Analogy: When you’re writing in your personal diary, you’re free to define “table” however you want. But in ordinary English-language discourse, if you call all penguins “tables” you’ll just be wrong. And this fact isn’t changed at all by the fact that “table” lacks a perfectly formal physics-level definition.
You’re also free to define “I” however you want in your values. You’re only wrong if your definitions imply wrong physical reality. But defining “I” and “experiences” in such a way that you will not experience anything after teleportation is possible without implying anything physically wrong.
You can be wrong about physical reality of teleportation. But even after you figured out that there is no additional physical process going on that kills your soul, except for the change of location, you still can move from “my soul crashes against an asteroid” to “soul-death in my values means sudden change in location” instead of to “my soul remains alive”.
It’s not like I even expect you specifically to mean “don’t liking teleportation is necessary irrational” much. It’s just that saying that there should be an actual answer to questions about “I” and “experiences” makes people moral-realist.
You’re also free to define “I” however you want in your values.
Sort of!
It’s true that no law of nature will stop you from using “I” in a nonstandard way; your head will not explode if you redefine “table” to mean “penguin”.
And it’s true that there are possible minds in abstract mindspace that have all sorts of values, including strict preferences about whether they want their brain to be made of silicon vs. carbon.
But it’s not true that humans alive today have full and complete control over their own preferences.
And it’s not true that humans can never be mistaken in their beliefs about their own preferences.
In the case of teleportation, I think teleportation-phobic people are mostly making an implicit error of the form “mistakenly modeling situations as though you are a Cartesian Ghost who is observing experiences from outside the universe”, not making a mistake about what their preferences are per se. (Though once you realize that you’re not a Cartesian Ghost, that will have some implications for what experiences you expect to see next in some cases, and implications for what physical world-states you prefer relative to other world-states.)
In the case of teleportation, I think teleportation-phobic people are mostly making an implicit error of the form “mistakenly modeling situations as though you are a Cartesian Ghost who is observing experiences from outside the universe”, not making a mistake about what their preferences are per se.
Why not both? I can imagine that someone would be persuaded to accept teleportation/uploading if they stopped believing in physical Cartesian Ghost. But it’s possible that if you remind them that continuity of experience, like table, is just a description of physical situation and not divinely blessed necessary value, that would be enough to tip the balance toward them valuing carbon or whatever. It’s bad to be wrong about Cartesian Ghosts, but it’s also bad to think that you don’t have a choice about how you value experience.
You’re also free to define “I” however you want in your values. You’re only wrong if your definitions imply wrong physical reality. But defining “I” and “experiences” in such a way that you will not experience anything after teleportation is possible without implying anything physically wrong.
You can be wrong about physical reality of teleportation. But even after you figured out that there is no additional physical process going on that kills your soul, except for the change of location, you still can move from “my soul crashes against an asteroid” to “soul-death in my values means sudden change in location” instead of to “my soul remains alive”.
It’s not like I even expect you specifically to mean “don’t liking teleportation is necessary irrational” much. It’s just that saying that there should be an actual answer to questions about “I” and “experiences” makes people moral-realist.
Sort of!
It’s true that no law of nature will stop you from using “I” in a nonstandard way; your head will not explode if you redefine “table” to mean “penguin”.
And it’s true that there are possible minds in abstract mindspace that have all sorts of values, including strict preferences about whether they want their brain to be made of silicon vs. carbon.
But it’s not true that humans alive today have full and complete control over their own preferences.
And it’s not true that humans can never be mistaken in their beliefs about their own preferences.
In the case of teleportation, I think teleportation-phobic people are mostly making an implicit error of the form “mistakenly modeling situations as though you are a Cartesian Ghost who is observing experiences from outside the universe”, not making a mistake about what their preferences are per se. (Though once you realize that you’re not a Cartesian Ghost, that will have some implications for what experiences you expect to see next in some cases, and implications for what physical world-states you prefer relative to other world-states.)
Why not both? I can imagine that someone would be persuaded to accept teleportation/uploading if they stopped believing in physical Cartesian Ghost. But it’s possible that if you remind them that continuity of experience, like table, is just a description of physical situation and not divinely blessed necessary value, that would be enough to tip the balance toward them valuing carbon or whatever. It’s bad to be wrong about Cartesian Ghosts, but it’s also bad to think that you don’t have a choice about how you value experience.