when billions of people are extinguished and replaced by slightly different versions of themselves.
This happens in the ordinary passage of time anyway. (Stephen King’s story “The Langoliers” plays this for horror—the reason the past no longer exists is because monsters are eating it.)
If your theory of time is 4-dimensionalist, then you might think the past people are ‘still there,’ in some timeless sense, rather than wholly annihilated. Interestingly, you might (especially if you reject determinism) think that moving through time involves killing (possible) futures, rather than (or in addition to) killing the past.
Hard to see why you can’t make a version of this same argument, at an additional remove, in the time travel case. For example, if you are a “determinist” and / or “n-dimensionalist” about the “meta-time” concept in Eliezer’s story, the future people who are lopped off the timeline still exist in the meta-timeless eternity of the “meta-timeline,” just as in your comment the dead still exist in the eternity of the past.
In the (seemingly degenerate) hypothetical where you go back in time and change the future, I’m not sure why we should prefer to say that we “destroy” the “old” future, rather than simply that we disconnect it from our local universe. That might be a horrible thing to do, but then again it might not be. There’s lots of at-least-conceivable stuff that is disconnected from our local universe.
Yes, that seems more consistent with the rest of the sequences (and indeed advocacy of cryonics/timeless identity). “You” are a pattern, not a specific collection of atoms. So if the pattern persists (as per successive moments of time, or destroying and re-creating the pattern), so do “you”.
Sure. At the same time, it’s important to note that this is a ‘you’ by stipulation. The question of how to define self-identity for linguistic purposes (e.g., the scope of pronouns) is independent of the psychological question ‘When do I feel as though something is ‘part of me’?‘, and both of these are independent of the normative question ‘What entities should I act to preserve in the same way that I act to preserve my immediate person?’ It may be that there is no unique principled way to define the self, in which case we should be open to shifting conceptions based on which way of thinking is most useful in a given situation.
This is one of the reasons the idea of my death does not terrify me. The idea of death in general is horrific, but the future I who will die will only be somewhat similar to my present self, differing only in degree from my similarity to other persons. I fear death, not just ‘my’ death.
“Death” is the absence of a future self that is continuous with your present self. I don’t know exactly what constitutes “continuous” but it clearly is not the identity of individual particles. It may require continuity of causal derivation, for example.
Upload yourself to a computer. You’ve got a copy on the computer, you’ve got a physical body. Kill the physical body a few milliseconds after upload.
Repeat, except now kill the physical body a few milliseconds before the upload.
Do you mean to define the former situation as involving a “Death” because a few milliseconds worth of computations were lost, but the latter situation as simple a transfer?
I don’t think the word “death” really applies anymore when we are talking at the level of physical systems, any more than “table” or “chair” would. Those constructs don’t cross over well into (real or imaginary) physics.
Since Eliezer is a temporal reductionist, I think he might not mean “temporally continuous”, but rather “logical/causal continuity” or something similar.
Discrete time travel would also violate temporal continuity, by the way.
(Even the billiard ball model of “classical” chemistry is enough to eliminate “individual particles” as the source of personal identity; you aren’t made of the same atoms you were a year ago, because of eating, respiration, and other biological processes.)
This happens in the ordinary passage of time anyway. (Stephen King’s story “The Langoliers” plays this for horror—the reason the past no longer exists is because monsters are eating it.)
If your theory of time is 4-dimensionalist, then you might think the past people are ‘still there,’ in some timeless sense, rather than wholly annihilated. Interestingly, you might (especially if you reject determinism) think that moving through time involves killing (possible) futures, rather than (or in addition to) killing the past.
Hard to see why you can’t make a version of this same argument, at an additional remove, in the time travel case. For example, if you are a “determinist” and / or “n-dimensionalist” about the “meta-time” concept in Eliezer’s story, the future people who are lopped off the timeline still exist in the meta-timeless eternity of the “meta-timeline,” just as in your comment the dead still exist in the eternity of the past.
In the (seemingly degenerate) hypothetical where you go back in time and change the future, I’m not sure why we should prefer to say that we “destroy” the “old” future, rather than simply that we disconnect it from our local universe. That might be a horrible thing to do, but then again it might not be. There’s lots of at-least-conceivable stuff that is disconnected from our local universe.
(RobbBB seems to refer to what philosophers call the B-theory of time, whereas CronoDAS seems to refer to the A-theory of time.)
Yes, that seems more consistent with the rest of the sequences (and indeed advocacy of cryonics/timeless identity). “You” are a pattern, not a specific collection of atoms. So if the pattern persists (as per successive moments of time, or destroying and re-creating the pattern), so do “you”.
Sure. At the same time, it’s important to note that this is a ‘you’ by stipulation. The question of how to define self-identity for linguistic purposes (e.g., the scope of pronouns) is independent of the psychological question ‘When do I feel as though something is ‘part of me’?‘, and both of these are independent of the normative question ‘What entities should I act to preserve in the same way that I act to preserve my immediate person?’ It may be that there is no unique principled way to define the self, in which case we should be open to shifting conceptions based on which way of thinking is most useful in a given situation.
This is one of the reasons the idea of my death does not terrify me. The idea of death in general is horrific, but the future I who will die will only be somewhat similar to my present self, differing only in degree from my similarity to other persons. I fear death, not just ‘my’ death.
Sure, but my point is that most of the commentary on this site, or that is predicated on the Sequences, assumes the equivalence of all of those.
“Death” is the absence of a future self that is continuous with your present self. I don’t know exactly what constitutes “continuous” but it clearly is not the identity of individual particles. It may require continuity of causal derivation, for example.
Why?
Upload yourself to a computer. You’ve got a copy on the computer, you’ve got a physical body. Kill the physical body a few milliseconds after upload.
Repeat, except now kill the physical body a few milliseconds before the upload.
Do you mean to define the former situation as involving a “Death” because a few milliseconds worth of computations were lost, but the latter situation as simple a transfer?
I don’t think the word “death” really applies anymore when we are talking at the level of physical systems, any more than “table” or “chair” would. Those constructs don’t cross over well into (real or imaginary) physics.
Since Eliezer is a temporal reductionist, I think he might not mean “temporally continuous”, but rather “logical/causal continuity” or something similar.
Discrete time travel would also violate temporal continuity, by the way.
(Even the billiard ball model of “classical” chemistry is enough to eliminate “individual particles” as the source of personal identity; you aren’t made of the same atoms you were a year ago, because of eating, respiration, and other biological processes.)
There could be special “mind particles” in you brain and I can’t believe I just said that.
(::shrug:: Well, that does seem logically possible, but it doesn’t seem to be the way our biology works.)
Curses. My poor biology knowledge has betrayed me once again.