Comment by visarga | Hacker News Reader

Comment by visarga | Hacker News Reader

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I don't think that "I" from 10 years into the future is the same as the "I" from 10 years ago. The accumulation of small changes is like a "small death" that comes every day. We forget most of everything, we are thrust in different situations, and those situations make ourselves effectively different because they trigger our abilities in a different way.

Fighting death is more about the immortality of the body. The mind is recycled much sooner. The "I" is created by the mind anew every moment. Even sleep is like a mini-death, because we "don't exist" for a short time, then we continue existing again.

But, of course, if we actually get to cheat death and live forever, a new kind of life opens up. If we can back up our minds and then upload them into a young body or in a virtual reality, then we can also be more like a character in a game. We could have many "lives", we could have "save checkpoints", we could restore from previous points, or fork and create more of us. In fact life would not be the same as it was during "linear life". Would a meta-life such as this be the same as immortality? I don't think it would. It would be a completely different thing altogether.

Derek Parfit (a philosopher), in "Reasons and Persons", considers many of the cases you hint at, as well as few more tricky ones (such as progressively replacing your brain cells with someone else's, or splitting someone's brain [1] and putting the two halves in different bodies). He ultimately argues for two points:

1. Personal identity is basically just psychological continuity (physical continuity doesn't matter). That psychological continuity needs to be "non-branching" -- identity has to be one-to-one, and so if there's a clone of you walking around, it makes more sense to say neither of you are "you" than to say "both" are.

2. As the weirdness in (1), suggests, Parfit doesn't think personal identity matters very much. Self-interest (as opposed to altruism) seems a little silly when you linger on who exactly you care about, especially in the face of blended-brains and split-brains.

If we were immortal but had finite memory, Parfit would argue that personal identity is more of a sliding window. As we forgot our ancient memories, we would lose touch with that part of ourselves, eventually becoming totally distinct persons over time. Which, of course, sounds a lot like the actual human condition.

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Split-brain

Point 1 there sounds like nothing but convention.

Or you know the universe is a simulation and you and I are already temporary characters.

Let's say that you believe (or know) that. What difference does it make? You still have no access to the base reality, and you still have to make your life around the rules of this one. In fact, how does it change a single thing and/or emotion in your life?

For example: I go to work and do some project there. Let's say that I now found out that there is a base reality, and my work won't matter in the base reality, that there it's all like a video game. It doesn't change anything for me, does it? I only do the work because I enjoy doing things with my mind, because I enjoy the experience. I also know that my work will cause changes in this reality (I have a lot of past evidence for this), like give me a paycheck or change some part of the world in some way, and so I can plan according to this and how the things I do will affect other parts of the reality, including other people. All that still happens even if it's a simulation.

So why would you ever want to even think about if it's a simulation or not? There is still no way to go to the "base" reality.

Also, if it's simulation, wouldn't you want to make your life here longer? (Or are you just assuming that when you die, all your experience will somehow travel with you into some base reality that you have no way of accessing now? )

>Let's say that you believe (or know) that. What difference does it make? You still have no access to the base reality, and you still have to make your life around the rules of this one. In fact, how does it change a single thing and/or emotion in your life?

Would be amazing if it was a simulation. You would be able to hack this reality, like in movie The Matrix, and perform hacks that seems like miracles, for example, opening the sea, walking on water, and turning water into wine.

>Also, if it's simulation, wouldn't you want to make your life here longer?

If it's a simulation, you can just restore your HP.

The notion of our reality being an emulation feels analogous to the "we're first; we're few; we're fucked" notion of whether there's alien life. Someone has to create the emulator, if an emulator indeed exists (at any given time). Maybe that will be us.

Sure, but that doesn't mean we live in base reality. Simulations running simulations!

Something, something... Rick and Morty

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