Though not exactly a quantum immortality believer, I take it more seriously than most...
Objections mostly seem to come down to the idea that, if I split in two, and then one of me dies a minute later, its consciousness doesn’t magically transfer over to the other me. And so “one of me” has really died.
However, I see this case as being about as bad as losing a minute’s worth of memory. On the reductive view of personal identity, there’s no obvious difference. There is no soul flying about.
Is there a difference between these four cases:
I instantly lose a minute’s memory due to nanobot action
I am knocked unconscious and lose a minute’s memory
I die and am replaced by a stored copy of me from a minute ago
I die, but I had split into two a minute ago
I’m not seeing it...
(Well, admittedly in the final case I also “gain” a minute’s memory.)
In all the cases you listed, the remaining-you has the same moral weight as the you-if-nothing-would-happen. Arguably, the person on one side of a quantum coin only owns a half of moral weight, just like other events that you weight with Born probabilities, so the analogy breaks.
Here’s what I find confusing about the last two cases:
I die, but I had split into two a minute ago
Here I think we agree that a person has really died, which is bad if you believe that all people, once existing, are morally significant (or are they?).
I die and am replaced by a stored copy of me from a minute ago
In the previous case, the copy was created before the person died, whereas in this case, the copy is created after the person dies. But why would the time the copy was created be relevant at all with regards to the answer of the question “Did anyone really die?” If someone died in the first case, then someone also died in the second case, since creating a copy is in no way causally connected with the dying of the person. So killing someone and creating a copy afterwards would have the same moral weight as creating a copy and then killing one of the people.
Though not exactly a quantum immortality believer, I take it more seriously than most...
Objections mostly seem to come down to the idea that, if I split in two, and then one of me dies a minute later, its consciousness doesn’t magically transfer over to the other me. And so “one of me” has really died.
However, I see this case as being about as bad as losing a minute’s worth of memory. On the reductive view of personal identity, there’s no obvious difference. There is no soul flying about.
Is there a difference between these four cases:
I instantly lose a minute’s memory due to nanobot action
I am knocked unconscious and lose a minute’s memory
I die and am replaced by a stored copy of me from a minute ago
I die, but I had split into two a minute ago
I’m not seeing it...
(Well, admittedly in the final case I also “gain” a minute’s memory.)
In all the cases you listed, the remaining-you has the same moral weight as the you-if-nothing-would-happen. Arguably, the person on one side of a quantum coin only owns a half of moral weight, just like other events that you weight with Born probabilities, so the analogy breaks.
Here’s what I find confusing about the last two cases:
Here I think we agree that a person has really died, which is bad if you believe that all people, once existing, are morally significant (or are they?).
In the previous case, the copy was created before the person died, whereas in this case, the copy is created after the person dies. But why would the time the copy was created be relevant at all with regards to the answer of the question “Did anyone really die?” If someone died in the first case, then someone also died in the second case, since creating a copy is in no way causally connected with the dying of the person. So killing someone and creating a copy afterwards would have the same moral weight as creating a copy and then killing one of the people.