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From an outsider perspective, sure. But don't you have an inner mental world? I don't understand if you are conscious why you think a copy of your consciousness

by ericb 6y ago

From an outsider perspective, sure. But don't you have an inner mental world? I don't understand if you are conscious why you think a copy of your consciousness that you have no access to would offer you anything, or in any way be "you." There could be 5000 copies of you a block away and you'd have no idea. In a sense, aren't "you" the passenger "on" the Ship of Theseus? Whatever "you" is, you can trace the path of the ship across time from beginning to the end, and "you" have only access to the scope of your instance of consciousness.

ben_w 6y ago
> I don't understand if you are conscious why you think a copy of your consciousness that you have no access to would offer you anything, or in any way be "you." I don’t know why you think I’m saying that it does. I’m saying that: if this body were to die, and a backup of my brain state (made almost immediately before this body’s death) was copied in a new body or simulated on a computer, that would be no different for the entity that wakes up than it was for me to wake up from general anaesthetic having only half of the memory of the countdown the nurse walked me through before I went under. (Or that weird time where I was right next to a CO2 cylinder when it exploded, resulting in me having a separately sized gap in my visual vs audio episodic memory). Conversely, the me which did die would absolutely experience that death, would be scared, would try to avoid it — the me that wakes up afterwards might be glad to have missed it or might scream immediately, depending on when the death and the backup happened, but either way the death would still be real. Killing of a copy would also mean an entity would experience death. None of these are natural things to think about of course, so there’s no reason to expect that any of our own intuitions should even be close to correct, let alone the most comfortable ones.

by ericb 6y ago

ben_w 6y ago

> I don't understand if you are conscious why you think a copy of your consciousness that you have no access to would offer you anything, or in any way be "you." I don’t know why you think I’m saying that it does. I’m saying that: if this body were to die, and a backup of my brain state (made almost immediately before this body’s death) was copied in a new body or simulated on a computer, that would be no different for the entity that wakes up than it was for me to wake up from general anaesthetic having only half of the memory of the countdown the nurse walked me through before I went under. (Or that weird time where I was right next to a CO2 cylinder when it exploded, resulting in me having a separately sized gap in my visual vs audio episodic memory). Conversely, the me which did die would absolutely experience that death, would be scared, would try to avoid it — the me that wakes up afterwards might be glad to have missed it or might scream immediately, depending on when the death and the backup happened, but either way the death would still be real. Killing of a copy would also mean an entity would experience death. None of these are natural things to think about of course, so there’s no reason to expect that any of our own intuitions should even be close to correct, let alone the most comfortable ones.