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Are We Living in an Ancestor Simulation?
- Thread starter leroy
- Start date
Or you could just tell them. Or you could make the replication procedure such that they couldn't know which was the original. If they'd know is totally dependent on the procedure.Rumraket said:
Hell, it's possible that they both would be replicants with the original destroyed in the scanning.
That poor cat, we will never know if he is fictionally alive, or fictionally dead at any one time before we open that fictional box. Also wasn't there a death penalty in the Hyperion series which was based on that? A person would be locked into a sphere with enough things to survive a lifetime and a random triggered poison so he wouldn't know when he would die, and people outside not knowing if he was executed already?Rumraket said:
This just dawned to me; wouldn't gods existence be more probable in a simulated universe than in the real non-simulated one?
Dragan Glas
Well-Known Member
Grumpy Santa said:
But why assume that would happen in a civilization that could produce such perfect copies? Why wouldn't both copies be treated as equivalent instances of the original, with equal claims to their life, possessions and relations (and any conflicts managed by an appropriately fair-minded legal system)? That is, even if you could physically define an original and a copy (and such definitions could exist, but could easily be arguable at the quantum level anyway), does it follow that society must also define them as such legally or morally?
Sure, a civilization could create people to basically enslave them, but that would be the choice of the civilization not anything to do with the technology. And in doing that they'd be doing nothing that less-technologically-advanced civilizations haven't done before them.
Rumraket said:
I think the argument is that, if a sufficient proportion of civilizations like ours proceed to become a civilization with the propensity to make millions of simulations of civilizations like ours, then if you count up all of the entities in existence that have the subjective experience of being a civilization like ours, those entities that are in a simulation outnumber those that aren't. Hence the likelihood that we are in such a simulation.
I think the probabilities are doing a lot of work in that argument, a bit like Pascal's Wager and Boltzmann Brains. The latter in particular took awhile for me to realize how wrong it was; it basically argues that if minds are the result of brains, then how do we know that we are who we are in the Universe, and aren't just a random bunch of atoms that combined for a millisecond into a configuration that's having our current experience. The idea being that the odds of just enough atoms combining to form our experience for a tiny moment are much higher than the odds of all the atoms in the Universe making up the world we actually observe. Except that this assumes all atom configurations are independent events, which they're not, and it's pretty easy to find via thermodynamics that our brains being the result of the Big Bang, nucleosynthesis, stellar and planetary formation, and biological evolution is actually a lot more likely than a brain arising spontaneously from the ether.
I suspect something similar might be going on with the Ancestor simulation hypothesis, where the proportion of civilizations that ever might create ancestor simulations is lower than the argument assumes, and the number of ancestor simulations that actually match our experience of the world is similarly overstated. After all, there is an inherent resolution problem with simulating the Universe from within the Universe. (and if we aren't within the Universe the argument falls down flat, as it requires working from hypotheses about our Universe - that is also why I'm not sure it does apply to theists in quite the same way).
Grumpy Santa
New Member
Aelyn said:
Your copy shows up at your door, believing it's you. It wants you out, because you're clearly the copy, and fully intends to continue its' life (i.e. take over your life), including hopping in the sack with your wife.
If the copy is perfect, it's for all intents and purposes you in a different body. It believes it's you as much as you do. It wants it's life back and you, clearly the impostor, are in the way.
Or let's say it's marked as a copy. You wake up and suddenly there's a figurative stamp on your forehead indicating that your entire life is a sham. A fake. Not yours. You're in a lab on a slab when the last thing you remember is walking into the cloning facility... no, there has to have been a mistake made! They marked the wrong one, the other one is the copy! Can someone hear me! Get me out of here!
Grumpy Santa said:
I call the police or whatever authorities are relevant to the question, and an arrangement where both myself and my copy are treated as fairly as is possible given the situation is arrived at.
"Hopping in the sack" situations can be resolved through discussions between my copy, my wife and I and anybody else that might be concerned (children, polyamorous partners...).
Sure, there may be conflicts that are hard to resolve or leave one or both parties unhappier than they'd have been if there hadn't been a copy to begin with, but that's true of all interpersonal relationships.
What kind of "taking over my life" does it want anyway? Does it want my job? My job probably isn't unique and if it is, well, we don't always get our dream job and as a person who probably got theirs against the odds I'm likely aware of that. Or maybe it's a job we can do together, thus making it easier on us both! Interesting legal question for this society, which option is best adapted under which circumstances (salary would be a big issue I think). Does it want my friends? My friends can be friends with my copy if they wish, and why wouldn't they. You can see how it would be awkward if there are a thousand copies, but then again if I've got copies of myself running around my friends probably do too. Does it want my family? My family is already its family; by any biological reckoning we are basically (very identical) twins. Does it want my stuff? That's where the biggest legal issue would be I expect. Offhand I think the most sensible situation is for whoever created the copy to be responsible for its quality of life, with any shortfall involving dividing the original person's resources equitably between the two - and if this results in the original person having a lowered quality of life then clearly those that created the copy are responsible for this; in effect they've done a great harm to me either way, it's just that if one copy keeps all the stuff then the harm is all concentrated on one copy and if they share then it's distributed between the two. The latter is better as far as the incentives go (having two people pissed off at the situation makes it more likely to change than having one person pissed off at it; also it strikes me as more healthy to have both of me against the person who harmed me, than to have one instance of me joining the bastards who harmed me to harm another instance of me more), but either way a harm has clearly been done so presumably the society in question provides legal means of redress to the harmed party. Still, it is true that if the copy wasn't created with enough resources to match what it remembers having then there is an incentive for one copy to harm the other so it gets more resources. Again this is not that different from many other kinds of interpersonal conflict... Except that in this case the two people involved have near-identical personalities (allowing for some change over time and experience depending on what happens between the copying event and the two copies meeting), so if someone is the kind of person who'll screw their copy over for its stuff, well, that's them I guess.
We're in a situation where making perfect copies of people is possible, presumably this is common knowledge in the civilisation in question. Why would I think a different copy of me, that I know is a perfect copy and I know exists in a society where such perfect copies happen and there is thus a legal and moral framework to deal with them, is an "impostor" ? Clearly I know that those other versions of me have as much claim to being me as I do. I wouldn't want to destroy their lives just to have "their" lives for myself (as opposed to, oh, living my own life as this specific instance of me that's inhabiting this corner of spacetime). Why would they feel differently ?
But it's not. If I'm a perfect copy then by any standard that matters: my consciousness, my personality, my past history up to the copying... I am as real and as "me" as the original me is. The ability to label copies as such makes the copies physically distinguishable, but as I said there is no reason that we need to draw a social, legal or moral distinction as a result. It's like familial relationships - DNA testing allows us to tell exactly whether a child is genetically their parents' or not, but realizing that a child isn't genetically their parents' doesn't need to mean it is no longer legally or emotionally those parents' child... And in fact the law in most countries explicitly makes it possible for someone to be legally someone's child without being genetically related at all. The only aspects of a life that cannot be legally or morally given to both instances of a person are certain physical possessions, and if I can't come to an understanding with myself as to how to share possessions, well, maybe I have a problem that's bigger than having a copy of me running around? (and that's ignoring again that a society in which such copies would happen would probably make things such that everybody is OK with the process - by legally requiring that before you make a copy you can guarantee its comfort to a level it's OK with if nothing else. And if I'm involved in making a copy of me then it just stands to reason I'd work out the possessions thing beforehand).
Presumably this civilization also has therapists specialized in dealing with identity issues. And if I walked into the cloning facility then presumably I knew what I was in for, and was prepared for the 50/50 chance of waking up the copy. If I did this voluntarily then surely I did it knowing that existence of me-as-a-copy would be non-horrific, otherwise why would I expose myself to a 50/50 chance of such. (there's an actual short story that's basically this, as a weigh-loss technique, and it very much does involve screwing over one instance of the person - though the original in that case, not the copy. To the great dismay of the person who undergoes the procedure. But the guy in question is a thoughtless, selfish asshole, and it's clearly portrayed as the reason he thinks copying himself without wondering what happens to the original after is a good idea in the first place).
Grumpy Santa
New Member
Aelyn said:
Everything you've said misses the most important point.
The copy believes it's you as much as you do. It's not your job and wife in his mind, it's his job and wife.
Here, a little perspective:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3vDtvgQT9s0
Please quote one thing I said that missed that point, because nothing did that I can tell. Everything I said is about that point. I know it's his job and wife in his mind, that's why it is best considered our job and wife, and the question becomes one of sharing/allocating/distributing. And if you think the point is that the copy is unable to conceptualize such a thing, please explain how come the copy is unable to conceptualize this when I seem perfectly able to.Grumpy Santa said:
Moreover, you're missing my point that in a civilization that could make perfect copies of people, this would all be embedded in a system to deal with the situation on a societal level; it wouldn't be copy vs copy in the first place. It would be copy and/vs copy and/vs the institutions designed to minimize the conflicts inherent to the situation.
Wow, a science-fiction work involving copies of people. I've never run across such a concept before. Oh wait, I quoted one in my previous post.
You know I also believe clones should be considered human with all attendant rights and responsibilities and can be overall considered siblings of the original? How many science-fiction plots would that bit of common sense obliterate... (quite a few it turns out)
Dragan Glas
Well-Known Member
Greetings,
Aelyn, you're assuming here that a souse/significant other would be sanguine about being unable to distinguish between two identical individuals whilst knowing that one is a clone.
How would you feel about facing such a dilemma - where "the other" (clone) claims you as "mine"?
And I'm not going into how males and females view relationships differently.
Kindest regards,
James
Aelyn, you're assuming here that a souse/significant other would be sanguine about being unable to distinguish between two identical individuals whilst knowing that one is a clone.
How would you feel about facing such a dilemma - where "the other" (clone) claims you as "mine"?
And I'm not going into how males and females view relationships differently.
Kindest regards,
James
Dragan Glas said:
I disagree that I assumed any such thing. I said that the two copies and the single spouse could work things out, I didn't say it would be easy or always end well for all concerned. There is a very wide gap between "sanguine" and "MUST KILL IT'S THE ONLY SOLUTION". I also disagree that "knowing that one is a clone" is relevant; again if these are perfect copies then for all practical purposes of human interaction they're both the person in question, there is no reason to feel more negatively towards one for being a copy.
--- WARNING WALL OF TEXT GO TO END TO AVOID ---
I think considering how this would work out involves looking at how our concept of "identity" would change if people could be copied into other bodies. Right now there are many things that are ill-defined and arguable about what personal identity means. How much change can someone go through while still being the same person? Is an adult "really" "the same person" that they were as a child? When someone undergoes a stroke that changes their personality, do they become a different person? Are we the same person when we're drunk or otherwise altered as when we're sober? Is someone with more or less advanced dementia "still the same person"? Are we the same person that we'd be if our life had taken a very different turn ten years ago?
These are all situation where we might colloquially talk about someone "not being the same person", but in practice the question is moot because every person has a body, and every body at any given moment contains a single identity (possible rare dissociative disorders excepted). So it's easy in practice to assign identity to the body and not worry about the relationship between identity and other mental characteristics of the person.
If we can copy people into other bodies then that shortcut becomes impossible. I don't know how identity gets defined at that point, but I don't think it can be assumed to have the same properties it's assumed to have now. If you take a person who gets copied into two people who proceed to exist independently, I think the closest analogy to think of it is like the two hypothetical versions of a person you get when you imagine "what my future might be like if this happened vs if that happened". Currently we consider most hypothetical future versions of us to be "us", so I think it's valid to think the same of copies: they're both the person that existed before the copying event. However, being in two bodies existing independently, from the second the copying happens they become different individuals, in that they're exposed to different experiences, their thoughts and feelings and actions are as independent as the thoughts and feelings of two different people in different bodies, and they have different priorities - they both have a stronger incentive to look after the interest of the instance of them in this body than the other. And one can expect those two individuals to grow more and more different as time passes and they accumulate different histories and experiences.
So on the one hand they're the same person, because both of them can equally be thought of as a future version of the person who got copied, but on the other hand they're not the same person because they are different individuals - to borrow a line from Sandman, they are different "points of view".
I don't see a way around this: I don't think you can copy people and keep identity as the reflexive (A=>B therefore B=>A) and transitive (A=>B and B=>C therefore A=>C) property we think it now. You can no longer equate "identity" as "an experience of being a person continuously through time" and "identity" as "a single individual". Now the "experience of being a person continuously through time" becomes something that can branch, so that at time T+1 you can have two experiencing entities that are distinct from each other but who are both a continuation of what was a single experience at time T.
In a way the "perfect copy" hypothesis makes this easy. If you look into imperfect copies, that are unlike the original but arguably not more different from the original than the original is from how it was ten years ago, or how it would be if it had a stroke or was struck by amnesia, or how it is when it's dreaming... That would be a lot harder to figure out.
So all this to say, if your spouse gets copied and you meet both copies, I think you've got two people who are equally your spouse, in that they're both a valid version of the person you married, but they're still two people with their own two independent self-interests, meaning if you choose to pursue a relationship with both you're exposing yourself to all the additional difficulties of being in a relationship with two people.
I can see four basic outcomes:
1) you choose to pursue a relationship with both. Emotionally you're in love with both and they're both the person you married so it makes sense; it just involves converting your previously-monogamous relationship (if it was monogamous of course) to something akin to a polyamorous relationship. Obviously this also depends on if the two copies of your spouse are happy to be in a polyamorous relationship and having to share your time and attention. Also, not feasible if you have a dozen or a thousand copies instead of two. Also, you do run into the issue of your now-two spouses being able to pass for one another and cause mischief or take offense when you can't tell them apart. But, you know, presumably they love you and care for your emotional well-being so how bad could they be?
2) you stay with one and break up with the other. Emotionally it might be harder in the short term but people do break up for plenty of reasons. "I got copied and my wife and us didn't want a polyamorous relationship and I drew the short straw" could be one more of them. "Picking one", if they're perfect copies, just requires flipping a coin; if you don't want that, any other criterion would work. Would the broken-up one be horribly hurt and jealous? Depends on their personality but yeah, sure; in this they would be not that different the "loser" of any other love triangle. You also run into issues if the copies decide to pass for one another to get around your decision, but if so 1) why did you marry someone who would mind-fuck you this way in the first place - if the copy you broke up with will do it you know the copy you stayed with would to it too, and 2) I don't know, set a password, have the copy you've chosen as your spouse get a tattoo, whatever. It's an issue but a solvable one.
3) break up with both copies to avoid having to choose/jealousy. Heartbreaking if you don't want to live without your spouse, but it makes all your lives' thereafter more simple so if that's a priority, well, the option's there. I can certainly see 1 or 2 ending this way if your spouse turns out to be an asshole. Also, if your spouse is someone who'll be all "mine mine mine" without wondering about what you want then this might be a good time to cut the cord. And reconsider your life choices and the kinds of people you seem to end up married to.
4) copy yourself and have the copies pair off (or hey, polyamorous relationship if that's what you're into!). Allows for all copies to remain in a relationship with their spouse and have one spouse's undivided attention. But maybe you can't or don't want to make copies of yourself willy-nilly so you'd want to balance the advantages vs the drawbacks, whatever they are (like being legally mandated to divide your possessions between both copies of yourself, or other such drawbacks that completely depend on what the context of the copying process is).
--- END OF WALL OF TEXT BACK TO ANSWER ---
At the end of the day it comes down to a relationship issue; the fact that the two copies can be considered the same person for some purposes, or that they're physically identical, introduces some issues and problems that don't exist in relationship issues that don't involve copies, but nothing apocalyptic or that can't be worked through the same way humans work through other challenges, including very emotionally distressing ones, without murdering each other.
Dragan Glas
Well-Known Member
Greetings,
The problems it raises are greater than any "benefits" that could arise - this possibility would be banned on bio-ethical grounds.
Kindest regards,
James
The problems it raises are greater than any "benefits" that could arise - this possibility would be banned on bio-ethical grounds.
Kindest regards,
James
Dragan Glas said:
Agreed. It would really depend on the benefits (and to what extent the problems can be mitigated, but mitigating problems is itself an effort that needs to be worth it) but I can't imagine many benefits that would outweigh the ethical and social issues.