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Comment by tshaddox | Hacker News Reader

> Is it murder/suicide when you get blackout drunk and lose a few hours of memory?

No, but that's not what's happening in this thought experiment. In this thought experiment, the lives of independent people are being ended. The two important arguments here are that they're independent (I'd argue that for their creative output to be useful, or for the simulation to be considered accurate, they must be independent from each other and from the original biological human) and that they are people (that argument might face more resistant, but in precisely the same way that arguments about the equality of biological humans have historically faced resistance).

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Imagine instead that at the end of a task, instead of deleting a copy, it and the original are merged again, such that the merged self is made up of both equally and has both their memories. (This is easier to imagine if both are software agents, or they're both biological, and the new merged body is made up of half of the materials of each.) In this case, I think it's apparent that the copy should have no fear of death and would be as willing as the original to work together.

Now imagine that because there's too many copies, there's too many unique memories, and before the merger, the copy has its memory wound back to how it was at the scan, not too different than if the copy got blackout drunk.

Now because the original already has those memories, there's no real difference between the original and the merged result. Is there any point in actually doing the merge then instead of dropping the copy? I'm convinced that actually bothering with that final merge step is just superstitious fluff.

> I'm convinced that actually bothering with that final merge step is just superstitious fluff.

Sure, but that's an easy thing to be convinced of when you know you're not a copy with an upcoming expiration date!

Have you read Greg Egan? I believe there is a book by him with this very same concept.

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