This “explanation” leaves lingering doubt. It doesn’t dissolve all the questions that I have about personal identity. Ok, I’m a factor in a subspace of an amplitude distribution: I get that and I’m okay with that. But there are still unresolved issues of anticipation.
Let’s say I record in sufficient fidelity the amplitude distribution factor which represents “me” at this point in time. Then after I am dead some machine is used to recreate this amplitude distribution to sufficient fidelity as to re-create me, as I exist now. That person will come into being with all my memories and with a subjective feeling of actually being me. Furthermore, there is nothing about this “new instance of me” which experimentally differentiates it from the “original me” which is typing these words. (This is the quantum replicator/teleport thought experiment.)
So far, I’m onboard.
Now the quantum realist typified by Eliezer would argue that there is no difference between “new instance of me” and “original me,” and I’m stupid for thinking that there is. Furthermore, since personal identity is thus shown to be a phantom of our mind’s inner workings, the “new instance of me” objectively is me. I’ve thus defeated death and come back to life!
That’s a pill I can’t swallow. And the nagging doubt which keeps me from going along with that line of argument is: what experience to I anticipate in this scenario? If I’m being scanned now.. I anticipate my life to continue as “original me” at the end of the scanning process and not to suddenly find myself soul-swapped into future “new instance of me.”
I’ve heard people argue that maybe both “original me” and “new instance of me” are entangled and I should expect a 50⁄50 probability of “ending up” in either manifestation. But that’s defeated by further thought experiments: just imagine creating an endless number of replicants in the future. Is the probability evenly split among them all? That would require non-local effects on the probabilities in the present depending on future state, which is highly unlikely.
I’ve also heard that each time I’m copied or made manifest I should treat that as a 50⁄50 branch condition. So 50% probability of continuing as original me, 25% as the first copy, 12.5% as the second, etc. We’ve recovered locality at least, but how does my consciousness persist across a storage medium over the intervening years that doesn’t represent a computation? This just substitutes one hard pill to swallow for another.
Furthermore, what should I expect to experience once I die of old age? Do I expect to “wake up” some years later in a younger version of myself, the copy of the earlier scan that was made? Unlikely; I’m not even remotely the same amplitude distribution at that point. This seems even more the product of sloppy thinking than the earlier options considered.
So if I have myself scanned, then die, knowing that someone will “restore” me from the backup copy, my expectation on my death bed is still that I will experience permanent death, oblivion. There will be a new entity constructed which has all my memories up to the point of being scanned, and perhaps that will help lessen the loss felt by those who loved me. But the fact remains: I expect to permanently die when this instance of me dies. The truth that we are all just factors in a subspace of an amplitude distribution doesn’t resolve this problem at all.
And there are practical ramifications of this thought experiment: should I sign up for cryonics (preserve this instantiation of me) or brain preservation (destructive copy)? Should I volunteer for destructive mind uploading, once it is available? Etc.
I agree that this is a major unsolved problem. I started thinking about this problem more than 20 years ago which eventually led to UDT (in part as an attempt to sidestep it). At one point I thought maybe we can just give up anticipation and switch to using UDT which doesn’t depend on a notion of anticipation, but I currently think that some of our values are likely expressed in terms of anticipation so we probably still have to solve the problem (or a version of it) before we can translate them into a UDT utility function.
I think this gets at psychological connectedness/continuity. There’s a large gap between scanning and the creation of the copy, but actually, maybe there’s a gap between your conscious states, too? Connectedness/continuity seems to be an illusion, and the copy could also be under the same illusion.
I think you could think of yourself as continuing 100% in all of them (at the time of copying), not some fractional amount. Identity is not transitive or unique in this way; it’s closer to something like inheritance/descendance. Your hypothetical biological children would each inherit about half of your genes, no matter how many there are. Your identity descendants could each inherit 100% of your identity, even if they aren’t identical to each other.
This “explanation” leaves lingering doubt. It doesn’t dissolve all the questions that I have about personal identity. Ok, I’m a factor in a subspace of an amplitude distribution: I get that and I’m okay with that. But there are still unresolved issues of anticipation.
Let’s say I record in sufficient fidelity the amplitude distribution factor which represents “me” at this point in time. Then after I am dead some machine is used to recreate this amplitude distribution to sufficient fidelity as to re-create me, as I exist now. That person will come into being with all my memories and with a subjective feeling of actually being me. Furthermore, there is nothing about this “new instance of me” which experimentally differentiates it from the “original me” which is typing these words. (This is the quantum replicator/teleport thought experiment.)
So far, I’m onboard.
Now the quantum realist typified by Eliezer would argue that there is no difference between “new instance of me” and “original me,” and I’m stupid for thinking that there is. Furthermore, since personal identity is thus shown to be a phantom of our mind’s inner workings, the “new instance of me” objectively is me. I’ve thus defeated death and come back to life!
That’s a pill I can’t swallow. And the nagging doubt which keeps me from going along with that line of argument is: what experience to I anticipate in this scenario? If I’m being scanned now.. I anticipate my life to continue as “original me” at the end of the scanning process and not to suddenly find myself soul-swapped into future “new instance of me.”
I’ve heard people argue that maybe both “original me” and “new instance of me” are entangled and I should expect a 50⁄50 probability of “ending up” in either manifestation. But that’s defeated by further thought experiments: just imagine creating an endless number of replicants in the future. Is the probability evenly split among them all? That would require non-local effects on the probabilities in the present depending on future state, which is highly unlikely.
I’ve also heard that each time I’m copied or made manifest I should treat that as a 50⁄50 branch condition. So 50% probability of continuing as original me, 25% as the first copy, 12.5% as the second, etc. We’ve recovered locality at least, but how does my consciousness persist across a storage medium over the intervening years that doesn’t represent a computation? This just substitutes one hard pill to swallow for another.
Furthermore, what should I expect to experience once I die of old age? Do I expect to “wake up” some years later in a younger version of myself, the copy of the earlier scan that was made? Unlikely; I’m not even remotely the same amplitude distribution at that point. This seems even more the product of sloppy thinking than the earlier options considered.
So if I have myself scanned, then die, knowing that someone will “restore” me from the backup copy, my expectation on my death bed is still that I will experience permanent death, oblivion. There will be a new entity constructed which has all my memories up to the point of being scanned, and perhaps that will help lessen the loss felt by those who loved me. But the fact remains: I expect to permanently die when this instance of me dies. The truth that we are all just factors in a subspace of an amplitude distribution doesn’t resolve this problem at all.
And there are practical ramifications of this thought experiment: should I sign up for cryonics (preserve this instantiation of me) or brain preservation (destructive copy)? Should I volunteer for destructive mind uploading, once it is available? Etc.
I agree that this is a major unsolved problem. I started thinking about this problem more than 20 years ago which eventually led to UDT (in part as an attempt to sidestep it). At one point I thought maybe we can just give up anticipation and switch to using UDT which doesn’t depend on a notion of anticipation, but I currently think that some of our values are likely expressed in terms of anticipation so we probably still have to solve the problem (or a version of it) before we can translate them into a UDT utility function.
I think this gets at psychological connectedness/continuity. There’s a large gap between scanning and the creation of the copy, but actually, maybe there’s a gap between your conscious states, too? Connectedness/continuity seems to be an illusion, and the copy could also be under the same illusion.
I think you could think of yourself as continuing 100% in all of them (at the time of copying), not some fractional amount. Identity is not transitive or unique in this way; it’s closer to something like inheritance/descendance. Your hypothetical biological children would each inherit about half of your genes, no matter how many there are. Your identity descendants could each inherit 100% of your identity, even if they aren’t identical to each other.