Do people have some theory around continuity of personal identity that makes them fear being uploaded against their will? Like it seems to reduce to absurdity to consider space and time separated events being tied to my selfhood since there could be multiple copies made at once. Rather than make me afraid, it makes me think the relation between spacetime events and identity is not something you can fuck with as a physical entity. Sorry to tempt the basilisk.
I’m not an expert on rationalist lore, but I think the idea is that you can’t be sure that you aren’t already the simulated one.
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The whole rationalist/singularitarian/etc philosophy, like all(?) religious beliefs, is at its core an elaborate defense mechanism against having to consider one’s own mortality. Ray Kurzweil’s beliefs are at least partially motivated by not having been able to come to terms with his father’s death, for example, and there’s also Yudkowsky’s whole “deathist” thing / obsession with cryogenics.
In actuality, of course, even if you do somehow upload your brain into a computer, you will never be able to escape living inside your own brain. You will still have to experience death. But of course this is a terrifying thing to realize (it freaks me out too! I’m not claiming to be immune here!) so it helps to have a belief that somehow things will be able to continue. In this sense the whole belief in ‘continuity of personal identity’ through brain uploads is just a sci-fi-flavored version of the normal belief in life after death (afterlife, reincarnation, etc).
IIRC they do have some particular dogma that justifies this and forms part of the basis for the Basilisk (something like “you should consider simulations of yourself to be just as much you as you yourself are”) but I forget the specifics.
In the original formulation, no brain scans are required. The Singularity is so smart it can simulate you, down to the neuron, just based off waves vaguely at everything the historical record of you. No need for frozen heads a jar or anything, I guess the Singularity can just trace back through thousands of years every molecule that used to be you and figure you that way. It’s downright bonkers even by extropian standards.
There are three sort of angles on it. The first is if you’re a perfectly benevolent utilitarian. Then any simulations being tortured is unacceptable, it doesn’t matter if they’re of you.
Then there’s a weird kind of ingroup utilitarianism some of them seem to do, where for some reason (which they claim isn’t racism) you should care about people who’re similar to yourself. In that case it’s really bad if it’s someone essentially identical to you being tortured.
The third group are those who believe that the simulation of you is in fact you, just as you’re suggesting. That one is weird but not the weirdest take on consciousness that I’ve ever heard.
The only way it could work is if somehow a copy of you would bring your consciousness from the past into the new copy. Which is some wild metaphysical speculation that’s essentially spiritual. If someone tortures an exact copy of me in the future it probably won’t be my problem because that person’s pain won’t affect me any more than deleting a second copy of a file will automatically delete the first. It’s bugshit.
I would very much object to a Basilisk torturing a copy of me (or indeed, pretty much anyone) for a trillion years.
What I don’t think is that a Basilisk is remotely likely to occur.
I don’t care about the suffering of mere copies of me and would not support the development of AGI regardless.
If the magical robot god will know everything written on the Internet, it will of course know that I wrote this comment. The basilisk won’t torture copies of me as blackmail because it would presumably know that it wouldn’t have any effect on me.
In fact, if a Basilisk AI gets created, it wouldn’t need. The peopke who feared and revered the then hypothetical Basilisk have already chipped in to help create it, so it doesn’t need to follow through on its threats to torture simulations. Or even issue threats– Roko and other Rationalists have already invented the concept of the Basilisk and issued threats for it.