Comment by pavel_lishin
5 years ago
I think the difference is that when I start drinking with the intention or possibility of blacking out, I know that I'll wake up and there will be some continuity of consciousness.
When I wake up in a simworld and asked to finally refactor my side project so it can connect to a postgres database, not only do I know that it will be the last thing that this one local instantiation experiences, but that the local instantiation will also get no benefit out of it!
If I get blackout drunk with my friends in meatspace, we might have some fun stories to share in the morning, and our bond will be stronger. If I push some code as a copy, there's no benefit for me at all. In fact, there's not much incentive for me to promise my creator that I'll get it done, then spend the rest of my subjective experience trying to instantiate some beer and masturbating.
I really enjoyed the exploration of this premise in the novel "Kil'n People" by David Brin.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kiln_People
The premise is quite similar to "uploads" except the device is a "golem scanner", which copies your mind into a temporary, disposable body. Different "grades" of body can be purpose made for different kinds of tasks (thinking, menial labour etc).
The part that resonates with your comment is around the motivation of golems, who are independently conscious and have their own goals.
In the novel, some people can't make useful golems, because their copies of themselves don't do what they want. There's an interesting analogy with self control; that is about doing things that suck now, to benefit your future self. This is similar, but your other self exists concurrently!
Key to the plot though is the "merge" step; you can take the head of an expiring golem, scan it, and merge it's experiences with your own. This provides some continuity and meaning to anchor the golem's life.
It seems like you may not see the local instantiation and the original to share the same identity. If I was a local instantiation that knew the length of my existence was limited (and that an original me would live on), that doesn't mean I'd act different than my original self in rebellion. I'd see myself and the original as the same person whose goals and future prospect of rewards are intertwined.
Like another commentor pointed out, I'd see my experience as a memory that would be lost outside the manifestation of my work. It would be nice to have my memories live on in my original being, but not required.
This concept of duplicated existence is also explored in the early 2000s children's show Chaotic (although the memories of one's virtual self do get merged with the original in the show): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chaotic_(TV_series)
There are plenty of situations where people do things for benefits that they personally won't see. Like people who decide to avoid messing up the environment even though the consequences might not happen in their lifetime or to themselves specifically. Or scientists who work to add knowledge that might only be properly appreciated or used by future generations. "A society grows great when old men plant trees whose shade they know they shall never sit in". The setup would just be the dynamic of society recreated in miniature with a society of yourselves.
If you psyche yourself into the right mood, knowing that the only remaining thing of consequence to do with your time is your task might be exciting. I imagine there's some inkling of truth in https://www.smbc-comics.com/comic/dream. You could also make it so all of your upload-selves have their mental states modified to be more focused.
If such a technology existed, it would definitely require intense mental training and preparation before it could be used. One would have to become the most detached buddhist in order to be the sort of person who, when cloned, did not flip their shit over discovering that the rest of their short time alive will only to further the master branch of their own life.
It would change everything about your personality, even as the original and surviving copy.
I really think that if you truly believed your identity is defined only by things you share in common with the original, then you as the upload would have no fear of deletion.
Most people define identity in part by continuity of experience, which is something that wouldn't be in common with the original, but I think this is just superstition. It's easy to imagine setups that preserve continuity that come out with identical results to setups that fail to preserve continuity (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26234052), which makes me suspicious of it being valuable. I think continuity of experience is only an instrumental value crafted by evolution to help us stay alive in a world that didn't have copying. I think if humans evolved in a world where we could make disposable copies of ourselves, we wouldn't instinctively value continuity of experience -- we would instead instinctively value preserving the original and ensuring a line of succession for a copy to take the place of the original if something happened to the original -- and that would make us more effective in our pursuits in a world with copying.
Now if I was the upload, and I learned that my original had died (or significantly drifted in values away from myself) and none of my other copies were in position to take over the place in the world of my original, then I would worry about my mortality.