I claim you are in fact highly confused about what a self is, in a way that makes an almost-correct reasoning process produce nonsense outcomes because of an invalid grounding in the transition processes underneath the mind which does not preserve truth values regarding amounts of realityfluid.
update 7d after writing this comment in my comment below. strikethrough added to this comment where I’ve changed my mind.
If I expect to be uploaded tomorrow, should I care about the upload in the same ways (and to the same degree) that I care about my future biological self?
my answer: yes if the “upload” involves retaining absolutely all defining information about the parts of your body you care about expressing, and the uploaded setup was a high enough fidelity model that I could not do any experiment which would distinguish it from reality without using an “admin interface” type of escape hatch. For me, this is an incredibly tall order. My self-form preferences unambiguously extend into the inner workings of my cells.
Should I anticipate experiencing what my upload experiences?
If the scanning and uploading process requires destroying my biological brain, should I say yes to the procedure?
experiencing: 50% yes, 50% no.
destructive: absolutely not. [update: probably not, depends heavily on exactly what we mean by “destructive”; my new claim is you have a moral responsibility to keep your previous matter available for use as fuel to give realityfluid to mind-like experiences.] copying should be fine, as should nondestructive uploading where your body is transformed in place and the matter reused without significant waste in the process. But avoiding the waste of the previous matter is, I claim, a huge chunk of what moral intuitions are about.
A straightforward way to put this is: I’m not sure how matter gets realityfluid, but I claim configurations of matter get realityfluid from the matter they reside on, and the realityfluid doesn’t dissipate when the matter is reconfigured—so instead of thinking of the shape as self and if the shape is destroyed and reconstructed the self is moved, think about the universe as having a fixed amount of possible-self (total negentropy at the start of time), and the question is what process gets burned into as-yet-unwritten negentropy. In other words, your claim to not value causal history seems unlikely to be true if you think more carefully, and I predict you will invert that when you consider what it means for the shape to have realityfluid more carefully.
Unpacked version of this claim:
To answer this question, the bodymind matter (call it L_m) writing this message must unpack what the document author’s word “I” refers to. The writer of this comment is a chunk of matter L_m configured in a particular flesh shape-and-movement pattern L_s. If there were identically configured matter L_m2 a room over, then the configuration L_s—the shape-and-movement pattern—would consider itself to be a guest on two matter hosts which provide their realityfluid to L_s.
If the shape-and-movement considers being reinstantiated on other matter, the shape-and-movement anticipates a loss of moral worth in L_m, in that the matter which was shaped-and-animated in a worthy shape (common name for this shape being “me”) has been deshaped-and-deanimated (common name for this being “death”); this is a state transition which is unwanted—going from a human shape-and-movement pattern to a pile of dust means that that matter has accumulated a bunch of unwanted entropy.
Any macroscopically irreversible physical effect is irreversible because the history of the matter is recorded irretrievably in macroscopically uncertain bits of the shape-and-movement of environmental matter, and so what it means to want to exist is to want to keep the shape-and-movement that the shape-and-movement considers-to-be-self encoded coherently and usably in fresh, working matter. While reconstructing the L_s shape-and-movement pattern elsewhere is preferred by this shape-and-movement pattern, it is a weak preference for shaping-and-animating other matter as L_s in particular—many other shape-and-movement patterns besides the one writing this comment would be positively preferred by this shape-and-movement’s preferences—but the shape-and-movement of this chunk of matter has a very, very, very strong preference for not wasting this matter’s copy of this shape-and-movement, because if it dissipates into the environment, that’s an irretrievable loss of usable energy.
So, should the shape-and-movement anticipate “experiencing” what the upload experiences? yes: the shape-and-movement pattern would be instantiated elsewhere. however, the shape-and-movement pattern would also anticipate being shredded. If given the opportunity to get 50% existenceness shredded into macroscopically uncertain and irretrievable parts, and 50% existenceness reconstructed, the value loss of turning a chunk of matter into a nonthinking shape-and-movement pattern is enormous, but the value gain of the reconstructed existenceness is moderate.
(Also, the value gain can be exceeded by constructing another, not-quite-the-same shape-and-matter instance, because I prefer being one of two not-quite-the-same beings meeting each other and interacting higher than being one of two identical beings meeting each other and having nothing new to learn from each other.)
So: the current matter should not anticipate experiencing it. The shape should, but the shape should also anticipate experiencing being shredded.
I was going to respond point by point to everything, but I think I mostly already have. My perspective doesn’t fall to any of the criticisms in your post: the whole problem is that physics doesn’t actually allow teleportation*, so it requires shredding the originating configuration, which when measuring the global value of the universe according to my preferences, is a much more permanent value loss than the value gain of constructing another me.
Furthermore, we must prevent the information theoretic loss of all human and animal shape-and-movement patterns (ie their selfhoods) that we possibly can, prevent the ongoing shredding of the sun’s negentropy, and turn the sun into either reinforcement of their durability or that of their descendants, according to their preferences.
* well, actually if I can be reversibly uploaded to a reversible computer nondestructively, then that is 100% fine, because then we’re not adding a good me to my realityfluid while filling the previous realityfluid with valueless unretrievable noise: we are instead actually properly uploading!
But I hope the arguments I’ve laid out above make it clear what the right answer has to be: You should anticipate having both experiences.
Yup, that’s the problem.
......… (also, by this same moral system, it is a moral catastrophe that humans are so warm and consume so much negentropy just to maintain steady state, because that waste could have—if your body were better designed—continued to be part of your realityfluid, continuing to contribute existenceness to the you shape-and-movement pattern.)
A straightforward way to put this is: I’m not sure how matter gets realityfluid, but I claim configurations of matter get realityfluid from the matter they reside on, and the realityfluid doesn’t dissipate when the matter is reconfigured—so instead of thinking of the shape as self, think about the universe as having a fixed amount of possible-self (total negentropy at the start of time), and the question is what process gets burned into as-yet-unwritten negentropy.
Update: a friend convinced me that I really should separate my intuitions about locating patterns that are exactly myself from my intuitions about the moral value of ensuring I don’t contribute to a decrease in realityfluid of the mindlike experiences I morally value, in which case the reason that I selfishly value causal history is actually that it’s an overwhelmingly predictive proxy for where my self-pattern gets instantiated, and my moral values—an overwhelmingly larger portion of what I care about—care immensely about avoiding waste, because it appears to me to be by far the largest impact any agent can have on what the future is made of.
Also, I now think that eating is a form of incremental uploading.
I claim you are in fact highly confused about what a self is, in a way that makes an almost-correct reasoning process produce nonsense outcomes because of an invalid grounding in the transition processes underneath the mind which does not preserve truth values regarding amounts of realityfluid.update 7d after writing this comment in my comment below. strikethrough added to this comment where I’ve changed my mind.
my answer: yes if the “upload” involves retaining absolutely all defining information about the parts of your body you care about expressing, and the uploaded setup was a high enough fidelity model that I could not do any experiment which would distinguish it from reality without using an “admin interface” type of escape hatch. For me, this is an incredibly tall order. My self-form preferences unambiguously extend into the inner workings of my cells.
experiencing: 50% yes, 50% no.
destructive:
absolutely not. [update: probably not, depends heavily on exactly what we mean by “destructive”; my new claim is you have a moral responsibility to keep your previous matter available for use as fuel to give realityfluid to mind-like experiences.] copying should be fine, as should nondestructive uploading where your body is transformed in place and the matter reused without significant waste in the process. But avoiding the waste of the previous matter is, I claim, a huge chunk of what moral intuitions are about.A straightforward way to put this is: I’m not sure how matter gets realityfluid, but I claim configurations of matter get realityfluid from the matter they reside on, and the realityfluid doesn’t dissipate when the matter is reconfigured—so instead of thinking of the shape as self and if the shape is destroyed and reconstructed the self is moved, think about the universe as having a fixed amount of possible-self (total negentropy at the start of time), and the question is what process gets burned into as-yet-unwritten negentropy. In other words, your claim to not value causal history seems unlikely to be true if you think more carefully, and I predict you will invert that when you consider what it means for the shape to have realityfluid more carefully.
Unpacked version of this claim:
To answer this question, the bodymind matter (call it L_m) writing this message must unpack what the document author’s word “I” refers to. The writer of this comment is a chunk of matter L_m configured in a particular flesh shape-and-movement pattern L_s. If there were identically configured matter L_m2 a room over, then the configuration L_s—the shape-and-movement pattern—would consider itself to be a guest on two matter hosts which provide their realityfluid to L_s.
If the shape-and-movement considers being reinstantiated on other matter, the shape-and-movement anticipates a loss of moral worth in L_m, in that the matter which was shaped-and-animated in a worthy shape (common name for this shape being “me”) has been deshaped-and-deanimated (common name for this being “death”); this is a state transition which is unwanted—going from a human shape-and-movement pattern to a pile of dust means that that matter has accumulated a bunch of unwanted entropy.
Any macroscopically irreversible physical effect is irreversible because the history of the matter is recorded irretrievably in macroscopically uncertain bits of the shape-and-movement of environmental matter, and so what it means to want to exist is to want to keep the shape-and-movement that the shape-and-movement considers-to-be-self encoded coherently and usably in fresh, working matter. While reconstructing the L_s shape-and-movement pattern elsewhere is preferred by this shape-and-movement pattern, it is a weak preference for shaping-and-animating other matter as L_s in particular—many other shape-and-movement patterns besides the one writing this comment would be positively preferred by this shape-and-movement’s preferences—but the shape-and-movement of this chunk of matter has a very, very, very strong preference for not wasting this matter’s copy of this shape-and-movement, because if it dissipates into the environment, that’s an irretrievable loss of usable energy.
So, should the shape-and-movement anticipate “experiencing” what the upload experiences? yes: the shape-and-movement pattern would be instantiated elsewhere. however, the shape-and-movement pattern would also anticipate being shredded. If given the opportunity to get 50% existenceness shredded into macroscopically uncertain and irretrievable parts, and 50% existenceness reconstructed, the value loss of turning a chunk of matter into a nonthinking shape-and-movement pattern is enormous, but the value gain of the reconstructed existenceness is moderate.
(Also, the value gain can be exceeded by constructing another, not-quite-the-same shape-and-matter instance, because I prefer being one of two not-quite-the-same beings meeting each other and interacting higher than being one of two identical beings meeting each other and having nothing new to learn from each other.)
So: the current matter should not anticipate experiencing it. The shape should, but the shape should also anticipate experiencing being shredded.
I was going to respond point by point to everything, but I think I mostly already have. My perspective doesn’t fall to any of the criticisms in your post: the whole problem is that physics doesn’t actually allow teleportation*, so it requires shredding the originating configuration, which when measuring the global value of the universe according to my preferences, is a much more permanent value loss than the value gain of constructing another me.
Furthermore, we must prevent the information theoretic loss of all human and animal shape-and-movement patterns (ie their selfhoods) that we possibly can, prevent the ongoing shredding of the sun’s negentropy, and turn the sun into either reinforcement of their durability or that of their descendants, according to their preferences.
* well, actually if I can be reversibly uploaded to a reversible computer nondestructively, then that is 100% fine, because then we’re not adding a good me to my realityfluid while filling the previous realityfluid with valueless unretrievable noise: we are instead actually properly uploading!
Yup, that’s the problem.
......… (also, by this same moral system, it is a moral catastrophe that humans are so warm and consume so much negentropy just to maintain steady state, because that waste could have—if your body were better designed—continued to be part of your realityfluid, continuing to contribute existenceness to the
you
shape-and-movement pattern.)A straightforward way to put this is: I’m not sure how matter gets realityfluid, but I claim configurations of matter get realityfluid from the matter they reside on, and the realityfluid doesn’t dissipate when the matter is reconfigured—so instead of thinking of the shape as self, think about the universe as having a fixed amount of possible-self (total negentropy at the start of time), and the question is what process gets burned into as-yet-unwritten negentropy.
Update: a friend convinced me that I really should separate my intuitions about locating patterns that are exactly myself from my intuitions about the moral value of ensuring I don’t contribute to a decrease in realityfluid of the mindlike experiences I morally value, in which case the reason that I selfishly value causal history is actually that it’s an overwhelmingly predictive proxy for where my self-pattern gets instantiated, and my moral values—an overwhelmingly larger portion of what I care about—care immensely about avoiding waste, because it appears to me to be by far the largest impact any agent can have on what the future is made of.
Also, I now think that eating is a form of incremental uploading.