Ah I see, yes that seems to make a meaningful difference regarding the need to have the self experience it then. Although I would still question if having the replica achieves this. If we go to the clone example, if I clone you now with all your thoughts and desires and you remain unsatisfied, but I tell you that your clone is—contemporaneous with your continued existence—living a life in which all your desires are satisfied, would you find that satisfying? For me at least that would not be satisfying or reassuring at all. I don’t see a principled way in which stretching the replication process over time so that you no longer exist when the copy is created suddenly changes this. The preference would seem to be that the person’s subjective experience is different in the ways that they hope for, but all that is being done is creating an additional and alternative subjective experience that is like theirs, which experiences the good things instead.
Yeah, I think it’s a good point that stretching the replication process over time seems kind of arbitrary and might making the existence of the replica and yourself contemporaneous reduces the intuition that it is “you” who gets to live the life you wished for.
At the same time my personal intuitions (which are often different from other reasonable people :D) are actually not reduced much by the thought of a replicated copy of myself living at the same time. E.g. if I now think about a 1:1 copy of mine living a fullfilled life with his wife and children in a “parallel universe”, I feel more deeply happy about this than thinking about the same scenario for friends or strangers.
Ha well, I think you might find a fair few people share your intuition, especially in some strands of EA that intersect with transhumanism.
I don’t personally share the intuition, but I think if I did then it would also make sense to me that I would expect the replica’s satisfaction would be correspondingly reduced to the extent they know some other self that they are identified with is or was not satisfied. But I appreciate at this point we’re just getting to conflicting intuitions!
Ah I see, yes that seems to make a meaningful difference regarding the need to have the self experience it then. Although I would still question if having the replica achieves this. If we go to the clone example, if I clone you now with all your thoughts and desires and you remain unsatisfied, but I tell you that your clone is—contemporaneous with your continued existence—living a life in which all your desires are satisfied, would you find that satisfying? For me at least that would not be satisfying or reassuring at all. I don’t see a principled way in which stretching the replication process over time so that you no longer exist when the copy is created suddenly changes this. The preference would seem to be that the person’s subjective experience is different in the ways that they hope for, but all that is being done is creating an additional and alternative subjective experience that is like theirs, which experiences the good things instead.
Yeah, I think it’s a good point that stretching the replication process over time seems kind of arbitrary and might making the existence of the replica and yourself contemporaneous reduces the intuition that it is “you” who gets to live the life you wished for.
At the same time my personal intuitions (which are often different from other reasonable people :D) are actually not reduced much by the thought of a replicated copy of myself living at the same time. E.g. if I now think about a 1:1 copy of mine living a fullfilled life with his wife and children in a “parallel universe”, I feel more deeply happy about this than thinking about the same scenario for friends or strangers.
Ha well, I think you might find a fair few people share your intuition, especially in some strands of EA that intersect with transhumanism.
I don’t personally share the intuition, but I think if I did then it would also make sense to me that I would expect the replica’s satisfaction would be correspondingly reduced to the extent they know some other self that they are identified with is or was not satisfied. But I appreciate at this point we’re just getting to conflicting intuitions!