I’m sorry, I don’t think I can help. It’s not that I don’t believe in personal continuity, it’s that I can’t even conceive of it.
At t=x there’s an Eliezer pattern and there’s a Bill Gates pattern. At t=x+1 there’s an Eliezer+1 pattern and a Bill Gates+1 pattern. A few of the instances of those patterns live in worlds in which they won the lottery, but most don’t. There’s nothing more to it than that. How could there be?
Some Eliezer instances might have decided to only care about Eliezer+1 instances that won the lottery, but that wouldn’t change anything. Why would it?
I can’t be the only one who sees this discussion as parallel to the argument over free will, right down to the existence of people who proudly complain that they can’t see the problem.
Do you see how this is the same as saying “Of course there’s no such thing as free will; physical causality rules over the brain”? Not false, but missing completely that which actually needs to be explained: what it is that our brain does when we ‘make a choice’, and why we have a deeply ingrained aversion to the first question being answered by some kind of causality.
There’s a strong similarity, all right. In both cases, the bullet-biters describe reality as we have every reason to believe it is, and ask the deniers how reality would be different if free will / personal continuity existed. The deniers don’t have an answer, but they’re very insistent about this feeling they have that this undefined free will or continuity thing exists.
Explaining this feeling could be interesting, but it has very little to do with the question of whether what the feeling is about, is real.
I’m sorry, I don’t think I can help. It’s not that I don’t believe in personal continuity, it’s that I can’t even conceive of it.
At t=x there’s an Eliezer pattern and there’s a Bill Gates pattern. At t=x+1 there’s an Eliezer+1 pattern and a Bill Gates+1 pattern. A few of the instances of those patterns live in worlds in which they won the lottery, but most don’t. There’s nothing more to it than that. How could there be?
Some Eliezer instances might have decided to only care about Eliezer+1 instances that won the lottery, but that wouldn’t change anything. Why would it?
I can’t be the only one who sees this discussion as parallel to the argument over free will, right down to the existence of people who proudly complain that they can’t see the problem.
Do you see how this is the same as saying “Of course there’s no such thing as free will; physical causality rules over the brain”? Not false, but missing completely that which actually needs to be explained: what it is that our brain does when we ‘make a choice’, and why we have a deeply ingrained aversion to the first question being answered by some kind of causality.
There’s a strong similarity, all right. In both cases, the bullet-biters describe reality as we have every reason to believe it is, and ask the deniers how reality would be different if free will / personal continuity existed. The deniers don’t have an answer, but they’re very insistent about this feeling they have that this undefined free will or continuity thing exists.
Explaining this feeling could be interesting, but it has very little to do with the question of whether what the feeling is about, is real.