Subjective anticipation is an approximation that isn’t guaranteed to give meaningful results for copied minds, just as Newtonian mechanics isn’t guaranteed to give meaningful results for electrons and black holes (though the result seems sensible in the simple case of a single persisting copy).
But as for what the law should say, once we have the technology to do this, it seems to me three principles should apply:
You should specify how your assets are going to be divided, before undertaking the procedure.
Copies do not count as extra people for purposes like voting and receiving social welfare. Instead, these things count among the assets that should be allocated before the copy is made.
If such allocation wasn’t done, and nobody knows which one is the original, then the copies should be able to agree on what should be done (divide evenly, flip a coin or whatever), since each has the same values and the same information.
I don’t see any good reason to insist that, after the procedure, every asset belongs to exactly one body.
By way of analogy, when I married my husband, a number of assets became legally held in common. There simply is no answer to the question of which of us owns which part of the money in our checking account… we own it jointly; we both have the legal right to dispose of all of it as we choose. Obviously, this creates the potential for conflict, but the legal system doesn’t get involved in that conflict… it’s our problem.
Of course, marriage is a special relationship. But then, so is identical copyhood.
My initial instinct is for the law to stay out of it, other than to provide a mechanism whereby identical copies can contract with one another and enforce the terms of such contracts.
(And, no, I’m not a libertarian in general, but I do think it works OK as an approach towards relationships among equals.)
I am a libertarian in general, and if you want your assets owned jointly between you and your copies, I certainly have no objection to that. Presumably something indivisible like your vote in elections would then be used by consensus between all copies?
The only caveat I would suggest is that whichever way you want to do it, it’s best to make the decision and sign the appropriate documentation before you step into the copying machine. As with divorces and inheritance in our own time, the last thing you want is to run into a dispute after the fact.
Requiring consensus seems unnecessary. If we get one vote between us, then we get to vote once; that’s all the legal system has to concern itself with. Everything else is our own problem.
The courts have no interest in whether we agreed on a result, or whether one of us is currently chained to the wall in our basement, or whatever. (Well, the courts may have an interest in the latter for other reasons, but not as it applies to voting.)
I agree with your suggestion; I’m just saying this isn’t a legal complication, just a bit of good personal advice. (That said, my husband and I didn’t sign a prenuptual agreement when we got married, so my agreement with this advice is clearly relatively superficial.)
The analogy breaks down when you consider that a married couple can define property rights in case of a divorce (and create a legally binding contract) before even marrying, and in fact, can divorce. Whereas the relationship between copies of a person exists for the entire duration of their coexistence.
It seems unfair to preallocate property among otherwise identical copies of a person, but it’s certainly physically possible—and I can’t think of any reason why we’d want to prevent copies from negotiating their own ownership of property once their state vectors have diverged. Seems like a reasonable analogy to the economic side of divorce.
That is, I’d support a pair of copies legally filing for the equivalent of divorce. And just as with divorce, the couple needs to work out a division of assets at that point, perhaps with the “assistance” of a court of law, or a professional arbitrator.
Of course, if they signed a pre-duplication contract, that’s fine too, just as with divorcing couples today.
Incidentally, as a matter of law I’d expect a pre-duplication contract to be binding on both parties X and Y if and only if the law recognizes both X and Y as the original. If copy X is not the original, legally speaking, then copy X was not a signatory to that contract and is not bound by it.
For instance, suppose the prior to the procedure I, like many people, believed that I was guaranteed to continue on as the original, so the original, being the one that acquired the assets, should get all of them.
However, the copy, upon realizing they are the copy, quickly revises this opinion and now believes assets should be shared equally (this does not even have to be self-serving, it is easy to imagine that since the copy has the same memories as the original, will have a powerful intuition that they are the original, or at least one of two originals). The original remains unsympathetic to this, since he assumes that’s just what a self-interested clone who only wanted to sponge off someone else would say.
That’s the same as inheritance when there’s no will: should it all go to the eldest son? Be split equally among sons? Should even daughters get a share? How about the widow? Adopted children? Nephews? Siblings? Non-married companions? Lovers? Children born out of wedlock and not formally recognized? It’s not rare for the children to disagree on this.
If the parent didn’t specify a will, the law usually has a default case, which hasn’t been the same from one society to another, or from one epoch to another.
The difference here is that heirs are different people using different reasoning, and they can appeal to various factors depending on their capacity for reasoning and their implicit privileges (age, degree of relation, etc.)
Here we are arguing about a case where the “heirs” are not only not privileged over each other in any intrinsic sense, but they are also copies of the same thought process, with access to the exact same threads of reasoning.
This logic works in the scenario where nobody knows who the original is. It doesn’t work as well when there is a known original, since this difference in subjective experience between the two may be enough to break symmetry in terms of which arguments are appealing, and the analogy to heirs probably works best. I myself favour a default case of equal splitting, since it means we don’t have to argue about who is the ‘original’.
Given that the copies (we suppose) use the same thought algorithms at the forking point, it may be helpful to imagine yourself as either version in such a scenario, or mentally roleplay a dialogue between them.
Subjective anticipation is an approximation that isn’t guaranteed to give meaningful results for copied minds, just as Newtonian mechanics isn’t guaranteed to give meaningful results for electrons and black holes (though the result seems sensible in the simple case of a single persisting copy).
But as for what the law should say, once we have the technology to do this, it seems to me three principles should apply:
You should specify how your assets are going to be divided, before undertaking the procedure.
Copies do not count as extra people for purposes like voting and receiving social welfare. Instead, these things count among the assets that should be allocated before the copy is made.
If such allocation wasn’t done, and nobody knows which one is the original, then the copies should be able to agree on what should be done (divide evenly, flip a coin or whatever), since each has the same values and the same information.
I don’t see any good reason to insist that, after the procedure, every asset belongs to exactly one body.
By way of analogy, when I married my husband, a number of assets became legally held in common. There simply is no answer to the question of which of us owns which part of the money in our checking account… we own it jointly; we both have the legal right to dispose of all of it as we choose. Obviously, this creates the potential for conflict, but the legal system doesn’t get involved in that conflict… it’s our problem.
Of course, marriage is a special relationship. But then, so is identical copyhood.
My initial instinct is for the law to stay out of it, other than to provide a mechanism whereby identical copies can contract with one another and enforce the terms of such contracts.
(And, no, I’m not a libertarian in general, but I do think it works OK as an approach towards relationships among equals.)
I am a libertarian in general, and if you want your assets owned jointly between you and your copies, I certainly have no objection to that. Presumably something indivisible like your vote in elections would then be used by consensus between all copies?
The only caveat I would suggest is that whichever way you want to do it, it’s best to make the decision and sign the appropriate documentation before you step into the copying machine. As with divorces and inheritance in our own time, the last thing you want is to run into a dispute after the fact.
Requiring consensus seems unnecessary. If we get one vote between us, then we get to vote once; that’s all the legal system has to concern itself with. Everything else is our own problem.
The courts have no interest in whether we agreed on a result, or whether one of us is currently chained to the wall in our basement, or whatever. (Well, the courts may have an interest in the latter for other reasons, but not as it applies to voting.)
I agree with your suggestion; I’m just saying this isn’t a legal complication, just a bit of good personal advice. (That said, my husband and I didn’t sign a prenuptual agreement when we got married, so my agreement with this advice is clearly relatively superficial.)
The analogy breaks down when you consider that a married couple can define property rights in case of a divorce (and create a legally binding contract) before even marrying, and in fact, can divorce. Whereas the relationship between copies of a person exists for the entire duration of their coexistence.
It seems unfair to preallocate property among otherwise identical copies of a person, but it’s certainly physically possible—and I can’t think of any reason why we’d want to prevent copies from negotiating their own ownership of property once their state vectors have diverged. Seems like a reasonable analogy to the economic side of divorce.
This is a pretty science-fictional aside, though.
The legal relationship needn’t last forever.
That is, I’d support a pair of copies legally filing for the equivalent of divorce. And just as with divorce, the couple needs to work out a division of assets at that point, perhaps with the “assistance” of a court of law, or a professional arbitrator.
Of course, if they signed a pre-duplication contract, that’s fine too, just as with divorcing couples today.
Incidentally, as a matter of law I’d expect a pre-duplication contract to be binding on both parties X and Y if and only if the law recognizes both X and Y as the original. If copy X is not the original, legally speaking, then copy X was not a signatory to that contract and is not bound by it.
What if they can’t agree.
For instance, suppose the prior to the procedure I, like many people, believed that I was guaranteed to continue on as the original, so the original, being the one that acquired the assets, should get all of them.
However, the copy, upon realizing they are the copy, quickly revises this opinion and now believes assets should be shared equally (this does not even have to be self-serving, it is easy to imagine that since the copy has the same memories as the original, will have a powerful intuition that they are the original, or at least one of two originals). The original remains unsympathetic to this, since he assumes that’s just what a self-interested clone who only wanted to sponge off someone else would say.
That’s the same as inheritance when there’s no will: should it all go to the eldest son? Be split equally among sons? Should even daughters get a share? How about the widow? Adopted children? Nephews? Siblings? Non-married companions? Lovers? Children born out of wedlock and not formally recognized? It’s not rare for the children to disagree on this.
If the parent didn’t specify a will, the law usually has a default case, which hasn’t been the same from one society to another, or from one epoch to another.
The difference here is that heirs are different people using different reasoning, and they can appeal to various factors depending on their capacity for reasoning and their implicit privileges (age, degree of relation, etc.)
Here we are arguing about a case where the “heirs” are not only not privileged over each other in any intrinsic sense, but they are also copies of the same thought process, with access to the exact same threads of reasoning.
This logic works in the scenario where nobody knows who the original is. It doesn’t work as well when there is a known original, since this difference in subjective experience between the two may be enough to break symmetry in terms of which arguments are appealing, and the analogy to heirs probably works best. I myself favour a default case of equal splitting, since it means we don’t have to argue about who is the ‘original’.
Given that the copies (we suppose) use the same thought algorithms at the forking point, it may be helpful to imagine yourself as either version in such a scenario, or mentally roleplay a dialogue between them.