It is much harder to motivate myself to exercise, for example, because it is a painful task with no reward in the near future.
When the reward is the reason you want to do something you don’t want to do, why do you care about the reward?
Imagine a man who lives on an island large enough to sustain him. In the distance, he can see other islands and has heard from passing ships that they hold great wonders, which sounds great. Problem is, he can’t motivate himself to do the work to build a raft and travel over because his island already has everything he needs. Then one day a fire wipes out his farms, leaving only whatever food he has stored away untouched. Now, assuming he cares about living, motivation to build that raft is a lot easier to find. The action (building the raft) and the reward (reaching another island) haven’t changed, but the reason he wants those things (curiosity --> not starving) has.
Back to exercise, if the reason you want the reward of getting stronger is because you’ve heard detached experiences from other people about how cool it is, it’s unlikely that’s going to be enough to motivate you. If, in your current situation, you don’t have any real desire to be stronger or healthier, say you’re healthy enough or have never needed more strength, the pain of exercise sounds crazy, why would someone subject themselves to it? Then a day comes where you experience some event which takes these abstract notion of strength and health and molds them into a clear, relevant goal. Maybe you were mugged and hated that feeling of being powerless, maybe someone close to you dies because they had weak lungs and you fear a similar fate, that link could come in many forms. But without the link, whether made through trauma, curiosity, or a goal, it’s not that you don’t care about something but rather you don’t even understand why you would want to care about something, which makes it very hard to bring yourself to do it.
This idea of finding something to care about and pursuing it is what the sequence I recommended talks about, but there’s a chance the angle it comes from won’t be helpful for you based on how you’ve described things. I’ve found the more ways something’s explained, the more likely one of them are to stick, so I hope this helps if the sequence doesn’t.
I’m not convinced by this. All you would need to determine the original is an accurate clock. When the teleporter copies EarthMe, time has to pass as the information is transfered to SpaceMe. If I’m EarthMe I expect to watch the clock function correctly, while SpaceMe should expect the clock to jump slightly as EarthMe’s last visual input of the clock is rewritten by SpaceMe’s first visual input.
Say Me1 decides to copy themself, creating Me2. We agree Me1 shouldn’t expect to experience Me1 and Me2′s experiences at the same time, but I don’t think Me1 should expect their listener to start listening to Me2 post-copy. Instead, I believe Me2 would recieve an identical listener to Me1, but the two listeners would be distinct (otherwise Me1 should expect to experience both minds simultaneously.)
The best analogy I can think of is as follows: You have a camera recording constant video. If you were to clone this camera exactly, you shouldn’t expect camera 1′s storage to start recording camera 2′s output, even if the two cameras are perfectly identical.