From: Johnicholas Hines (johnicholas.hines@gmail.com)
Date: Mon Mar 02 2009 - 07:23:55 MST
On Mon, Mar 2, 2009 at 6:18 AM, Stathis Papaioannou <stathisp@gmail.com> wrote:
> 2009/3/2 Matt Mahoney <matmahoney@yahoo.com> wrote:
>> The teleportation industry might [...]
> Subjectively you have a 1/2 chance of suffering when faced
> non-destructive teleportation with painful killing of the original. [...]
In an attempt to take this conversation in a different direction than
we have gone in before, let us talk about entities. Each entity in
this list has a claim to be you, but there are other reasons to say
that the entity is not you. You could add additional features to each
of these scenarios to transform them into a continuum between
more-plausibly-you and less-plausibly you.
Note: This list is in no particular order.
1. Your tomorrow self after going to sleep tonight ("sleep is death").
2. Your self after surgery on your heart that requires stopping your
heart ("death").
3. Your self after many of the atoms in your body have been replaced,
via normal living.
4. Your self after a radical atom-flushing treatment replaces all of
the atoms in your body.
5. Your self after a stroke that causes you to change in knowledge or emotions.
6. Your clone, grown from your DNA.
7. Your self after a genome-editing virus transforms you into
(technically) a different species - mutually infertile with unedited
humans, but otherwise identical.
8. Your life's work, a body of text that might be republished and
reread by college students for centuries.
9. Your children.
10. A high-quality simulation of you.
11. Your self after surgery on your brain to change your personality.
12. All of your future light cone.
My point is that we ACTIVELY DECIDE which future entities fit into our
utility functions in the role of "my future self". There isn't a
bright line labeled "self" in the world - it's all atoms underneath.
Johnicholas
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