“It’s classified. I could tell you, but then I’d have to kill you.” Top Gun, 1986 Today, secrets are lumpy. You might know some info that would help you persuade someone of something, but reasonably fear that if you told them, they’d tell others, change their opinion on something else, or perhaps just get discouraged. Today, you can’t just tell them one implication of your secret. In the future, however, the ability to copy and erase minds (as in am em scenario) might make secrets much less lumpy – you
They are most likely doing it because they consider both copies the same person, and don't think killing one is murder. They'd consider it more like a memory wipe.
I'm reminded of a scene in HP:MoR, where a character noticed some similarities between memory wipes and murder. That may be a reference to this. I know Eliezer disagrees with Robin on this point.
> No, they aren't. The second law of thermodynamics forbids it.
The second law of thermodynamics doesn't work that way. In fact, it exists because the laws of physics are reversible. The information has to go somewhere, and if it gets too complex for you to keep track of, you call it "heat" and ignore it.
In fact, if you flip charge and parity, the laws of physics will run backwards. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wi...
That doesn't seem to address the point. If you perfectly erase a person's memories, it's the same as deleting them and restarting from a backup, which is itself the same as just branching and quickly deleting. At what point does it become killing, and why?
I should add that that does gloss over one possibility. It could be that going from imperfect deletion to perfect deletion is the point that they're killed.
"The EM is a sentient being, if he requests to not be destroyed that request has to be granted."
That issue comes up more in other stuff that Robin's written, but not really here. Nobody will volunteer if they're not okay with what may or may not be death. If you're going to be duplicated a bunch until your knowledge isn't useful, then most of you is destroyed, you have quite some time to change your mind. If someone's just going to explain it to you, it doesn't matter so much.
"The only way around this is to lift the prohibition of murder (which means anyone can legally kill you too) or to have some law that discriminates artificial persons from biological persons (which is ethically disgusting)."
It's a question of defining a person. If you consider all branches to be the same person, or all branches less than x apart, then it's not murder to prune the tree. It's only murder to destroy it entirely. If there's only one instance left, it's not murder.
Personally, I don't consider any of them the same person. That is, you now and you two seconds from now are two different people. Death doesn't mean much from that perspective. It's just like someone standing at the end of a line, except it's temporal instead of lateral.
I think you and IMASBA are both wrongly attributing a metaphysical essence to personhood. You say it's a configuration of information; IMASBA says its the potentially distinct possibility of experience (itself reducible to a different information-based account, in theory). But personhood has no essence, being a family-relations concept, and the questions raised are ones of psychology rather than metaphysics: how would a future society think about the relationship OR what is the least dissonant extension of our present attitudes, my position being that Hanson might be right about what how speculative society would end up moralizing, but he's wrong to extol it in terms of present morality. (The key concept is wrongful taking rather than personhood.)
To IMASBA, if killing the EM is necessarily murder, then StarTrek teleportation is necessarily suicide. And some people (say, believers in immaterial souls) might think of it that way. (But no morality holds that the way very idiosyncratic people think about something is what makes it "right.")
(A personal example: Of course I don't believe in an afterlife, but I can understand that someone would think of their "soul" in heaven as being "them." On IMASBAS account, it would make no sense. But I find I have no personal empathy for the Hindu account, on which my reincarnation continues my identity: I say to myself, why should I even care about that entity? I conclude that culture is important in the social construction of personhood.)
ADDED. I think the reasons I have zero interest in cryonics is that I don't identify the future entity as myself. (Actually, I think it requires something like a desperate wish to enable one to make the equation.) I don't distinguish the entity from myself based on the physical continuity (as do Bryan Caplan and Donald Davidson) but on the fact that I identify myself with the continuity of my projects, which will be senseless on "my" resurrection. (The Christian heaven is tailored to allow continuing one's mortal projects.) I find I don't give a damn if a version of myself exists in the far future.
When Robin has occasionally argued the point, I inferred that he, too, has a metaphysical view of personhood (as consisting of the information in a person's brain). But in sci-fi scenarios (such as Swampman), when the congeries of properties contributing to the sense of personhood come apart, there is really no fact of the matter whether it's the same person. Investigation by philosophers of the supposed metaphysics of personhood was warranted on their assumption (usually based on moralism) that personhood is a useful philosophical primitive, but those investigations have proven it isn't.
"I say, what good is it to me that there's a copy of me out there?"
What good is it to you that there will be a version of you tomorrow, i.e. that you don't die in your sleep tonight?
If you don't identify with your copies, you have no reason to identify with your future versions either.
"Of course there is something to complain about."
Note that you didn't show why.
You just implicitly conceded the point about the numbers of lifeforms going down, even though you used it earlier to boost your intuition that shutting down a local copy is equal to murder.
"Would you acquit a woman if she birthed more children than she killed people?"
Now you're just ignoring all the previous arguments about identity and loss of information.
"It doesn't make getting shot in the face any less painful."
Shutting down an em process can be painless.
I'd say the discussion has run its course; all relevant arguments have been made, some more than once.
"A person is a system, composed of components, defined and identified by properties - all of which can be copied."
Right, but they are still individuals because they can experience different things at the same time. It doesn't matter that they both have an equally strong claim to the same name, you can still shoot one in the face without the other one ever noticing.
"The number of lifeforms has nothing to do with it at all; you could spawn over 9000 identical copies while you delete one, and people with your confusion would still complain."
Of course there is something to complain about. Would you acquit a woman if she birthed more children than she killed people? You're basically saying you're okay with being shot in the face as long as there is a copy of you out there. I say, what good is it to me that there's a copy of me out there? It doesn't make getting shot in the face any less painful. If the copying happened 20 years ago we may have completely different personalities and memories at the time of my death by shotgun to the face.
There is simply information at some points in space and time, and not at other points.
A person is a system, composed of components, defined and identified by properties - all of which can be copied.
A person isn't a soul or immutable consciousness essence which can go to an afterlife or to oblivion.
Personal pronouns are just pointers; if you use them in a way that implies that consciousness or identity can't be copies, then you're implicitly begging the question without explicitly justifying it or even realizing it (you are not alone in this, people do this all the time, and the usually get mad when you point out to them that this is an error).
The number of lifeforms has nothing to do with it at all; you could spawn over 9000 identical copies while you delete one, and people with your confusion would still complain.
What I concede is that diverging forks of the same person developing differently can get messy very quickly, especially if they share your confusion explicitly or on some psychological level.
I also concede there can be conflicts of interest between local versions, just like there can be conflicts of interests between me today and me tomorrow (e.g. when/who to do the dishes); this is uncontested.
Memories aren't a person, just like a stats sheet or a screenshot of a video game isn't a video game. A person can interpret memories, act on them and make new memories. When you destroy an EM you are destroying the entire machinery of personhood. From the perspective of the EM you are really killing him. Maybe you don't see it that way, but that's irrelevant, you're not god, you don't get to decide over an other person's life. The EM is a sentient being, if he requests to not be destroyed that request has to be granted. The only way around this is to lift the prohibition of murder (which means anyone can legally kill you too) or to have some law that discriminates artificial persons from biological persons (which is ethically disgusting).
You know, I don't have a good response to that. I feel that the analogy isn't perfect, but I don't have the time or energy to analyze it in any depth, so, point taken. It will be digested over time, and perhaps accepted.
"It seems to me that originals might never really be sure the em wouldn't value its separate existence."
The original could just ask the copy this... Refusal to take the 10 seconds or so needed to make sure you're not committing murder betrays a hidden fear that the copy might say no.
"This is exactly the kind of magical thinking I accused you of earlier."
I don't think you understand what I did here. The existence of an afterlife is not crucial to my point, it is simply a way to make it easier to see my point. Without an afterlife someone would still have gone to oblivion, which can only happen if that person was killed, but "being nothingness in oblivion" is a bit harder to imagine than being in heaven. In fact we do not even have to think about what happens after death at all if we look at a simple EM copy procedure instead of the swampman thought-experiment: after the copy we could have two versions living separate lives, but you want to delete one version so the number of lifeforms goes down by one, and that's only possible if someone dies.
But you wouldn't count the destruction of two hours of personal memory as murder.
Not normally, but then this is an "abnormal" situation. When what happens in those two hours radically changes a person's self-conception, it could be different. If a person became a religious fanatic because of a singular revelation during those two hours, and this caused him to completely change his life plans, for example.
Here, what happens during the two hours is the em experiences the original as dedicated to destroying whatever is unique to the em. (The em also asymmetrically experiences being an em, whatever mental effect that has.) That seems like the kind of difference that would cause the em to see itself as distinct from the original, to develop hopes that run contrary to the original. At an "instinctive" level, the original is the em's enemy.
It seems to me that originals might never really be sure the em wouldn't value its separate existence. Applying contemporary moral standards, the practice would risk being a killing without consent: you might say manslaughter rather than murder.
"It's not difficult to see when you posit the existence of an afterlife in the swampman thought experiment."
This is exactly the kind of magical thinking I accused you of earlier.
You don't get to posit magical entities as you see fit and then sell this as some kind of objective morality.
The fact that this cheap trick works at all is a good enough reason for me to abandon morality altogether and just rely on the robustness of practical power distributions.
@Stephen
"note that the relationship between em and original isn't without loss, as an em rapidly accrues experiences that can be expected to change its self conception"
Yes, and maybe it makes sense to have laws that forgive crimes and broken promises that happened too far in the past ("he's no longer the same person").
But you wouldn't count the destruction of two hours of personal memory as murder.
Also be aware that people tend to hide astonishing amounts of complexity behind personal pronouns, which routinely confuses all discussions of the philosophy of personhood and identity.
True, so the listener would take this into account, and presumably rely more on being pointed to verifiable info found in the other data sources accessible from the box.
If someone threatened to erase the last minute of your memories, would you accuse them of attempting to kill you? What if they did it perfectly, and restored your mind to exactly how it was a minute ago? What if they made your mind do the same calculations, but in parallel?
They are most likely doing it because they consider both copies the same person, and don't think killing one is murder. They'd consider it more like a memory wipe.
I'm reminded of a scene in HP:MoR, where a character noticed some similarities between memory wipes and murder. That may be a reference to this. I know Eliezer disagrees with Robin on this point.
> No, they aren't. The second law of thermodynamics forbids it.
The second law of thermodynamics doesn't work that way. In fact, it exists because the laws of physics are reversible. The information has to go somewhere, and if it gets too complex for you to keep track of, you call it "heat" and ignore it.
In fact, if you flip charge and parity, the laws of physics will run backwards. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wi...
That doesn't seem to address the point. If you perfectly erase a person's memories, it's the same as deleting them and restarting from a backup, which is itself the same as just branching and quickly deleting. At what point does it become killing, and why?
I should add that that does gloss over one possibility. It could be that going from imperfect deletion to perfect deletion is the point that they're killed.
"The EM is a sentient being, if he requests to not be destroyed that request has to be granted."
That issue comes up more in other stuff that Robin's written, but not really here. Nobody will volunteer if they're not okay with what may or may not be death. If you're going to be duplicated a bunch until your knowledge isn't useful, then most of you is destroyed, you have quite some time to change your mind. If someone's just going to explain it to you, it doesn't matter so much.
"The only way around this is to lift the prohibition of murder (which means anyone can legally kill you too) or to have some law that discriminates artificial persons from biological persons (which is ethically disgusting)."
It's a question of defining a person. If you consider all branches to be the same person, or all branches less than x apart, then it's not murder to prune the tree. It's only murder to destroy it entirely. If there's only one instance left, it's not murder.
Personally, I don't consider any of them the same person. That is, you now and you two seconds from now are two different people. Death doesn't mean much from that perspective. It's just like someone standing at the end of a line, except it's temporal instead of lateral.
I think you and IMASBA are both wrongly attributing a metaphysical essence to personhood. You say it's a configuration of information; IMASBA says its the potentially distinct possibility of experience (itself reducible to a different information-based account, in theory). But personhood has no essence, being a family-relations concept, and the questions raised are ones of psychology rather than metaphysics: how would a future society think about the relationship OR what is the least dissonant extension of our present attitudes, my position being that Hanson might be right about what how speculative society would end up moralizing, but he's wrong to extol it in terms of present morality. (The key concept is wrongful taking rather than personhood.)
To IMASBA, if killing the EM is necessarily murder, then StarTrek teleportation is necessarily suicide. And some people (say, believers in immaterial souls) might think of it that way. (But no morality holds that the way very idiosyncratic people think about something is what makes it "right.")
(A personal example: Of course I don't believe in an afterlife, but I can understand that someone would think of their "soul" in heaven as being "them." On IMASBAS account, it would make no sense. But I find I have no personal empathy for the Hindu account, on which my reincarnation continues my identity: I say to myself, why should I even care about that entity? I conclude that culture is important in the social construction of personhood.)
ADDED. I think the reasons I have zero interest in cryonics is that I don't identify the future entity as myself. (Actually, I think it requires something like a desperate wish to enable one to make the equation.) I don't distinguish the entity from myself based on the physical continuity (as do Bryan Caplan and Donald Davidson) but on the fact that I identify myself with the continuity of my projects, which will be senseless on "my" resurrection. (The Christian heaven is tailored to allow continuing one's mortal projects.) I find I don't give a damn if a version of myself exists in the far future.
When Robin has occasionally argued the point, I inferred that he, too, has a metaphysical view of personhood (as consisting of the information in a person's brain). But in sci-fi scenarios (such as Swampman), when the congeries of properties contributing to the sense of personhood come apart, there is really no fact of the matter whether it's the same person. Investigation by philosophers of the supposed metaphysics of personhood was warranted on their assumption (usually based on moralism) that personhood is a useful philosophical primitive, but those investigations have proven it isn't.
"I say, what good is it to me that there's a copy of me out there?"
What good is it to you that there will be a version of you tomorrow, i.e. that you don't die in your sleep tonight?
If you don't identify with your copies, you have no reason to identify with your future versions either.
"Of course there is something to complain about."
Note that you didn't show why.
You just implicitly conceded the point about the numbers of lifeforms going down, even though you used it earlier to boost your intuition that shutting down a local copy is equal to murder.
"Would you acquit a woman if she birthed more children than she killed people?"
Now you're just ignoring all the previous arguments about identity and loss of information.
"It doesn't make getting shot in the face any less painful."
Shutting down an em process can be painless.
I'd say the discussion has run its course; all relevant arguments have been made, some more than once.
"A person is a system, composed of components, defined and identified by properties - all of which can be copied."
Right, but they are still individuals because they can experience different things at the same time. It doesn't matter that they both have an equally strong claim to the same name, you can still shoot one in the face without the other one ever noticing.
"The number of lifeforms has nothing to do with it at all; you could spawn over 9000 identical copies while you delete one, and people with your confusion would still complain."
Of course there is something to complain about. Would you acquit a woman if she birthed more children than she killed people? You're basically saying you're okay with being shot in the face as long as there is a copy of you out there. I say, what good is it to me that there's a copy of me out there? It doesn't make getting shot in the face any less painful. If the copying happened 20 years ago we may have completely different personalities and memories at the time of my death by shotgun to the face.
I'll say it one last time, then I'll give up.
You are believing in magic.
There is no such thing as "going to oblivion".
There is simply information at some points in space and time, and not at other points.
A person is a system, composed of components, defined and identified by properties - all of which can be copied.
A person isn't a soul or immutable consciousness essence which can go to an afterlife or to oblivion.
Personal pronouns are just pointers; if you use them in a way that implies that consciousness or identity can't be copies, then you're implicitly begging the question without explicitly justifying it or even realizing it (you are not alone in this, people do this all the time, and the usually get mad when you point out to them that this is an error).
The number of lifeforms has nothing to do with it at all; you could spawn over 9000 identical copies while you delete one, and people with your confusion would still complain.
What I concede is that diverging forks of the same person developing differently can get messy very quickly, especially if they share your confusion explicitly or on some psychological level.
I also concede there can be conflicts of interest between local versions, just like there can be conflicts of interests between me today and me tomorrow (e.g. when/who to do the dishes); this is uncontested.
Memories aren't a person, just like a stats sheet or a screenshot of a video game isn't a video game. A person can interpret memories, act on them and make new memories. When you destroy an EM you are destroying the entire machinery of personhood. From the perspective of the EM you are really killing him. Maybe you don't see it that way, but that's irrelevant, you're not god, you don't get to decide over an other person's life. The EM is a sentient being, if he requests to not be destroyed that request has to be granted. The only way around this is to lift the prohibition of murder (which means anyone can legally kill you too) or to have some law that discriminates artificial persons from biological persons (which is ethically disgusting).
You know, I don't have a good response to that. I feel that the analogy isn't perfect, but I don't have the time or energy to analyze it in any depth, so, point taken. It will be digested over time, and perhaps accepted.
"It seems to me that originals might never really be sure the em wouldn't value its separate existence."
The original could just ask the copy this... Refusal to take the 10 seconds or so needed to make sure you're not committing murder betrays a hidden fear that the copy might say no.
@Margin
"This is exactly the kind of magical thinking I accused you of earlier."
I don't think you understand what I did here. The existence of an afterlife is not crucial to my point, it is simply a way to make it easier to see my point. Without an afterlife someone would still have gone to oblivion, which can only happen if that person was killed, but "being nothingness in oblivion" is a bit harder to imagine than being in heaven. In fact we do not even have to think about what happens after death at all if we look at a simple EM copy procedure instead of the swampman thought-experiment: after the copy we could have two versions living separate lives, but you want to delete one version so the number of lifeforms goes down by one, and that's only possible if someone dies.
But you wouldn't count the destruction of two hours of personal memory as murder.
Not normally, but then this is an "abnormal" situation. When what happens in those two hours radically changes a person's self-conception, it could be different. If a person became a religious fanatic because of a singular revelation during those two hours, and this caused him to completely change his life plans, for example.
Here, what happens during the two hours is the em experiences the original as dedicated to destroying whatever is unique to the em. (The em also asymmetrically experiences being an em, whatever mental effect that has.) That seems like the kind of difference that would cause the em to see itself as distinct from the original, to develop hopes that run contrary to the original. At an "instinctive" level, the original is the em's enemy.
It seems to me that originals might never really be sure the em wouldn't value its separate existence. Applying contemporary moral standards, the practice would risk being a killing without consent: you might say manslaughter rather than murder.
@IMASBA
"It's not difficult to see when you posit the existence of an afterlife in the swampman thought experiment."
This is exactly the kind of magical thinking I accused you of earlier.
You don't get to posit magical entities as you see fit and then sell this as some kind of objective morality.
The fact that this cheap trick works at all is a good enough reason for me to abandon morality altogether and just rely on the robustness of practical power distributions.
@Stephen
"note that the relationship between em and original isn't without loss, as an em rapidly accrues experiences that can be expected to change its self conception"
Yes, and maybe it makes sense to have laws that forgive crimes and broken promises that happened too far in the past ("he's no longer the same person").
But you wouldn't count the destruction of two hours of personal memory as murder.
Also be aware that people tend to hide astonishing amounts of complexity behind personal pronouns, which routinely confuses all discussions of the philosophy of personhood and identity.
True, so the listener would take this into account, and presumably rely more on being pointed to verifiable info found in the other data sources accessible from the box.
It is pretty easy to just turn off long term memory. People seem to be more comfortable with this, so maybe it would be more popular.
If someone threatened to erase the last minute of your memories, would you accuse them of attempting to kill you? What if they did it perfectly, and restored your mind to exactly how it was a minute ago? What if they made your mind do the same calculations, but in parallel?