Her parents aren’t letting her go to college out of state, or so much as move out until she’s married. She can’t do anything to stop them; any fighting back will result in even worse conditions for her.
Overall I strongly agree with your post, but I’m confused about this example.
I don’t know all of the context of your friend’s situation, but you say “out of state” which makes me think that she lives in the US, in which case I don’t understand how her parents could prevent her from leaving home once she is an adult.
Are they...
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Using emotional manipulation, e.g. making it clear that they’ll be really mad or disappointed if she doesn’t comply? In that case, that sounds like a toxic situation that your friend should leave.
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Threatening to withhold funding and support that they would otherwise provide? This one is tough but it’s possible to go to college without being financially supported by your parents.
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Physically preventing her from leaving? Less common but I’m sure it happens. They can’t legally do this, so at this point, if she is a legal adult, she could get police involved to escort her out out of the property.
Thinking about identical brains as the same person is an interesting idea, and I think it’s useful for reasoning about some decision puzzles.
To anyone thinking about this idea, it has some important limitations. Don’t try to use it in domains where counting the number of individuals/observers is important. If you roll a die 100 times and it keeps coming up “6” then you should update towards it being a loaded die, even though there are infinite copies of every brain state experiencing every possibility of the die rolls. If you’re in a trolley problem where the five people on the track have identical brains, you should still pull the lever, or else utilitarian ethics don’t work (and if you’re going to bite the bullet that utilitarian ethics don’t work because of this, you have to also bite the bullet on reasoning about the world from your own observations not working, which it obviously does).
Here’s a Bostrom paper talking about this https://nickbostrom.com/papers/experience.pdf