The Cloned-Consciousness-as-Continuous-Consciousness Fallacy

It's less a fallacy than a fantasy. It's a bizarre universalist solipsism: A perception that all people are is what is important for you to consider, carried to the most absurd conclusion of thinking that what you are is only what is important for others to consider.

Therefore, if you duplicate a process, delete the old and copy the new one in its place, it's the same process.

This is totally acceptable to me if there is a proof somewhere that there is no such thing as subjective experience, but then it makes no sense to talk about "consciousnesses" as separable anyway, and the entire discussion is pointless.

edit: If Peapod suddenly goes out of business and Amazon seamlessly picks up my grocery deliveries, is Amazon Peapod?

The author's "fallacy" isn't so much a fallacy as much as it is one particular (and rather unsurprising) opinion on how to answer the questions that Aaronson and Hanson have asked.

In this sense, the author fundamentally misses the point of what Aaronson and Hanson have written. Aaronson and Hanson seem to be primarily interested in identifying questions and exploring the problems that arise when trying to give simple answers to those questions.

The fact that the author is able to quickly and cleanly resolve his personal belief about how these questions should be answered doesn't indicate that the questions are easy to answer or even that there is an obviously correct answer. At least any more than a Christian's belief in God cleanly settles the question of whether God exists.

I came to conclusion that torturing Sims is indeed morally wrong. Now it's not that much wrong, because they are not very self-aware, but if they were more self-aware, it would be very wrong. So yeah, killing clones or even virtual replicas willy-nilly is wrong.

On the other hand, I would have no problem with teleportation-via-cloning. I don't have a problem with being unconscious every night, after all (kudos to http://existentialcomics.com/comic/1 for pointing that out to me). Also I have no problem, every day when I go to work, to sit for half an hour in a huge metal structure which is propelled by enormous speed through a tunnel. What if it crashed, and I would be smashed to death? It's pretty much the same question the article asks, what if some incident caused the clone not being recreated successfully? I simply trust the people who built it and maintain it, and I know many people use it with no issues, so why not use it?

It's an interesting problem, but I don't feel like this page accomplished much besides calling a position he disagreed with a fallacy and using unexplained appeals to emotion.

>To refute this, let’s conduct a thought experiment. Pretend that you can copy a human brain. There are ten copies of me. They are all individually conscious — perfect replicas that only diverge after the point when replication happened. Is it okay to kill five of these copies? No, of course not! Each one is a self-aware, intelligent mind, human in everything but body. The identicalness doesn’t change that.

The things that scare me about death are the ideas that my specific goals would be left unpursued, that my responsibilities would be abandoned, my friends would lose my friendship, and that my memories and experiences would lose their significance upon the world.

If an alien came to Earth with a perfect matter-duplicater (that I have reason to fully trust), duplicated me such that I'm not even sure which is the original, then remembers that he's not allowed to use it on humans, and explains he needs to painlessly euthanize and disassemble one of me, I wouldn't be particularly shaken up by it. Sure, I'd feel I was teased with a cool toy and possibility, but the only injury that has happened is in a way equivalent to a few seconds of memory loss. I've done worse to myself by drinking. There were no big life experiences lost or goals left unpursued.

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Going a little further... if I were an AI or could somehow copy myself, I imagine I would frequently make short-lived copies to work together with to accomplish my goals. I as my copies would be told that I'm going to be removed in a few days; I think I could handle the idea of knowing the surviving-me is going to be amnesic to my several days of (probably barely)unique experiences in a world much closer to our goals.

In a world where everyone or all AIs could do the above, I imagine the minds who did the above would become much more successful in nearly all endeavors. Choosing not to do so would be choosing to fail, unless the strategy was made illegal. I struggle to fault the strategy morally given that it would be something done by a single consenting individual to themselves, though it does still sound a little weird to my instincts about how survival is supposed to work. If we encountered otherwise similar aliens which already worked that way, would we judge them, or only consider it an abomination when humans did it to themselves?

I'm a bit disappointed that I haven't seen much sci-fi explore concepts like this.

The no-cloning theorem together with chaos theory suggests that cloning is fundamentally impossible. Mostly people will respond to this by saying "the brain isn't a quantum computer", which is almost certainly true, but what is actually required for mind uploading is "the brain's behavior is not influenced by quantum phenomena at all", which is even more certainly false.

Yet we're still obsessed with mind uploading. Why?

I guess it's because, while we accept that life seems to have some "atman", a sense of identity, and quantum mechanics allows this in a very weak sense, it makes no sense that our perceptions would be at all influenced by quantum mechanics. Using the no-cloning theorem to resolve the problem of mind uploading seems like cheating, and we're all pretty sure that souls don't exist, so we tend to think that anyone who looks for something like a soul in fundamental physics must be pushing an agenda. But this latter reasoning is a fallacy; the well is poisoned when anyone who suggests that quantum mechanics might derail computational neuroscience must believe in some weird magical revisionism of ESP or hypercomputations occurring in the brain or whatever.

But there's an easier culprit hiding in plain sight: the tendency of people to talk more about things they think they can understand, than things where they run a serious risk of being proven flat wrong. I could be flat wrong (but this is not my first rodeo); many posters in this thread as well as the blogger cannot. Loss aversion strikes again.