Most of the concepts here are ethical. Whether some contraption has the same personal identity as you do, and whether it’s good to have that contraption copied/destroyed, is a moral question, in a case when the unnatural concept of what’s right gets extended to very strange situations. Whether we cut this question in terms of personal identity or patterns of elementary particles is a matter of cognitive algorithm used to determine the decision. It doesn’t matter whether an upload is called “the same person” as its biological preimage, it only matters whether it’s a good decision to make this change. In our environment, the only analogous decision is to whether you leave a person alive, maybe trading a life for something greater. When trying to extend a concept of personal identity itself, people make a mistake of trying to extend its instrumental value along with it, but this value breaks along with the concept when context becomes sufficiently unnatural.
Our morality evolved without taking into account the fine properties of physical world, and so at least moral decisions drawn in context so close to our evolutionary environment that all the classical hallucinations still hold, shouldn’t require those properties of physical world to be taken into account. The decision to determine more average people vs. less happier people shouldn’t be justified in terms of many-worlds, it should be justified just as well in terms of out cognitive architecture without breaking out from the framework of classical hallucinations.
Most of the concepts here are ethical. Whether some contraption has the same personal identity as you do, and whether it’s good to have that contraption copied/destroyed, is a moral question, in a case when the unnatural concept of what’s right gets extended to very strange situations. Whether we cut this question in terms of personal identity or patterns of elementary particles is a matter of cognitive algorithm used to determine the decision. It doesn’t matter whether an upload is called “the same person” as its biological preimage, it only matters whether it’s a good decision to make this change. In our environment, the only analogous decision is to whether you leave a person alive, maybe trading a life for something greater. When trying to extend a concept of personal identity itself, people make a mistake of trying to extend its instrumental value along with it, but this value breaks along with the concept when context becomes sufficiently unnatural.
Our morality evolved without taking into account the fine properties of physical world, and so at least moral decisions drawn in context so close to our evolutionary environment that all the classical hallucinations still hold, shouldn’t require those properties of physical world to be taken into account. The decision to determine more average people vs. less happier people shouldn’t be justified in terms of many-worlds, it should be justified just as well in terms of out cognitive architecture without breaking out from the framework of classical hallucinations.