My point is that if the black-box outputs continue to look like the same person, only more competent and less akratic, the burden of proof has shifted. The conservative cannot simply point to tissue loss and say “obviously death.” He has to explain why biological implementation deserves moral privilege over functional continuity.
I agree with your point about functional continuity. But the story doesn’t state that the wearer continues to look like the same person. In fact the only thing it says about the wearers as perceived by others (as opposed to the perception of the wearer themselves) is “The wearer lives an abnormally successful life, usually ending out as a rich and much-beloved pillar of the community with a large and happy family”.
If the neocortex, the part we usually associate with memory, abstraction, language, deliberation, and personality, has become vestigial, and yet the person continues to live an outwardly coherent human life, where exactly is the relevant information and computation happening?
There are many possible outwardly coherent human lives, even involving being rich, beloved, and having a happy family, that are not me any more than you (or for that matter a random person from the entirety of human existence) are.
The impression I got by reading the story is that by adopting the earring’s suggestions your mind gets shaped by it. Even if at every step it seems like following the suggestions is preferable to any other available alternative, it doesn’t follow that the wearer would endorse their future self’s desires or personality, and by the end it’s possible that indeed nothing is left of the original person, only a mechanism to carry out the earring’s decisions (which, sure, likely originate from something resembling a human (at the very least a good model of one), but not necessarily resembling the original wearer).
I agree with your point about functional continuity. But the story doesn’t state that the wearer continues to look like the same person. In fact the only thing it says about the wearers as perceived by others (as opposed to the perception of the wearer themselves) is “The wearer lives an abnormally successful life, usually ending out as a rich and much-beloved pillar of the community with a large and happy family”.
There are many possible outwardly coherent human lives, even involving being rich, beloved, and having a happy family, that are not me any more than you (or for that matter a random person from the entirety of human existence) are.
The impression I got by reading the story is that by adopting the earring’s suggestions your mind gets shaped by it. Even if at every step it seems like following the suggestions is preferable to any other available alternative, it doesn’t follow that the wearer would endorse their future self’s desires or personality, and by the end it’s possible that indeed nothing is left of the original person, only a mechanism to carry out the earring’s decisions (which, sure, likely originate from something resembling a human (at the very least a good model of one), but not necessarily resembling the original wearer).