The Cloned-Consciousness-as-Continuous-Consciousness Fallacy
It&#x27;s an interesting problem, but I don&#x27;t feel like this page accomplished much besides calling a position he disagreed with a fallacy and using unexplained appeals to emotion.<p>&gt;To refute this, let’s conduct a thought experiment. Pretend that you can copy a human brain. There are ten copies of me. They are all individually conscious — perfect replicas that only diverge after the point when replication happened. Is it okay to kill five of these copies? No, of course not! Each one is a self-aware, intelligent mind, human in everything but body. The identicalness doesn’t change that.<p>The things that scare me about death are the ideas that my specific goals would be left unpursued, that my responsibilities would be abandoned, my friends would lose my friendship, and that my memories and experiences would lose their significance upon the world.<p>If an alien came to Earth with a perfect matter-duplicater (that I have reason to fully trust), duplicated me such that I&#x27;m not even sure which is the original, then remembers that he&#x27;s not allowed to use it on humans, and explains he needs to painlessly euthanize and disassemble one of me, I wouldn&#x27;t be particularly shaken up by it. Sure, I&#x27;d feel I was teased with a cool toy and possibility, but the only injury that has happened is in a way equivalent to a few seconds of memory loss. I&#x27;ve done worse to myself by drinking. There were no big life experiences lost or goals left unpursued.<p>---<p>Going a little further... if I were an AI or could somehow copy myself, I imagine I would frequently make short-lived copies to work together with to accomplish my goals. I as my copies would be told that I&#x27;m going to be removed in a few days; I think I could handle the idea of knowing the surviving-me is going to be amnesic to my several days of (probably barely)unique experiences in a world much closer to our goals.<p>In a world where everyone or all AIs could do the above, I imagine the minds who did the above would become much more successful in nearly all endeavors. Choosing not to do so would be choosing to fail, unless the strategy was made illegal. I struggle to fault the strategy morally given that it would be something done by a single consenting individual to themselves, though it does still sound a little weird to my instincts about how survival is supposed to work. If we encountered otherwise similar aliens which already worked that way, would we judge them, or only consider it an abomination when humans did it to themselves?<p>I&#x27;m a bit disappointed that I haven&#x27;t seen much sci-fi explore concepts like this.