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Overcoming Bias Commenter's avatar

Is the memory of living through something really the same as having lived through it? In that Dick/Schwarzennegger movie about Mars, there is a company that sells vacations... or rather the memory of vacations at a tiny fraction of the price of the actual vacation. Given that we know memory is very spotty, that it is a sparse set of clues about the remembered event which the brain then weaves into a richer replayed story when it is remembered, this seems much technically simpler than creating a copy of someone and then merging the copies back into one at the end of the day.

Perhaps I am biased at the effort I have spent trying to merge the coding of two java programmers (I am one) after 4 hours of parallel development starting from the same code base. The conflicts are astonishing and NOT automatically fixable.

I suspect I would buy pleasant memories if they were really cheap. I would not value them equally as having lived through the same thing. One can argue that its only because I know (or think I know) they are not "real" memories, but clearly the value we place on things is infinitely tied to what we think we know about it.

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Overcoming Bias Commenter's avatar

I think you'd want to come up with a good space/time stretching equilibrium. It might be better to have three of me for 40 years, for example, that 10 of me for 10 years because my newfound manpower may not translate into a linear reduction into the time it takes to achieve my goals.

I think, in general, I'd want to be many when I need to cover a wide area and few when I need more time. So it would be good for 3 of me to work hard from 20 to 30, for one of me to hang out in Mumbai between 30 and 40, and many of me to spend the accumulated gains from 40 to 60 so that one of me can enjoy the memories in the years before he dies but is too frail to do much (why have 6 copies of the hospital bed experience, after all).

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