Your transhuman copy is of questionable value to your meat self.

I see the pattern identity theory, where uploads make sense, as one that takes it as a starting point that you have an unambiguous past but no unambiguous future. You have moments of consciousness where you remember your past, which gives you identity, and lets you associate your past moments of consciousness to your current one. But there's no way, objective or subjective, to associate your present moment of consciousness to a specific future moment of consciousness, if there are multiple such moments, such as a high-fidelity upload and the original person, who remember the same past identity equally well. A continuity identity theorist thinks that a person who gets uploaded and then dies is dead. A pattern identity theorist thinks that people die in that sense several times a second and have just gotten used to it. There are physical processes that correspond to moments of consciousness, but there's no physical process for linking two consecutive moments of consciousness as the same consciousness, other than regular old long and short term memories.

There's no question that the upload and the original will diverge. If I have a non-destructive upload done on me, I expect to get up from the upload couch, not wake up in the matrix, old habits and all that. And there is going to be a future me who will experience exactly that. But if the upload was successful, there's also going to be a future me who will be very surprised to wake up staring at some fluorescent polygons, having expected to wake up on the upload coach. This is where the "no unambiguous future selves" stops being sophistry and starts paying rent for the pattern identity theorist. "Which one is the real me" is a meaningless question. All we have to go with are memories, and both of me will have my memories.

If you want to argue a pattern identity theorist out of it, you'll want to argue why there has to necessarily be more than just memory going on with producing the sense of moment-to-moment personal continuity, and why the physically unconnected moments of consciousness model can't be sufficient.

Usul, I'm one of the galactic overlords in charge of earth. I have some very bad news for you. Every night when you (or any other human) go to sleep your brain and body are disintegrated, and a reasonably accurate copy is put in their place. But, I have a deal for you. For the next month we won't do this to you, however after a month has passed we will again destroy your body and brain but then won't make any more copies so you will die in the traditional sense. (There is no afterlife for humans.) Do you agree?

Usul, I just made a virtual copy of you and placed it in a virtual environment that is identical to that of the real you. Now, presumably, you believe that despite the copy being identical to yourself, you are still in some way the privileged "real" Usul. Unfortunately, the copy believes the exact same thing. My question for you is this:

Is there anything you could possibly say to the copy that could convince it that it is, in fact, a copy, and not the real Usul?

I use this framing: If I make 100 copies of myself so that I can accomplish some task in parallel and I'm forced to terminate all but one, then all the terminated copies, just prior to termination, will think something along the lines of, "What a shame, I will have amnesia regarding everything that I experienced since the branching." And the remaining copy will think, "What a shame, I don't remember any of the things I did as those other copies." But nobody will particularly feel that they are going to "die." I think of it more as how memories propagate forward.

If I forked and then the forks persisted for several weeks and accumulated lots of experiences and varying shifts in perspective, I'd be more prone to calling the forks different "people."

To disagree with this statement is to say that a scanned living brain, cloned, remade and started will contain the exact same consciousness, not similar, the exact same thing itself, that simultaneously exists in the still-living original. If consciousness has an anatomical location, and therefore is tied to matter, then it would follow that this matter here is the exact matter as that separate matter there. This is an absurd proposition.

You conclude that consciousness in your scenario cannot have 1 location(s).

If consciousness does not have an anatomical / physical location then it is the stuff of magic and woo.

You conclude that consciousness in your scenario cannot have 0 locations.

However, there are more numbers than those two.

The closest parallel I see to your scenario is a program run on two computers for redundancy (like it is sometimes done in safety-critical systems). It is indeed the same program in the same state but in 2 locations.

The two consciousnesses will diverge if given different input data streams, but they are (at least initially) similar. Given that the state of your brain tomorrow will be different from the state of if today, why do you care about the wellbeing of that human, who is not identical to now-you? Assuming that you care about your tomorrow, why does it make a difference if that human is separated from you by time and not by space (as in your scenario)?

Consider two possible ways the world might be (or that you might suppose the world could be):

1. There is no afterlife for human beings. You live and you die and that's it.

2. There is no afterlife for human beings in the conventional sense, but people are reincarnated, without any possibility of remembering their past lives.

From the subjective point of view of conscious experience, these two situations are subjectively indistinguishable. Are they objectively distinguishable? That depends on the "metaphysics" behind the situation. Perhaps they are, and perhaps they aren't, and if they aren't, then we are not talking about two possible situations, but only one. But let's suppose they are, and that you find out that number 2 is true.

Do you really think you have any reason to be happier than if you found out that number 1 was true? There are certainly subjectively indistinguishable situations where I would prefer one to be objectively the case rather than the other, but it is not clear to me that this is one of them. In this particular case, I don't see why I should care. Likewise, as suggested by James Miller's comment, I don't see why I should care whether I am objectively the same person as I was yesterday, or if this is just a subjective impression which is objectively false. And if I don't care about that, then creating something that would remember being me is just as good as continuing to exist.

I'm with Usul on this whole topic.

Allow me to pose a different thought experiment that might elucidate things a bit.

Imagine that you visit a research lab where they put you under deep anesthesia. This anesthesia will not produce any dreams, just blank time. (Ordinarily, this would seem like one of those "blink and you're awake again" types of experiences).

In this case, while you are unconscious, the scientists make a perfect clone of you with a perfect clone of your brain. They put that clone in an identical-looking room somewhere else in the facility.

The scientists also alter your original brain just ever-so-slightly by deleting a few memories. Your original brain is altered no more than it originally is when, let's say, it has a slight alcohol hangover. But it is altered more than the clone, which has a perfect copy of your brain from before the operation.

Which body do you expect to wake up in the next morning? My intuition: the original with the slightly impaired memories—despite the fact that the pattern theory of identity would expect that one would wake up as the clone, would it not?

Of course, both will believe they are the original, and by all appearances it will be hard for outsiders who were not aware of the room layout of the building to figure out which one was the original. I don't care about any of those questions for the purpose of this thought-experiment.

It seems to me that there can be five possibilities as to what I experience the next morning:

1. The body of the (ever-so-slightly) impaired original.
2. The body of the perfect clone.
3. Neither body (non-experience).
4. Neither body (reincarnation in a different body, or in an entirely different organism with an entirely different sort of consciousness, with no memory or trace of the previous experiences).
5. Somehow, both bodies at once.

So if you explained this setup to me before this whole operation and offered to pay either the original or the clone a million dollars after the experience was finished, my pre-operation self would very much prefer that the original get paid that million dollars because that's the body I expect to wake up in after the operation.

Why? Well, we will wake up in our original bodies after dreaming or having a hangover that changes our brains a bit, no?

Are you telling me that, next time I go to sleep, if there happens to be a configuration of matter, a Boltzmann brain somewhere, that happens to pattern-match my pre-sleep brain better than the brain that my original body ends up with after the night, that my awareness will wake up in the Boltzmann brain, and THAT is what I will experience? Ha!

I have a very strong feeling that this has not happened ever before. So that means one of three things:

1. Boltzmann brains or copies of me somewhere else don't exist. The brain in my bedroom the next morning is always the closest pattern-match to the brain in my bed the previous night, so that's what my awareness adheres to all the time.
2. My feelings are fundamentally misleading (how so?)

Just think: if the pattern theory of identity is true, then here is what I logically expect to happen when I die:

My awareness will jump to the next-as-good clone of my original mental pattern. Whoever had the most similar memories to what my original brain had before it died, that's whose body and brain and memories I will experience after the death of my original brain.

In that case: no cryonics needed! (As long as you are prepared to endure the world's worst hangover where you lose all memories of your previous life, gain new memories, and basically think that you have been someone else all along. But hey: assuming that this new person has had a pretty good life up until now, I would say that this still beats non-existence!)

This also implies that, if you are a, let's say, Jewish concentration camp prisoner who dies, the closest pattern-match to your mind the next moment that you will experience will be...probably another Jewish concentration camp prisoner. And on and on and on! Yikes!

All your arguments really prove is that if your copy diverges from you, it's not you anymore. But that's only because once something happens to your copy but not to you, you know which one you are. The import of "you have no way of knowing which copy you are" disappears. Conversely, if you don't know which one you are, then both must be your consciousness, because you know you are conscious.

Edit: the last point is not strictly rigorous, you could know that one is conscious but not know which, but it seems to me that if you know every relevant detail of both are equal, and don't know which you are, then they both must be conscious (anti-zombie principle, whatever) and since you can't tell which you are, there's a sense in which you're "both". That probably has subtle objections, but nothing that bothers me right now. If anyone wants to argue against that, I'd be interested; I just didn't think this post was really doing that, based on the examples given where the copy diverges.

This sums up some of the problems of mind cloning nicely and readable. It also adds your specific data point that you do not care about the other selves as much as about yourself. I most liked this point about the practical consequences:

Personally, I don't know that I care about that copy. I suppose he could be my ally in life. He could work to achieve any altruistic goals I think I have, perhaps better than I think that you could. He might want to fuck my wife, though. And might be jealous of the time she spends with me rather than him, and he'd probably feel entitled to all my stuff, as would I be vice versa.

But your post falls short in not making some clear distinctions. It doesn't differentiate between copies yo do and don't interact with (the above quote vs. Omega-style simulations). It also mixes philosophical aspects with individual and practical aspects and it is not clear for me how these are meant to explain/inform each other.

The book to read is Reasons and Persons by Derek Parfit.

Would a slow cell by cell, or thought by thought / byte by byte, transfer of my mind to another medium: one at a time every new neural action potential is received by a parallel processing medium which takes over? I want to say the resulting transfer would be the same consciousness as is typing this but then what if the same slow process were done to make a copy and not a transfer? Once a consciousness is virtual, is every transfer from one medium or location to another not essentially a copy and therefore representing a death of the originating version?

I would follow this line of questioning. For example, say someone does an incremental copy process to you, but the consciousness generated does not know whether or not the original biological consciousness has been destroyed, and has to choose which one to keep. If it chooses the biological one and the biology has been destroyed, bad luck you are definitely gone. What does your consciousness, running either just on the silicon, or identically on the silicon and in the biology, choose ?

Let's say you are informed that there is 1% chance that the biological version has been destroyed. Well, you're almost certainly fine then, you keep the biological version, the silicon version is destroyed, and you live happily ever after until you become senile and die.

On the other hand, say you are informed that the biological version has definitely been destroyed. On your current theory, this means that that the consciousness realises that it has been mistaken about its identity, and is actually only a few minutes old. It's sad that the progenitor person is gone, but it is not suicidal, so it chooses the silicon version.

At what point on the 1% to 100% slider would your consciousness choose the silicon version ?

(Hearing the though-experiment of incremental transfer (or alternatively duplication) was one of the things that changed my mind to pattern-identity from some sort of continuity-identity theory. I remember hearing an interview with Marvin Minsky where he described an incremental transfer on a radio program).

It is evading the question, but I think it is worth considering some alternative questions as well. They may be adequate for making decisions and predicting others' behavior.

Many people talk about achieving immortality through their children. They might prefer personal immortality, but they also care very much about their children, too. For example, while Robin Hanson expresses interest in "living" for thousands of years via cryonics, when he puts a number on it, he evades the controversial question of personal identity and defines success by

10. Such sims of you are as worthy as your kid of your identifying with them.

(to which he assigns 80-90%, like the other components)

There might be some incomplete separation on whether you truly think of memories not being part of conciousness. Lets say that we keep your "awareness" intact but inject and eject memories out of it. lets do so in a cyclical manner in that you remember every other day there being your "odd day memories" and "even day memories". Now if ask you about what you did yesterday you should not be able to answer with knowledge (you might guess but whatever). Can we still coherently hold that you are still just 1 awareness with 2 sets of memories? Or have you infact become two awarenesses?

We could then do a information split where every half a second your brain has only access to ears and memory set 1 and the other half to eyes and memory set 2. Are you still 1 or 2 awarenesses? How about if we run those in parallel so that ears is connected to memory set 1 and eyes in memory set 2 so there is no switching but no crossover.

If you were a upload we could have your "ear module" on one side of the brain and the "eye module" ont he other side of the brain. Suppose there is a wire connecting them so that the whole is isomorphic to your human based cognitition (I don't now what information would be transferred over the wire but parring ping times it should be doable somehow (and that migth be overcomeable by using something faster than neurotransmitters)). You should be 1 awareness now right? Now if we cut the wire only the transfer of information should be blocked and no "awareness" removed (those are supposedly in the black boxes). How many awarenesses are you with the cord cut? You won't be symmetric (ambigity of english pronouns works great here) but wouldn't the cord cutting be equilvalent to a software separation of forbidding memory crossover?

Then there is the case of the sheet brains of (Eborians?) form the Elizier texts. Suppose that you are implemented in hardware where each wire has a subsection that divivides them into two. While the subsection is in the "open" state it allows electrons to freely pass over. However when it is in the "close" state the electrons stay at their own sides. In "open" it functions as 1 wire and in "close" as 2 wires. When we transition from open to close the divider in effect makes two separate but identical circuits that should stay in synch. However have we doubled the amount of awarenesses? What is the difference in engaging the subsection and building an identical circuitry next to the old one?

If you move from "close" to "open" does it synch the (possibly 2) awareness(es) or does it fuse them into 1?

There are possibly quite real world analogs to these conditions. Its hard to remember your dreams and in the dreams its hard to remember you were going to sleep just hours ago. And people have been lobotomized and atleast one such lobotomized person on the basis of a brainscan answer oppositely based on lobe to the question "do you believe in God?" (comparable to the polygraph standard of "honest") (I remember someone talking about making a joke about it how it makes a puzzle for theoligians as in whether the person fullfills the "beliefs in god" as in whether he is going to hell or heaven)

Consider sleep. The consciousness that goes to sleep ends. There is a discontinuity in perceived time. In the morning, the wakening brain ...

[...] will be capable of generating a perfectly functional consciousness, and it will feel as if it is the same consciousness which observes the mind which is, for instance, reading these words; but it will not be. The consciousness which is experiencing awareness of the mind which is reading these words will no longer exist.

You cease to exist every night. Indeed, there are all sorts of disruptions to the continuity and integrity of consciousness, ranging from distraction to coma to seizures to dissociative drugs. But people who experience these still care about their future selves. Why? Are they in error to do so?

My point here is that we can argue "this consciousness ceases to exist" with about as much strength for sleep as for more exotic processes. The difference is social and psychological, not metaphysical: we are accustomed to sleep, and to treating the consciousness who is born in the morning as the same consciousness who died the night before. It makes sense socially to do so; it is adaptive to do so; it is certainly more conducive to an intuitive understanding of things like memory.

But sameness — identity — is pretty darn tricky. Electrons don't have it; where does it come from?

I'd argue that a branch of me is still me, in many meaningful ways. This is true for the many-worlds interpretation, where the universe branches, and for multiple simultaneous mes from mechanical copies.

After the copy, my meatself and my electronic self(-ves) will diverge, and will be different entities who only care about each other as others, not as selves. But that's true of cross-temporal and cross-universe entities that have a direct causal relationship as well. I care less about an alternate-world me than about the me I'm currently indexing. I care less about any specific future-me based on how distant it is from my current experiencing.

My expounding of the pattern identity theory elsewhere in the comments is probably a textbook example of what Scott Aaronson calls bullet-swallowing, so just to balance things out I'm going to link to Aaronson's paper Ghost in the Quantum Turing Machine that sketches a very different attack on standard naive patternism. (Previous LW discussion here)

Why do you attach any value whatsoever to a "consciousness" that cannot think, feel, remember, or respond? Your "consciousness", so defined, is as inanimate as a grain of sand. I don't care about grains of sand as ends-in-themselves, why would you?

Be clear that when you say you are conscious, it cannot be this "consciousness" that motivates the statement, because this "consciousness" cannot respond, so the non-conscious parts of your mind cannot query it for a status check. A simple neural spike would be a response, we could watch it on an fMRI.

A scenario not mentioned: my meat self is augmented cybernetically. The augmentations provide for improved, then greatly improved, then vast cognitive enhancements. Additionally, I gain the ability to use various robotic bodies (not necessarily androids) and perhaps other cybernetic bodies. My perceived 'locus' of consciousness/self disassociates from my original meat body. I see through whatever eyes are convenient, act through whatever hands are convenient. The death of my original meat body is a trauma, like losing an eye, but my sense of self is uninterrupted, since its locus has long since shifted to the augmentation cloud.

I define consciousness as a passively aware thing, totally independent of memory, thoughts, feelings, and unconscious hardwired or conditioned responses. It is the hard-to-get-at thing inside the mind which is aware of the activity of the mind without itself thinking, feeling, remembering, or responding. The demented, the delirious, the brain damaged all have (unless those brain structures performing the function of consciousness are damaged, which is not a given) the same consciousness, the same Self, the same I and You, as I define it, as they did when their brains were intact. Dream Self is the same Self as Waking Self to my thinking. I assume consciousness arises at some point in infancy. From that moment on it is Self, to my thinking.

Thought experiment for you, most of which may actually be physically possible:

Imagine that you went to sleep and someone anesthetized one hemisphere of your brain. Ignore any practicalities like interruptions to your heart and breathing, lets assume whatever medical support needed is provided.

"you" wake up running on only your right hemisphere.

This is possible and it happens to people who've had a Hemispherectomy. Is that consciousness you? it has a continuous line from your former self.

Next, you're put back to sleep and the other half of your brain is anesthetized.

"you" wake up running on only your left hemisphere with no memory of waking up as the right-hemisphere you (since any memories are in the right hemisphere). Left hemisphere you has no continuous line of consciousness with right hemisphere you that was awake a little while ago. There is no continuous line from that former self. They're running on 2 different chunks of hardware next to each other.

They could even communicate through letters or recordings. Should right and left hemisphere you care about each other beyond taking care of the body?

Should it matter that at some future point they might be merged back together into one?

What if they're reasonably sure they'll never be allowed to merge back into whole-brain you?

Sophie Pascal's Choice: yes. If it were an easy, painless death, the required reward would probably have to be on the order of about ten dollars, to make up for the inconvenience to my time. If it were not a painless death, I'd probably require more, but not a huge amount more.

Suppose I'm destructively uploaded. Let's assume also that my consciousness is destroyed, a new consciousness is created for the upload, and there is no continuity. The upload of me will continue to think what I would've thought, feel what I would've felt, choose what I would've chosen, and generally optimize the world in the way I would've. The only thing it would lack is my "original consciousness", which doesn't seem to have any observable effect in the world. Saying that there's no conscious continuity doesn't seem meaningful. The only actual observation we could make is that the process I tend to label "me" is made of different matter, but who cares?

I think a lot of the confusion about this is treating consciousness as an actual entity separate from the process it's identified with, which somehow fails to transfer over. I think that if consciousness is something worth talking about, then it's a property of that process itself, and is agnostic toward what's running the process.

The idea that "forward facing continuity of consciousness" is tied to a particular physical structure in your brain has been debunked for a long time, for example via incremental replacement of neurons one at a time by robotic neurons which can then have their function distributed over a network.

E.g.

If consciousness has an anatomical location, and therefore is tied to matter, then

is a false assumption, consciousness doesn’t necessarily have an anatomical location.

For previous discussion of issues related to personal identity on LW see these posts, with references and comments:

• The Anthropic Trilemma
• The I-Less Eye
• An attempt to dissolve subjective expectation and personal identity

I actually don't endorse a lot of these posts' content, but it's more efficient to work from a common background. Being more specific in your questions or statements could also push against the kind of beside-the-point responses you got to this post. For example, a lot of discussion of identity has problems with using words in unclear sense or with unclear significance for the arguments, words such as "same", "consciousness", "copy", "anticipation", etc.