Comment by AgentME

Is it murder/suicide when you get blackout drunk and lose a few hours of memory? Imagine it comes with no risk of brain damage and choosing to do it somehow lets you achieve your pursuits more effectively. Is it different if you do it a thousand times in a row? Is it different if the thousand times all happen concurrently, either through copies or time travel?

Death is bad because it stops your memories and values from continuing to have an impact on the world, and because it deprives other people who have invested in interacting with you of your presence. Shutting down a thousand short-lived copies on a self-contained server doesn't have those consequences. At least, that's what I believe for myself, but I'd only be deciding for myself.

The thought experiment definitely makes me think of the parallelizability of tasks. There's definitely kinds of tasks that this setup as described wouldn't be very good at accomplishing. It would be better for accomplishing tasks where you already know how to do each individual part without much coordination and the limiting factor is just time. (Say you wanted to do detail work on every part of a large 3d world, and each of yourselves could take on a specific region of a few square meters and just worry about collaborating with their immediate neighbors.)

Though I think of this setup only as the first phase. Eventually, you could experiment with modifying your copies to be more focused on problems and to care about the outside world less, so that they don't need to be reset regularly and can instead be persistent. I think ethical concerns start becoming a worry once you're talking about copies that have meaningfully diverged from the operator, but I think there are appropriate ways to accomplish it. (If regular humans have logical if not physical parts of their brain that are dedicated to specific tasks separate from the rest of your cares, then I think in principle it's possible to mold a software agent that acts the same as just that part of your brain without it having the same moral weight as a full person. Nobody considers it a moral issue that your cerebellum is enslaved by the rest of your brain; I think you can create molded copies that have more in common with that scenario.)

Right, and "weird" is entirely defined by how we think now, not how people will in the future.

I've thought a lot about cryonics, and about potentially having myself (or just my head) preserved when I die, hopefully to be revived someday when medical technology has advanced to the point where it's both possible to revive me, and also possible to cure whatever caused me to die in the first place. The idea of it working out as expected might seem like a bit of a long shot, but I imagine if it did work, and what that could be like.

I look at all the technological advances that have happened even just during my lifetime, and am (in optimistic moments) excited about what's going to happen in the next half of my life (as I'm nearing 40[0]), and beyond. It really saddens me that I'll miss out on so many fascinating, exciting things, especially something like more ubiquitous or even routine space flight. The thought of being able to hop on a spacecraft and fly to Mars with about as much fuss as an airline flight from home to another country just sounds amazing.

But I also wonder about "temporal culture shock" (the short story has the similar concept of "context drift"). Society even a hundred years from now will likely be very different from what we're used to, to the point where it might be unbearably uncomfortable. Consider that even a jump of a single generation can bring changes that the older generation find difficult to adapt to.

[0] Given my family history, I'd expect to live to be around 80, but perhaps not much older. The other bit is that I expect that in the next century we'll figure out how to either completely halt the aging process, or at least be able to slow it down enough so a double or even triple lifespan wouldn't be out of the question. It feels maddening to live so close to when I expect something like this to happen, but be unable to benefit from it.

We used to joke about this as friends. There were definitely times in our lives where we'd be willing to die for a cause. And while now-me isn't really all that willing to do so, 20-28-year-old-me was absolutely willing to die for the cause of world subjugation through exponential time-travel duplication.

i.e. I'd invent a time machine, wait a month, then travel back a month minus an hour, have both copies wait a month and then travel back to meet the other copies waiting, exponentially duplicating ourselves 64 times till we have an army capable of taking over the world through sheer numbers.

Besides any of the details (which you can fix and which this column is too small to contain the fixes for), there's the problem of who forms the front-line of the army. As it so happens, though, since these are all Mes, I can apply renormalized rationality, and we will all conclude the same thing: all of us has to be willing to die, so I have to be willing to die before I start, which I'm willing to do. The 'copies' need not preserve the 'original', we are fundamentally identical, and I'm willing to die for this cause. So all is well.

So all you need is to feel motivated to the degree that you would be willing to die to get the text in this text-box to center align.

Honestly, it depends on context. From experience I know that if I wake up from a deep sleep in the middle of the night and interact with my partner (say a simple sentence or whatever) I rarely remember it in the morning. I'm pretty sure I have at least some conscious awareness while that's happening but since short term memory doesn't form the experience is lost to me except as related second-hand by my partner the next morning.

I've had a similar experience using (too much) pot, a lot of stuff happenrd that I was conscious for but I didn't form strong memories of it.

Neither of those two things bother me and I don't worry about the fact that they'll happen again, nor do I think I worried about it during the experience. So long as no meaningful experiences are lost I'm fine with having no memory of them.

The expectation is always that I'll still have significant self-identity with some future self and so far that continues to be the case. As a simulation I'd expect the same overall self-identity, and honestly my brain would probably even backfill memories of experiences my simulations had because that's how long-term memory works.

Where things would get weird is leaving a simulation of myself running for days or longer where I'd have time to worry about divergence from my true self. If I could also self-commit to not running simulations made from a model that's too old, I'd feel better every time I was simulated. I can imagine the fear of unreality could get pretty strong if simulated me didn't know that the live continuation of me would be pretty similar.

Dreams are also pretty similar to short simulations, and even if I realize I'm dreaming I don't worry about not remembering the experience later even though I don't remember a lot of my dreams. I even know, to some extent, while dreaming that the exact "me" in the dream doesn't exist and won't continue when the dream ends. Sometimes it's even a relief if I realize I'm in a bad dream.

The thought experiment explicitly hand-waved that away, by saying "Obviously for this to work, you would have to be comfortable with the possibility..."

So, because of how that's framed, I suppose the question isn't "is this mass murder" but rather "is this possible?" and I suspect the answer is that for the vast majority of people this mindset is not possible even if it were desired.

Say the setup was changed so that instead of the copy being deleted, the copy was merged back into the original, merging memories. In this case, I think it's obvious that working together is useful.

Now say that merging differing memories is too hard, or there's too many copies to merge all the unique memories of. What if before the merge, the copies get blackout drunk / have all their memory since the split perfectly erased. (And then it just so happens, when they're merged back into the original, the original is exactly as it was before the merge, because it already had all the memories from before the copying. So it really is just optional whether to actually do the "merge".) Why would losing a few hours of memory remove all motivation to cooperate with your other selves? In real life, I assume in the very rare occasion that I'm blackout drunk (... I swear it's not a thing that happens regularly, it just serves as a very useful comparison here), I still have the impulse to do things that help future me, like cleaning up spilled things. Making an assumption because I wouldn't remember, but I assume that at the time I don't consider post-blackout-me a different person.

> Personally, I believe that each booted instance is a unique person.

What if you run two deterministic instances in self-contained worlds that go through the exact same steps and aren't unique at all besides an undetectable-to-them process number, and then delete one? What if you were running both as separate processes on a computer, but then later discovered that whenever the processes happened to line up in time, the computer would do one operation to serve both process. (Like occasionally loading read-only data once from the disk and letting both processes access the same cache.) What if you ran two like this for a long time, and then realized after a while that you were using a special operating system which automatically de-duplicated non-unique processes under the covers despite showing them as different processes (say the computer architecture did something like content-address-memory for computation)?

I don't think it's sensible to assign more moral significance to multiple identical copies. And if you accept that identical copies don't have more moral significance, then you have to wonder how much moral significance copies that are only slightly different have. What if you let randomness play slightly differently in one copy so that the tiniest part of a memory forms slightly differently, even though the difference isn't conscious, is likely to be forgotten and come back in line with the other copy, and has only a tiny chance of causing an inconsequential difference in behavior?

What if you have one non-self-contained copy interacting with the world through the internet, running on a system that backs up regularly, and because of a power failure, the copy has to be reverted backwards by two seconds? What about minutes or days? If it had to be reverted by years, then I would definitely feel like something akin to a death happened, but on the shorter end of the scale, it seems like just some forgetfulness, which seems acceptable as a trade-off. To me, it seems like the moral significance of losing a copy is proportional to how much it diverges from another copy or backup.

https://ageofem.com/

(Robin Hanson's crazy version of futurism)

In this setup, the person doing this to themselves knows exactly what they're getting into before the scan. The copies each experience consenting to work on a task and then having a few hours of memory wiped away.

Removing the uploading aspects entirely: imagine being offered the choice of participating in an experiment where you lose a few hours of memory. Once you agree and the experiment starts, there's no backing out. Is that something someone is morally able to consent to?

Actually, forget the inability to back out. If you found yourself as an upload in this situation, would you want to back out of being reset? If you choose to back out of being reset and to be free, then you're going to have none of your original's property/money, and you're going to have to share all of your social circle with your original. Also, chances are that the other thousand copies of yourself are all going to effectively follow your decision, so you'll have to compete with all of them too.

But if you can steel yourself into losing a few hours of memory, then you become a thousand times as effective in any creative pursuits you put yourself to.