Comment by jessedhillon
5 years ago
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.