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How would you feel if we could achieve a 1 to 1 The Prestige style copy where the copy believes they're the real one? I know hand waving getting there has real 'draw the rest of the owl' energy but I'm interested in your answer anyway.
Sounds horrifying? He'd love my wife as much as I do, be as attached to my entire life as much as I am, and think I'm the fake?
How doesn't this end with one of us dead, or feeling cucked for the rest his life?
I don't know if it's a mark of emotional health or the opposite, but I would love to have another me around the place. Like anyone, I spend lots of time in my own company anyway, I would expect me to understand me better and cooperate with me better than anyone.
Would you also love letting them have a go at your wife?
It's not relevant right now, and my feelings might change once it is, but I don't see why not. It's me. Being jealous of yourself seems silly. Especially since I know the other me wouldn't be jealous either, so it's not like I need to worry about him going behind my back. I am the one person in the world I genuinely, absolutely trust.
As long as you can't see the world through his eyes, hear it through his ears, be aware of his every thought and feeling, and directly control what he does, he's not you.
When I'm thinking about this I generally apply this to myself from a week ago or a week from now. Can I see through his eyes, hear through his ears, etc? I know they exist(ed), but the me as of now has very little access to the richness of their experiences, only vague records and predictions. From a certain point of view I'm much less divided from a hypothetical perfect copy than the version of myself existing at various not-far-removed intervals of time.
Unless I resort to an immaterial soul that behaves exactly as necessary to make selfhood work out as expected or I resort to notions of continuity that seem to break down in the edge cases, I think the case for identifying with one's copy is pretty good
To me this whole line of thought breaks down once you analyze what happens when two copies exist at the same time. If a copy of you existed in the past, do you have memories of it the same way you do of yourself? No? In that case they're not the same.
What about the future? My first conversation with a transhumanist was a guy trying to convince me that if I do a mind-upload upon death, it's just going to feel like going to sleep and waking up in a virtual world. My view is that it's going to feel like going to sleep and never waking up again, and we can prove that by running a mind-simulation of yourself now, and observing these entities exist independent from each other, without direct sharing of experiences. It is the belief that your meatbag self gets transferred into your virtual self that requires an immaterial soul.
I see what you mean, but also I don't know how I'd ground this view in anything other than something like a soul.
In the memory example, I think you leave yourself open to critiques along the lines of "if I had a few hours of amnesia, am I a different person?". This would be perceptually identical to having a clone that existed for the lost period.
And, of course, if your self is dependent on your biology there isn't something that it feels like to go to sleep and never wake up.
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