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If the chatbot doesn't quite have your 30 years of memories, but can make an impression that would fool anyone else, what's the difference?
It's just that I feel like your arguments prove too much, as the expression goes. If there can be such a thing as "not enough data", then indeed how can you place a cutoff point? There's never all data. You of today don't have all the data on the you of yesterday.
It makes a difference to me. I'm the customer here! If I'm physically around to evaluate the claim, then presumably there's some kind of non-destructive mind upload going on. I wouldn't consent to a destructive one unless I had no choice, or if I was sufficiently convinced by evidence that it highly accurately captures almost all behavior and internal state.
If I died without hope of recovery, then I have no control over what others get up to. If they want to run a fine-tune of GPT o5 that mimics me via text, in an unending simulation of The Motte, and names that thing self_made_human, what can I do about it? Even I think that's a strict improvement over being dead and entirely forgotten.
As far as I am aware, there is no principled and rigorous way to answer that question, at present.* It rarely comes up in normal life, because humans can't trivially clone themselves with their memories.
Some people think they live on through their children. Some think it's the books they write, or the good they do? That's good for them, or at least good enough. Highly inadequate for me.
And the prompting question was why I seek immortality, proper immortality and not word-play. That's my answer.
*I have strong intuitions on the matter, and seek to see if science and engineering can make them rigorous. I strongly believe that there's a meaningful and objective way to compare similarity between minds, in the manner you can generate embeddings on text.
If I go to bed right now, and wake up again, the new self_made_human and I will be virtually indistinguishable, even to ourselves. So we have no qualms about calling ourselves the same person. If you want proof, ask me this question again tomorrow, I guess.
The same holds for SMH from last week, less so from last year, even less so than 20 years ago. It will also continue to become less true with time. But I consider such divergence both unavoidable at present, and also entirely acceptable. I want to be able to grow and improve, ideally in a self-directed fashion.
There are operations I could undergo that wouldn't preserve identity. Say developing Alzheimer's, or having a lobe of my brain removed.
Even a clone of me with no shared memories would be a very similar person. We'd get along well, I'd treat him like family. I'd probably give him money if he asked. But he wouldn't meet my threshold for being the same person.
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