Consider two possible ways the world might be (or that you might suppose the world could be):
There is no afterlife for human beings. You live and you die and that’s it.
There is no afterlife for human beings in the conventional sense, but people are reincarnated, without any possibility of remembering their past lives.
From the subjective point of view of conscious experience, these two situations are subjectively indistinguishable. Are they objectively distinguishable? That depends on the “metaphysics” behind the situation. Perhaps they are, and perhaps they aren’t, and if they aren’t, then we are not talking about two possible situations, but only one. But let’s suppose they are, and that you find out that number 2 is true.
Do you really think you have any reason to be happier than if you found out that number 1 was true? There are certainly subjectively indistinguishable situations where I would prefer one to be objectively the case rather than the other, but it is not clear to me that this is one of them. In this particular case, I don’t see why I should care. Likewise, as suggested by James Miller’s comment, I don’t see why I should care whether I am objectively the same person as I was yesterday, or if this is just a subjective impression which is objectively false. And if I don’t care about that, then creating something that would remember being me is just as good as continuing to exist.
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.
If you had an option of being killed or having your memory wiped and waking up in what was effectively a completely different life (ie. different country, different friends), which would you choose?
people are reincarnated, without any possibility of remembering their past lives
What does that even mean? What would be the mechanism?
If you have two competing hypotheses which are experimentally undistinguishable, Occam’s Razor requires you prefer the hypothesis that makes fewer assumptions. Positing reincarnation adds a lot of rules to the universe which it doesn’t really need for it to function the way we already see it function.
I’m not sure what the point of your comment is. I said myself that it is unclear what the meaning of the situation would be, and I certainly did not say that the second theory was more probable than the first.
Consider two possible ways the world might be (or that you might suppose the world could be):
There is no afterlife for human beings. You live and you die and that’s it.
There is no afterlife for human beings in the conventional sense, but people are reincarnated, without any possibility of remembering their past lives.
From the subjective point of view of conscious experience, these two situations are subjectively indistinguishable. Are they objectively distinguishable? That depends on the “metaphysics” behind the situation. Perhaps they are, and perhaps they aren’t, and if they aren’t, then we are not talking about two possible situations, but only one. But let’s suppose they are, and that you find out that number 2 is true.
Do you really think you have any reason to be happier than if you found out that number 1 was true? There are certainly subjectively indistinguishable situations where I would prefer one to be objectively the case rather than the other, but it is not clear to me that this is one of them. In this particular case, I don’t see why I should care. Likewise, as suggested by James Miller’s comment, I don’t see why I should care whether I am objectively the same person as I was yesterday, or if this is just a subjective impression which is objectively false. And if I don’t care about that, then creating something that would remember being me is just as good as continuing to exist.
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.
If you had an option of being killed or having your memory wiped and waking up in what was effectively a completely different life (ie. different country, different friends), which would you choose?
Usul made a similar reply. See my response to his comment.
What does that even mean? What would be the mechanism?
If you have two competing hypotheses which are experimentally undistinguishable, Occam’s Razor requires you prefer the hypothesis that makes fewer assumptions. Positing reincarnation adds a lot of rules to the universe which it doesn’t really need for it to function the way we already see it function.
Does occam’s razor require you to prefer the likelier hypothesis? I don’t see why I should act as if the more likely case is definitely true.
I’m not sure what the point of your comment is. I said myself that it is unclear what the meaning of the situation would be, and I certainly did not say that the second theory was more probable than the first.