I have an issue with this framing. ‘Ghosts’ are exactly as physically instantiated into reality as ‘you’ are. They both run on your brain hardware. If you brain goes into an unrecoverable state then the ‘you’ part and any ‘ghost’ part are equally lost. What is the actual distinction you are trying to make here?
“I define a Philosophical Ghost to be something that has an experience but is not physically instantiated into reality, although it may experience the belief that it is physically instantiated into reality. Examples include story characters, simulacra inside of hypothetical or counterfactual predictions, my mental model of the LessWrong audience that I am bouncing thoughts off of as I write this post, your mental model of me that you bounce thoughts off of as you try to read it, and so on.”
I have an issue with this framing. ‘Ghosts’ are exactly as physically instantiated into reality as ‘you’ are. They both run on your brain hardware. If you brain goes into an unrecoverable state then the ‘you’ part and any ‘ghost’ part are equally lost. What is the actual distinction you are trying to make here?
“I define a Philosophical Ghost to be something that has an experience but is not physically instantiated into reality, although it may experience the belief that it is physically instantiated into reality. Examples include story characters, simulacra inside of hypothetical or counterfactual predictions, my mental model of the LessWrong audience that I am bouncing thoughts off of as I write this post, your mental model of me that you bounce thoughts off of as you try to read it, and so on.”