How Many of Me Are There?

Even if there were only 50 different memes you could have or not have, that's 2^50 possible combinations, which is 100000 of times the population of the earth. And in fact there are bajillions of memes out there, and absolutely no reason to think we've reduced the variation between people to under 50 memes - in fact this applies more strongly to modern people than medieval serfs, because peoples' experiences are so much more varied now. Thus everyone is almost certainly a separate person, even if we just look at their memes and not the strengths of their responses, or their memories, or their favorite foods, or their et cetera et cetera.

I would never have guessed that one of the side effects of the computational paradigm of mind would be a new form of proxy immortalism - by this I mean philosophies according to which you live on in your children, your race, your species, in the future consequences of your acts, or in your duplicates elsewhere in the multiverse. I suppose it's just another step beyond the idea that your copy is you, but it's still ironic to see this argument being made, given that it emerges from the same techno-conceptual zeitgeist which elsewhere is employed to urge a person not to be satisfied with living on in their children, their race, et cetera, but rather to seek personal survival beyond the traditional limits, because now it is finally conceivable that something more is possible.

Needless to say, I disagree profoundly with the idea that I "am" also anyone with whom I have some vague similarity. There's also a special appendix to my disagreement, in which I disagree specifically with the idea that Timeless Decision Theory has anything new to add here, except an extra layer of confusion. You don't need Timeless Decision Theory in order to identify with a group; identification with a group is not secretly a case of a person employing Timeless Decision Theory; and "acausal trade", as a phenomenon, is as real as "praying to God". Someone might engage in a thought process for which that is an accurate designation; and somewhere else in some other reality there might even be an entity which views itself as being on the other end of that relationship; but even if there is, it's a folie a deux, a combined madness. If someone in one insane asylum believes that he is the Emperor Napoleon, separated from his beloved Josephine, and if someone in another insane asylum believes that she is Josephine, separated from Napoleon, that doesn't validate the beliefs of either person, it doesn't make those beliefs rational, even if, considered together, the beliefs of those two people are mutually consistent. Acausal trade is irrational because it is acausal. It requires that you imagine, as your counterpart on the other side of the trade, only one, highly specific possible agent that happens to be thinking of you, and happens to respond to your choices in the way that you imagine, rather than any of the zillion other possible agents that would think of you but react according to completely different criteria.

If you do try to take into account the full range of agents that might be imagining you or simulating you, then you're no longer trading, you're just acting under uncertainty. There is a logic to the idea of acting as if you are - or, better, as if you might be - any of the possible entities which are your subjective duplicates (whose experience is indistinguishable from yours), but again, that's just acting under uncertainty: you don't know which possible world you're in, so you construct a probability distribution across the possibilities, and choose accordingly.

As for identifying with entities which are not your subjective duplicates but which share some cognition with you, where do you draw the line? My personal model of the hydrogen atom has something in common with Richard Feynman's; does that mean I should regard my decisions as Feynman's decisions?! I won't absolutely decry the practice of feeling kinship with others, even in remote times and places, far from it; but the moment we start to make this more than a metaphorical identification, a feeling of similarity, and start to speak as if I am you, and you are me, and all of us are one, we are sliding away from awareness of reality, and the fact, welcome or unwelcome as it may be, that I am not you, that we are distinct beings.

I would even say that, existentially, it is important for a person to realize that they are a separate being. You, and only you, will experience your life from inside. You have an interest in how that life unfolds that is not shared by anyone else, because they don't and can't live it for you. It is possible to contemplate one's existential isolation, in all its various dimensions, and then to team up with others, even to decide that something other than yourself is more important than you are; but if you do it that way, at least you'll be doing so in awareness of the actual relationship between you and the greater-than-you with which you identify; and that should make you more, not less, effective in supporting it, unless its use for you really is based on blinding you to your true self.

I don't wanna hijack this, but this post presents a fairly logical conclusion of a basic position I see on LW all the time.

Many people seem to identify themselves with their beliefs, memes and/or preferences. I find that very strange, but maybe my values are unusual in this regard.

For example, I don't want to see my preferences be fulfilled for their own sake, but so that I can experience them being fulfilled. If someone made a clone of me who wanted exactly the same things and succeeded at getting them, I wouldn't feel better about this. The very idea that my preferences have any meaning after my death seems absurd to me. Trying to affect the world in a way I won't personally experience is just as silly.

TDT might be a neat trick, but fundamentally I don't see how it could possible apply to me. There's exactly one entity like me, i.e. one that has this phenomenal experience. In other words, I care little about copying the data and a lot about this one running instance.

Is this really a (fairly extreme) value dissonance or am I misunderstanding something?

I think the most practical / accurate way of conceiving of individuality is through the connection of your perceptions through memory. You are the same person as 3 years ago, because you remember being that person (not only rationally, but on a deeper level of knowing and feeling that you were that person). Of course different persons will not share the memory of being the same person. So if we conceive of individuality in the way we actually experience individuality (which I think is most reasonable), there is not much sense in saying that many persons living right know are the same person, no matter how much they share certain memes. Even for an outside observer this is true, since people express enough of their memory to the outside world to understand that their memories form distinct life stories. It may be true to say that many persons share a cultural identity or share a meme space, but this does make them the same person, since they do not share their personal identity. So unless your AI is dumb and does not understand what individuality consists of it won't say that there are only thousands of people.

I might be true though that at some point in the future some people that have different memories right know will merge into one entity and thus share the same memory (if the singularity happens I think it is not that unlikely). Then we could say that different persons living right now might not be different persons ultimately, but they still are different persons right now.

Taboo "humans" and "individual". This post seems to be how many decision theoretically unique agents there are. You can also ask how many physical brains there are, how may "moral agents" there are, how much weight some group or brain should have in CEV, if disrupting a specific configuration of particles would count as "murder" by X utility function, etc.

Rather than seeing the population as being made up of more-or-less copies of individuals, a different approach would be to see each individual, including yourself as a sum of various patterns, some of which are longer-lived than others; and many of which change over time.

By "yourself" here I mean "the you that is thinking this thought right now", not "the four-dimensional extent of your lifetime" or some such.

For instance, one of the patterns that is an ingredient in "me" is the human genome, and specifically my genome, including any hereditary quirks I've inherited from my specific ancestors. This persists through lifetimes and reproduction; and this explains certain facts about me — such as that I have memories of bodily senses such as hunger and sexual arousal, which contribute to my genome's survival; but also such as that I have ten fingers and ten toes, as is typical for a human.

Another of the patterns that is an ingredient in "me" is the English language. This persists through different mechanisms than my genome: the imitative tendencies of human children; the teaching tendencies of human adults; and the economics of the English-speaking nations being favorable to immigrants (such as my German-speaking ancestors) learning English. The fact that I am having these thoughts in English is not a consequence of my genome; it is a consequence of my body being symbiotic with the English-language memeplex.

Yet another set of the patterns in "me" is the set of habits I have learned in my lifetime. I consider that skills are a form of habit. Many of these may persist only so long as I live; except insofar as I happen to teach them to others. Some of the things that I habitually do, such as writing computer code to solve problems, I would also find rewarding to teach to others; and so I am likely to intentionally contribute to those patterns' persistence — for instance by teaching people how to code. Other habits, such as certain fears and anxieties, I would rather prefer not to convey to others.

There are economic patterns, which are closely modeled by certain mathematics; I have a job, buy things, donate money in a way which participates in and reinforces a "capitalism" pattern. There are moral patterns, many of which are modeled by game theory. Some of these are carried on the genome (the capacity for empathy); some of them are carried on cultural replicators (the Golden Rule). I participate in and reinforce economic and moral patterns; and this in turn makes them more prevalent and persistent in the world. (A species of sociopaths could still study the mathematics of game theory, but would not implement Hofstadter's superrationality as much as humans do.)

There are patterns in common between humans and many other evolved organisms, such as sexual dimorphism; there are social patterns that depend on those, such as sex and gender roles. Certain facts about "me" are created by these patterns.

Saying that there is another copy of "me" somewhere in the world, in this vocabulary, means saying that there are two individuals at the same point in the configuration-space of the above sorts of patterns. This seems unlikely, since there are really quite a lot of patterns that I participate in. However, we may consider how close two points in configuration-space may be to consider them "almost the same" ...

Wait, since when was suicide considered more sinful than murder? Do you mean killing an in-group member vs. killing an out-group member?

Interesting idea though; I've never thought about myself an anything other than an individual despite knowing that I'm not ultimately unique in the grand scheme of things.

"I agree with Robin Hanson that if two instances of me exist, and one is terminated, I didn’t die, I simply got smaller." This reminds my a lot of Eliezer's crossover fanfic. You should check it out.

Suicide is considered more sinful than killing outsiders because suicide always reduces the size of the Meta-Person that the suicidee belonged to.

Huh.

For the last nearly 30 years, I see everybody else as a copy of myself. Another instance. Coincarnation, if you will.

I agree with Robin Hanson that if two instances of me exist, and one is terminated, I didn’t die, I simply got smaller.

I am not to sure about this idea. To the best of my knowledge I am a biological being existing a universe obeying some sort of physics related to quantum mechanics and general relativity. If there are multiple instances of me then it is probably due to reality being some kind of multiverse. Lets keep things simple and assume that it is a Tegmark Level I Multiverse. This implies that there are an infinite number of copies of me.

Next what are these copies likely to be like? One arguement is that they could be Boltzman brains. This requires there to be enough of a statistical fluctuation in the randomness of the universe to arrange all of the atoms into a brain that remembers reading this article and experiences being in the process of typing a reply. Highly unlikely. Much more likely is that a set of atoms or stuff in general in the far distance past were in such a configuration that it evolved into a configuration including me. I expect this to me more likely because the level of organisation required at that time was much less than the level required now. Now if all of these parts of the universe that contain me evolved from parts of the universe that had similar initial conditions then all of them require for example my mother and father to be in them, both to get my DNA right, and also to create the meories that I have of them. Similarly all the other people that I have met need to be in all of those locations so that I would have memories of them. Thus all of those infinite copies of me would live in a world just like my own.

Now, given all this, for me to be terminated means to die. Whatever it is that kills this instance of me probably exists in the environment of each of those infinite copies of me. Thus I would expect that the fate of all of those instances of me to be highly correlated. If this correlation is high enough (say unity) then being terminated means that my measure is reduced all the way to zero, which is a bit more then just getting smaller.