Subjective Anticipation and Death

Could we please not adopt the "tl;dr" thing? Just cast the abstract in italics, and shift it to the right.

I would now like to introduce the term mind-moment. I´m not sure quite how to define that, it may have to mean a single plank-time snapshot of a mind, or it might be as much as a couple weeks.

The term-of-art in the philosophy of personal identity literature is "person-stage".

But the problem is that my use of the word I is incoherent - the ¨me¨ that experiences those new things, that knows more than I do, is not me.

You haven't actually shown any incoherence. What you've shown is that we can think of the lives of persons as a series of numerically distinct but psychologically continuous stages. But the word "I" may not refer to person-stages but to the whole person of which those stages are parts or tokens. What it means for "you to die" is for there to be no more person-stages psychologically continuous with your current person-stage. We can still use the same vocabulary, more or less. This goes for any object that changes over time. My Venus Fly Trap isn't numerically identical with the thing that was in my kitchen yesterday, but they're still the same plant.

Which mind-moment should be created? Are we obligated to create both? What if there are a million possible mind-moment successors? Are we obligated to create all of them?

Why is this a "should" question? No. Still no.

Also, are we obligated to create on the best/happiest/most fulfilled successor mind-moments? It might seem so in a classical universe, but in many worlds, wouldn´t doing so result in horendous duplication of effort?

Explain.

If you've not read Derek Parfit's Reasons and Persons, you should; he discusses this and related topics.

but it is fairly obvious that Little Lucas isn't around anymore.

You appear to have "solved" the bulk of the problem by assuming it away. If you carve a statue from a stone, the stone continues to exist. As the earth slowly gains mass due to the accretion of interstellar dust, it remains itself. There's a very meaningful sense in which any tree or other living organism is continuous. There's no doubt that the current Lucas is different from Young Lucas, but that could be (and basically has been) accomplished by modification and growth of Young Lucas.

I think the human mind is predisposed to think in terms of discrete people identities (either one person, one identity, or one person, one series of discrete identities), and has trouble comprehending this type of partial change. Thus, I think that, "Is young Lucas dead?" is a wrong question.

This interpretation is interesting and does seem to have merit. I suppose that from an evolutionary perspective, it is inevitable that any being advanced enough to have a concept of self would also identify its successor mind moment with that self.

This interpretation also complicates ethics. Traditionally, the way one treats others is expected to be at least quasi-utilitarian in nature, but providing for one's own future prosperity is generally considered a question of wisdom rather than morals. However, given that a person and his future mind moment are merely similar entities connected by a near-continuous transformation, rather than being the same entity, it would seem that there must be a symmetry between the moral implications of a person's treatment of others and of his own future.

Edit: Also, quantum suicide only works as intended if the mind is terminated within one mind-moment-span of the time in which triggering of the quantum suicide device becomes inevitable. Otherwise, it denies a successor to at least one mind moment.

It´s not that I don´t want to die, it´s that I want there to, in the future, exist happy, fulfilled mind-moments that remember being me.

Do you consider amnesia as bad as death?

I said basically the same thing in the sl4 IRC room ages ago, and yudkwosky disagreed and said he still believed in the thread of conciousness, and I asked why, and he said he was too busy to explain.

http://academicearth.org/lectures/body-theory-personality-theory I want to say something in the way of explanation, but the relevance is self-explanatory.

For what it's worth, this is exactly the Buddhist principle of "no-self", which, by my understanding, is a specific case of sunyata, the Mahayana Buddhist doctrine of "emptiness." Interestingly, sunyata seems to be equivalent or very similar to the notion of the Mind Projection Fallacy:

"According the Madhyamaka, or Middle Way philosophy which is central to Mahayana Buddhism, ordinary beings misperceive all objects of perception in a fundamental way. The misperception is caused by the psychological tendency to grasp at all objects of perception as if they really existed as independent entities. This is to say that ordinary beings believe that such objects exist 'out there' as they appear to perception...

Sunyata - translated as Emptiness - is the concept that all objects are Empty of svabhava, they are Empty of 'inherent existence'."

I would now like to introduce the term mind-moment. I'm not sure quite how to define that, it may have to mean a single plank-time snapshot of a mind, or it might be as much as a couple weeks. I doubt that what I mean by this is anywhere near the upper bound I just gave, a more likely upper bound might be about a second - about the time it takes to notice something and realize something is going on.

I used to think that "mind-moments" was a good way to view personhood , but now I'm rather rather sceptical about it, because it's somewhat like trying to explain an objects movement in terms of one coordinate with one temporal coordinate; it wont tell you anything about the movement of the object. Similarly one "mind-moment" does not do anything, does not think, does not understand, does not react. I like to view it more like a process, not as moments in time. But hey my intuition might just be broken.

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