was highly improbable. But just now I wonder (not to the probability of magical afterlives) but what if I gave you the choice: 1. Bullet to the head. 2. Complete wipe of memory, including such things as personality, unconscious emotional responses imprinted over the years, etc: all the things that make you you, but allowed that the part of your brain/mind which functioned to produce the awareness which passively experienced these things as they happened (my definition of consciousness) to continue functioning. Both options suck, of course, but somehow my #2 sounds appealing relative to my #1 in a way that your #2 doesn’t. Which is funny I think. Maybe simply because your #2, transfer of my meat consciousness into another piece of meat, would require a magical intervention to my thinking.
As to your second point: (If it hasn’t already been coined) Sophie Pascal’s Choice? Would any reward given to the surviving copy induce you to step onto David Bowie Tesla’s Prestige Duplication Machine, knowing that your meat body and brain will be the one which falls into the drowning pool while an identical copy of you materializes 100m away, believing itself to be the same meat that walked into the machine?
This is a good reply. I feel the same way that you do about your #1 and #2, but I suspect that the reason is because of an emotional reaction to physical death. Your #2 is relatively attractive because it doesn’t involve physical death, while my version had physical death in both. This might be one reason that I and most people don’t find cryonics attractive: because it does not prevent physical death, even if it offers the possibility of something happening afterwards.
I find the intuitions behind my point stronger than that emotional reaction. In other words, it seems to me that I should either adjust my feelings about the bullet to correspond with the memory wipe situation, or I should adjust the feelings about the memory wipe to correspond with the bullet situation. The first adjustment is more attractive: it suggests that death is not as bad as I thought. Of course, that does not prove that this is the correct adjustment.
Regarding the duplication machine, I would probably take a deal like that, given a high enough reward given to the surviving copy.
Thanks for the reply. I don’t really follow how the two parts of your statement fit together, but regardless, my first instinct is to agree with part one. I did as a younger (LSD-using) man ascribe to a secular magical belief that reincarnation without memory was probable, and later came to your same conclusion that it was irrelevant, and shortly thereafter that it was highly improbable. But just now I wonder (not to the probability of magical afterlives) but what if I gave you the choice: 1. Bullet to the head. 2. Complete wipe of memory, including such things as personality, unconscious emotional responses imprinted over the years, etc: all the things that make you you, but allowed that the part of your brain/mind which functioned to produce the awareness which passively experienced these things as they happened (my definition of consciousness) to continue functioning. Both options suck, of course, but somehow my #2 sounds appealing relative to my #1 in a way that your #2 doesn’t. Which is funny I think. Maybe simply because your #2, transfer of my meat consciousness into another piece of meat, would require a magical intervention to my thinking.
As to your second point: (If it hasn’t already been coined) Sophie Pascal’s Choice? Would any reward given to the surviving copy induce you to step onto David Bowie Tesla’s Prestige Duplication Machine, knowing that your meat body and brain will be the one which falls into the drowning pool while an identical copy of you materializes 100m away, believing itself to be the same meat that walked into the machine?
This is a good reply. I feel the same way that you do about your #1 and #2, but I suspect that the reason is because of an emotional reaction to physical death. Your #2 is relatively attractive because it doesn’t involve physical death, while my version had physical death in both. This might be one reason that I and most people don’t find cryonics attractive: because it does not prevent physical death, even if it offers the possibility of something happening afterwards.
I find the intuitions behind my point stronger than that emotional reaction. In other words, it seems to me that I should either adjust my feelings about the bullet to correspond with the memory wipe situation, or I should adjust the feelings about the memory wipe to correspond with the bullet situation. The first adjustment is more attractive: it suggests that death is not as bad as I thought. Of course, that does not prove that this is the correct adjustment.
Regarding the duplication machine, I would probably take a deal like that, given a high enough reward given to the surviving copy.