In the clone thought experiment, ‘context’ just refers to all of the sensory inputs you have ever received and all of the thoughts you have ever had. For a LLM instance, it just refers to the KV cache. Since you are identical to your clone except for differences in context since the cloning took place, this context is a defining part of who ‘you’ are. But yes, I am being overly zealous when I say that this defines you—it is better to say that your context is a part of who you are, which is not really a very novel statement.
I do agree that we care about our future self (who will have a different context), and we would care about our clone—just usually both to a lesser extent than we care about our current self. Interestingly, I think I would care more about my future self than I would care about my clone, even if the clone had a greater percentage of shared history.
In the clone thought experiment, ‘context’ just refers to all of the sensory inputs you have ever received and all of the thoughts you have ever had. For a LLM instance, it just refers to the KV cache. Since you are identical to your clone except for differences in context since the cloning took place, this context is a defining part of who ‘you’ are. But yes, I am being overly zealous when I say that this defines you—it is better to say that your context is a part of who you are, which is not really a very novel statement.
I do agree that we care about our future self (who will have a different context), and we would care about our clone—just usually both to a lesser extent than we care about our current self. Interestingly, I think I would care more about my future self than I would care about my clone, even if the clone had a greater percentage of shared history.