I think the "gut feeling" would apply more towards going down a certain street. The cop can claim he was just driving around randomly when he saw the suspect do something illegal, when in fact the cop knew exactly where to be to witness a crime because he was tipped off by the NSA, which actually wiretapped a conversation the suspect had over a phone.
I don't think slavery can really be compared to voluntary employment. It is such a drastically different mechanism that I don't think many (if any) of the same principles apply.
I would say that I don't think there is clear correlation between worker happiness and worker productivity. By this I mean, I don;t think the graph of happiness and productivity is likely to resemble a straight line. I suspect it might look something more like a parabola or a Gaussian distribution.
Maybe the happiest worker is one that does no work at all but remains employed through a computer glitch or manager incompetence
I would not disagree that the advantage is currently in the hands of large corporations. While I can;t speak for all self described libertarians, I would say that most feel that corporations have an undeserved level of power that is harmful to society. However I would also say that most would favor removing this power rather than passing more laws to give workers a big enough legal advantage to compete.
The single biggest thing I think that can be done to further to goal of limiting the power of corporations, is to stop treating corporations as people, and treat all corporate profits as the profit of individuals, and revamping the tax code to be more fair and simple.
I also think things like the negative income tax would be a great way to simply the tax code/welfare system and ensure a minimum income level to all people
"Robots" was my tongue and cheek term for all forms of automation robotic or otherwise.
I don't think a standard "income" is necessary per se, as long as goods and services become essential free (which I believe is one possible scenario for the future). I think it is quite possible the the means of production become available to all people, and raw materials become a resource that is rationed by some kind of democratic system.
Civil unrest, robot armies, opression, etc, is another possible outcome
I never said continuous. You can pause it, sure. Copying to a new body is rather different though. One conciousness ends and never re-starts. That original person dies, they cannot experience what the copy does.
That's only if you refuse to consider the copy to be the same person. Obviously if we do consider the copy to be the same person, then he never died, and if we don't then he did die. My argument is that we *should* consider the copy to be the same person for reasons I have already stated. We are already copies of our past selves.
Consider this. If it were possible to make the copy and keep the original around would that mean there were two of you? Would your conciousness be looking out of four eyes, listening with four ears, be in two different places at once? Of course not, the two would be separate and immediately begin to diverge as their experiences differed.
Yes they would become 2 different consciousness. But they started from the same consciousness. Neither one is more you than the other. This is exactly the same is if you made 2 copies kept them both alive and killed the original.
It has been the case throughout all of human history that you can clearly say which human being "was you" at all points in time, because of the way human biology works. If you had a time machine you could find the "you" from 1979 or the you from 2020, or definitively say that "you" didn't exist in 1903.
What I am saying is that this limitation of biology may one day come to an end, and we may have to explore how this affects our preconceptions of terms like "me". I think we will need to have a new model for how consciousness evolves, and allow for branching.
Imagine if whenever a cell divided, one of the 2 descendents died. It would be easy to treat this new cell as the same cell because it has a clear and single ancestor and descendent. You can look at every point in time and see which single cell corresponds to this particular lineage, and you might be tempted to refer to all these cells as "the same cell" (e.g. cell X). If you all of a sudden remove this limitation, and allow cells to divide (without one always dying), the language of "which one of these cells Y, Z *is* cell X", doesn't really make sense anymore. You have to change your terminology to "cell X is cell Y's ancestor" and "cell Z is cell X's ancestor" , and "cell X has 2 descendents, cell Y and cell Z".
Well isn't that the very issue I am talking about? Libertarians pick and choose which liberties they support and do not support.
Everyone should pick and choose which liberties they support and do not support.
That they often oppose worker liberty in subordination to owner liberty is telling.
What does it tell? That libertarians don't blindly support workers regardless of the situation?
Libertarians also often oppose corporate power as well.
In fact actual libertarian ideology doesn't favor liberty of one group over another in terms of workers or owners. It talks about freedom in terms of autonomy and free association and non-coercion. If the owners of a company are engaging in coercion or the denial of autonomy, then libertarians (the real ones) will oppose that. If workers do the same, then libertarians will oppose them in the same way.
I can't imagine that you would *always* be on the side of "the workers" regardless of the circumstances.
I think a person whose family has been taken hostage can probably be made into just about the most productive worker imaginable, and these working conditions are basically as bad as it gets.
Does this single example completely disprove the concept that "happy workers are more productive"?
I think it does if you view this question very narrowly.
If you allow for some other factors like "we live in a society where we are free to change jobs", I don't think it's a stretch to say that treating your employees worse than every other employer will lead to you losing some/all your workers.
Maybe every company would race to the bottom, but we haven;t really seen that happen. Many corporations pay above minimum wage. Clearly their strategy is not to race to the bottom.
1. Real libertarians don't "hate" the state. A person who hates the state would probably be better described as an anarchist.
ut their ideal society is one where a corporation can essentially have all of the power of the state, but without any representation.
2. A real libertarian does not want corporations to have the power of a state.
They will say, you are free to leave a corporation and do business with another. How is that different than, if you don't like the laws of a state, go to another state?
Well one big difference is that leaving a corporation doesn't force you to leave your home, family and friends, but leaving a country does.
This isn't hypothetical. Company towns in the past were owned by a corporation which provided essentially all government functions. Quite the libertarian paradise.
A society with only one employer is not a libertarian paradise.
I don;t think you really understand libertarianism. You seem to thinking of a caricature of libertarianism.
In the same way that it is a caricature to say that all liberals want to government to control everything and have everyone be dependent on welfare.
The argument is not "not a single company will attempt this strategy". It is that these companies will be at a competitive disadvantage.
If a giraffe has a slight competitive advantage because it has a longer neck, it doesn't mean that all the giraffes with short necks instantly die off. It just means that over time, giraffes will gradually have longer and longer necks through the pressure of natural selection.
Yes society has in the past needed a certain number of people in low skill jobs, and that number has continued to rapidly approach zero as technology improves. Soon we will reach the point where the cost of robots will be lower than any 3rd world worker could possibly survive on, and the only jobs that will require humans are high skill jobs that robots can't do.
The danger is not that humans will be stuck in low paying jobs. There won't be any more low paying jobs for humans to get.
technological advancements didn't make just it "look like" workers were more productive. IT actually made them more productive. We have more stuff now, because workers produced more stuff.
Real libertarians (i.e. not republicans in disguise) or in favor of the right to bargain collectively. They just tend to be opposed to laws being passed that give both unions and/or employers and unfair advantage.
I'll bet I can find some "progressives" who would prefer rampant poverty for everyone over even the slightest bit of wealth inequality (e.g. they would prefer a world were everyone was as poor as the poorest person in the world currently to the one we have now).
I don't see what this would prove. And I don't see what you are trying to prove either. That some libertarians are ideologues? There are ideologues for every ideology.
There are left libertarians like Noam Chomsky. There are people who are heroes of the intellectual libertarianism like Milton Friedman who actually proposed the negative income tax as a way to eliminate poverty without removing the incentive to be self sufficient.
It's easy to pick the dumbest people and hold them up as the paradigms of an ideology you disagree with, but it is not intellectually honest.
I'll be the first person to say that there are a lot of selfish and dumb people who claim to be libertarians. But there are a lot of selfish and dumb people in general. I'm fine with calling those people out on their selfishness and stupidity, but I object to equating this juvenile point of view with libertarianism, just as you would probably object if I equated the mentality of person who only wants a free cell phone from Obama with the best liberalism has to offer.
Libertarians also don't believe in the freedom for murderers to murder people, or the freedom for thieves to steal from people. The libertarian philosophy does not advocate some sort of nonsensical universal freedom to do everything. It advocates in certain concepts like free markets, autonomy, and free association.
If you are going to attack the libertarian ideology, at least know what you are talking about.
1. You take out your brain and cut it right down the middle. you make a copy of both halves and reattach the halves so that you have 2 brains each with half original atoms and half copies. You take each of these brains and stick them into artificial bodies (e.g. robots). They both have the same memories and inclinations, until the moment they awaken and slowly diverge as they start to have different experiences. Are they both you? Are neither you?
2. You replace one neuron in your brain with a clone of this same neuron and reattach in the same way that the original neuron was attached. It functions just as the old one did. You feel exactly the same. Is this just an illusion? Is this a different person who only thinks he's you? What if we repeat this process 100 billion times, and replace your neurons one by one and get the same result (you feel the same and act the same)? What if I told you we were in fact taking all your old neurons and putting them back together into your original brain and sticking that into a robot that also acted and felt like you (but in a robot)? Which one would be you? Both? Neither? What if instead of pulling out your neurons 1 at a time, we replaced the atoms in your neurons one at a time? This is kind of whats already happening in your brain already just through normal biological process, the only difference is that nobody is assembling the neurons that are removed, back into your original brain.
It's a copy, the original one still dies, that stream of conciousness ends.
So if you could freeze someone and thaw them out, they would not be really you because their stream of consciousness was not continuous?
You can't download yourself to a computer or a new body, just make a copy and then die yourself.
Well if you *could* download yourself into a computer or a new body, how would that be any different? That's like saying I want you to email me an image file, but I don;t want it to be a copy, I want it to be the original. What does that even mean? It's the information that's meaningful, not the atoms used to represent that information at any given time. You can represent the same image using different materials (pits in a cd, electric charges on a magnetic disk, 1's and 0's written in a notebook with a pencil)
If somehow you or most anybody got cloned down the the atomic structure level, the you that you are at the moment wouldn't at all look at the other as "me".
I would probably phrase this as: Both my future me's would not view eachother as the same person as themselves.
You would still be in the same place when you woke up, if you had to go to sleep at all. The other you would "occur" somewhere else on receiving consciousness.
I never wake up in the same place in the bed that I went to sleep in. If my clone and I both wok up in the same bed, I'm sure neither of us would no for sure which was the original copy, based solely on discontinuity.
And if you had a silicon copy of yourself, would you be willing to kill the meat-you? No? Then I'd say a brain-state copy isn't you, it's a copy.
I would not be willing to kill the meat me. This is because I have evolved some pretty sophisticated self preservation instincts. That doesn't mean the copy can;t *also* be me. There is no rule of the universe that says there can be only 1 me. If I copied myself, I'm sure the meat me, would be sad that he is still going to die of old age. The silicon me will be ecstatic that the copying process worked.
It's easy to say that the meat me is the *real* me. But I think a more appropriate way to look at the situation is that we are constantly changing into different people. The present me is a new person that came from the me from a moment ago. The future me is a new me that is going to come from the present me in a moment. A copy is a scenario where there are 2 future me's rather than only 1. Unfortunately the biological copy has some limitations and is going to die.
Looking at it this way I think clears up some confusion. You asked would *I* be willing to kill the meat me. This presupposes that *I* will be only 1 of the 2 copies, which is wrong. If there are 2 of me, they would both not want to die equally. One of the copies would be better able to achieve that goal.
In short, either all this business about a continuous, individual consciousness is largely illusory or we just don't understand the phenomenon very well at all yet.
There is lots of things we *do* understand. We understand that the atoms that make up our brain are constantly changing. New ones come in and old ones go out. Some of the atoms in our brain belonged to other people's brains (some of which are probably even still alive). It is pretty clear that what makes you you is not the physical atoms. If this were true then you are definitely not the same person moment to moment.
The only other alternative is that it is the configuration of the atoms that is you. This explains why you feel like the same person even though your atoms are constantly changing. This also makes people unfomfortable because it also implies that you can be copied because your particular configuration can just as easily be made from different atoms. But this discomfort is not a good reason to believe this idea is wrong.
Also if the configuration is what makes you you, what does it mean if you can make a different configuration that has the same functional effect (i.e. a silicon copy). It acts like you, it has the same feelings, taste in music, loves the same peoople, has the same memories. Even if you want to call this thing a mere "copy", it would appear to be a copy that's as good as the original. There would be in my view as much utility in distinguishing these copies as there would be in trying to figure out which one of every set of identical twins got the soul.
The "original you" dies every time something in your brain changes. What's the difference?
What if you replaced every neuron in your brain with an artificial one, one at a time. Would this make it easier to pretend their is continuity? What if we hide the blob of meat that used to be your brain after the process is over?
Well if you do it right and use brain state rather than just tweets and facebook posts, then you don't need to greive at all, because you'd still be alive, and your consciousness would be housed in a silicon brain rather than a meat brain.
Right - we have a word for companies that perform those services: "banks".
I never said that these would not be considered banks. I only said that they were not necessary with bitcoin, but this does not mean they can't exist with bitcoin.
Odd as it sounds, the government "making people whole" on widespread bank failures by "printing money" doesn't actually change the money supply.
Lets say hypothetically that all the banks invested in something that ultimately provided a poor return (e.g. they invested in quantum computers that turned out not to work or something). They did this by indirectly spending X dollars of depositors on engineers and materials to build the quantum computers. Those engineers (an materials suppliers) then take their X dollars and put it back in the bank. Now we find out the quantum computers don't work, and the bank can't give the engineers and the depositors their money back because the bank only has X dollars, but owes 2X dollars. So now the FDIC needs to step in and provide the additional X dollars.
Maybe the government can just send X fewer dollars on other stuff to cover the FDIC, or maybe it can't and it needs to "print" money to cover them.
Had the quantum computers worked, then the bank would be able to sell or rent these quantum computers (indirectly through the companies they invested in) and everything would have been fine. It would be fine because each dollar in the supply represents the same amount of wealth. If the quantum computers didn't work, then now we need to somehow spread the losses
We can "print" more money more money, so everyone has the same amount of dollars but they are now worth less. Or we can tax people more i.e. a 50% tax (maybe not an income tax, but something like the Cyprian haircut) that leaves both the depositors and the engineers with only X/2 dollars, or the government can provide X dollars less of services, in which case we need to spend X more dollars to acquire services the government used to provide.
Somehow that loss needs to get covered. Maybe the money supply increases, or maybe it doesn't. But my (new) argument is that the T = (number of dollars) * (value of a dollar) will go down. Whereas the value of other stuff like gold, houses, bitcoins, etc, might actually stay the same (i.e. go up compared to T).
I realize this is a hypothetical toy example that oversimplifies things. Please let me know if you see any glaring holes in my logic. All this stuff is a bit confusing for me, and I could have easily missed something very important.
I also realize that this is all probably a tangent off of the bitcoin subject. Just say the word if we are done going down this path, either because we agree or whether ti's no longer interesting.
Slashdot Mirror
I think the "gut feeling" would apply more towards going down a certain street. The cop can claim he was just driving around randomly when he saw the suspect do something illegal, when in fact the cop knew exactly where to be to witness a crime because he was tipped off by the NSA, which actually wiretapped a conversation the suspect had over a phone.
From wikipedia: "Ideologically, he aligns himself with anarcho-syndicalism and libertarian socialism." http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/N...
I don't think slavery can really be compared to voluntary employment. It is such a drastically different mechanism that I don't think many (if any) of the same principles apply.
I would say that I don't think there is clear correlation between worker happiness and worker productivity. By this I mean, I don;t think the graph of happiness and productivity is likely to resemble a straight line. I suspect it might look something more like a parabola or a Gaussian distribution.
Maybe the happiest worker is one that does no work at all but remains employed through a computer glitch or manager incompetence
I would not disagree that the advantage is currently in the hands of large corporations. While I can;t speak for all self described libertarians, I would say that most feel that corporations have an undeserved level of power that is harmful to society. However I would also say that most would favor removing this power rather than passing more laws to give workers a big enough legal advantage to compete.
The single biggest thing I think that can be done to further to goal of limiting the power of corporations, is to stop treating corporations as people, and treat all corporate profits as the profit of individuals, and revamping the tax code to be more fair and simple.
I also think things like the negative income tax would be a great way to simply the tax code/welfare system and ensure a minimum income level to all people
"Robots" was my tongue and cheek term for all forms of automation robotic or otherwise.
I don't think a standard "income" is necessary per se, as long as goods and services become essential free (which I believe is one possible scenario for the future). I think it is quite possible the the means of production become available to all people, and raw materials become a resource that is rationed by some kind of democratic system.
Civil unrest, robot armies, opression, etc, is another possible outcome
I never said continuous. You can pause it, sure. Copying to a new body is rather different though. One conciousness ends and never re-starts. That original person dies, they cannot experience what the copy does.
That's only if you refuse to consider the copy to be the same person. Obviously if we do consider the copy to be the same person, then he never died, and if we don't then he did die. My argument is that we *should* consider the copy to be the same person for reasons I have already stated. We are already copies of our past selves.
Consider this. If it were possible to make the copy and keep the original around would that mean there were two of you? Would your conciousness be looking out of four eyes, listening with four ears, be in two different places at once? Of course not, the two would be separate and immediately begin to diverge as their experiences differed.
Yes they would become 2 different consciousness. But they started from the same consciousness. Neither one is more you than the other. This is exactly the same is if you made 2 copies kept them both alive and killed the original.
It has been the case throughout all of human history that you can clearly say which human being "was you" at all points in time, because of the way human biology works. If you had a time machine you could find the "you" from 1979 or the you from 2020, or definitively say that "you" didn't exist in 1903.
What I am saying is that this limitation of biology may one day come to an end, and we may have to explore how this affects our preconceptions of terms like "me". I think we will need to have a new model for how consciousness evolves, and allow for branching.
Imagine if whenever a cell divided, one of the 2 descendents died. It would be easy to treat this new cell as the same cell because it has a clear and single ancestor and descendent. You can look at every point in time and see which single cell corresponds to this particular lineage, and you might be tempted to refer to all these cells as "the same cell" (e.g. cell X). If you all of a sudden remove this limitation, and allow cells to divide (without one always dying), the language of "which one of these cells Y, Z *is* cell X", doesn't really make sense anymore. You have to change your terminology to "cell X is cell Y's ancestor" and "cell Z is cell X's ancestor" , and "cell X has 2 descendents, cell Y and cell Z".
Well isn't that the very issue I am talking about? Libertarians pick and choose which liberties they support and do not support.
Everyone should pick and choose which liberties they support and do not support.
That they often oppose worker liberty in subordination to owner liberty is telling.
What does it tell? That libertarians don't blindly support workers regardless of the situation?
Libertarians also often oppose corporate power as well.
In fact actual libertarian ideology doesn't favor liberty of one group over another in terms of workers or owners. It talks about freedom in terms of autonomy and free association and non-coercion. If the owners of a company are engaging in coercion or the denial of autonomy, then libertarians (the real ones) will oppose that. If workers do the same, then libertarians will oppose them in the same way.
I can't imagine that you would *always* be on the side of "the workers" regardless of the circumstances.
I think a person whose family has been taken hostage can probably be made into just about the most productive worker imaginable, and these working conditions are basically as bad as it gets.
Does this single example completely disprove the concept that "happy workers are more productive"?
I think it does if you view this question very narrowly.
If you allow for some other factors like "we live in a society where we are free to change jobs", I don't think it's a stretch to say that treating your employees worse than every other employer will lead to you losing some/all your workers.
Maybe every company would race to the bottom, but we haven;t really seen that happen. Many corporations pay above minimum wage. Clearly their strategy is not to race to the bottom.
Libertarians hate the state
1. Real libertarians don't "hate" the state. A person who hates the state would probably be better described as an anarchist.
ut their ideal society is one where a corporation can essentially have all of the power of the state, but without any representation.
2. A real libertarian does not want corporations to have the power of a state.
They will say, you are free to leave a corporation and do business with another. How is that different than, if you don't like the laws of a state, go to another state?
Well one big difference is that leaving a corporation doesn't force you to leave your home, family and friends, but leaving a country does.
This isn't hypothetical. Company towns in the past were owned by a corporation which provided essentially all government functions. Quite the libertarian paradise.
A society with only one employer is not a libertarian paradise.
I don;t think you really understand libertarianism. You seem to thinking of a caricature of libertarianism.
In the same way that it is a caricature to say that all liberals want to government to control everything and have everyone be dependent on welfare.
This phenomenon exists. That doesn't mean it is the only thing that can happen.
The argument is not "not a single company will attempt this strategy". It is that these companies will be at a competitive disadvantage.
If a giraffe has a slight competitive advantage because it has a longer neck, it doesn't mean that all the giraffes with short necks instantly die off. It just means that over time, giraffes will gradually have longer and longer necks through the pressure of natural selection.
Yes society has in the past needed a certain number of people in low skill jobs, and that number has continued to rapidly approach zero as technology improves. Soon we will reach the point where the cost of robots will be lower than any 3rd world worker could possibly survive on, and the only jobs that will require humans are high skill jobs that robots can't do.
The danger is not that humans will be stuck in low paying jobs. There won't be any more low paying jobs for humans to get.
technological advancements didn't make just it "look like" workers were more productive. IT actually made them more productive. We have more stuff now, because workers produced more stuff.
Real libertarians (i.e. not republicans in disguise) or in favor of the right to bargain collectively. They just tend to be opposed to laws being passed that give both unions and/or employers and unfair advantage.
I'll bet I can find some "progressives" who would prefer rampant poverty for everyone over even the slightest bit of wealth inequality (e.g. they would prefer a world were everyone was as poor as the poorest person in the world currently to the one we have now).
I don't see what this would prove. And I don't see what you are trying to prove either. That some libertarians are ideologues? There are ideologues for every ideology.
There are left libertarians like Noam Chomsky. There are people who are heroes of the intellectual libertarianism like Milton Friedman who actually proposed the negative income tax as a way to eliminate poverty without removing the incentive to be self sufficient.
It's easy to pick the dumbest people and hold them up as the paradigms of an ideology you disagree with, but it is not intellectually honest.
I'll be the first person to say that there are a lot of selfish and dumb people who claim to be libertarians. But there are a lot of selfish and dumb people in general. I'm fine with calling those people out on their selfishness and stupidity, but I object to equating this juvenile point of view with libertarianism, just as you would probably object if I equated the mentality of person who only wants a free cell phone from Obama with the best liberalism has to offer.
Libertarians also don't believe in the freedom for murderers to murder people, or the freedom for thieves to steal from people. The libertarian philosophy does not advocate some sort of nonsensical universal freedom to do everything. It advocates in certain concepts like free markets, autonomy, and free association.
If you are going to attack the libertarian ideology, at least know what you are talking about.
Imagine the following thought experiments:
1. You take out your brain and cut it right down the middle. you make a copy of both halves and reattach the halves so that you have 2 brains each with half original atoms and half copies. You take each of these brains and stick them into artificial bodies (e.g. robots). They both have the same memories and inclinations, until the moment they awaken and slowly diverge as they start to have different experiences. Are they both you? Are neither you?
2. You replace one neuron in your brain with a clone of this same neuron and reattach in the same way that the original neuron was attached. It functions just as the old one did. You feel exactly the same. Is this just an illusion? Is this a different person who only thinks he's you? What if we repeat this process 100 billion times, and replace your neurons one by one and get the same result (you feel the same and act the same)? What if I told you we were in fact taking all your old neurons and putting them back together into your original brain and sticking that into a robot that also acted and felt like you (but in a robot)? Which one would be you? Both? Neither? What if instead of pulling out your neurons 1 at a time, we replaced the atoms in your neurons one at a time? This is kind of whats already happening in your brain already just through normal biological process, the only difference is that nobody is assembling the neurons that are removed, back into your original brain.
It's a copy, the original one still dies, that stream of conciousness ends.
So if you could freeze someone and thaw them out, they would not be really you because their stream of consciousness was not continuous?
You can't download yourself to a computer or a new body, just make a copy and then die yourself.
Well if you *could* download yourself into a computer or a new body, how would that be any different? That's like saying I want you to email me an image file, but I don;t want it to be a copy, I want it to be the original. What does that even mean? It's the information that's meaningful, not the atoms used to represent that information at any given time. You can represent the same image using different materials (pits in a cd, electric charges on a magnetic disk, 1's and 0's written in a notebook with a pencil)
If somehow you or most anybody got cloned down the the atomic structure level, the you that you are at the moment wouldn't at all look at the other as "me".
I would probably phrase this as: Both my future me's would not view eachother as the same person as themselves.
You would still be in the same place when you woke up, if you had to go to sleep at all. The other you would "occur" somewhere else on receiving consciousness.
I never wake up in the same place in the bed that I went to sleep in. If my clone and I both wok up in the same bed, I'm sure neither of us would no for sure which was the original copy, based solely on discontinuity.
Unfortunately due to what I inherited from past me's, I am compelled to worry about future me's.
And if you had a silicon copy of yourself, would you be willing to kill the meat-you? No? Then I'd say a brain-state copy isn't you, it's a copy.
I would not be willing to kill the meat me. This is because I have evolved some pretty sophisticated self preservation instincts. That doesn't mean the copy can;t *also* be me. There is no rule of the universe that says there can be only 1 me. If I copied myself, I'm sure the meat me, would be sad that he is still going to die of old age. The silicon me will be ecstatic that the copying process worked.
It's easy to say that the meat me is the *real* me. But I think a more appropriate way to look at the situation is that we are constantly changing into different people. The present me is a new person that came from the me from a moment ago. The future me is a new me that is going to come from the present me in a moment. A copy is a scenario where there are 2 future me's rather than only 1. Unfortunately the biological copy has some limitations and is going to die.
Looking at it this way I think clears up some confusion. You asked would *I* be willing to kill the meat me. This presupposes that *I* will be only 1 of the 2 copies, which is wrong. If there are 2 of me, they would both not want to die equally. One of the copies would be better able to achieve that goal.
In short, either all this business about a continuous, individual consciousness is largely illusory or we just don't understand the phenomenon very well at all yet.
There is lots of things we *do* understand. We understand that the atoms that make up our brain are constantly changing. New ones come in and old ones go out. Some of the atoms in our brain belonged to other people's brains (some of which are probably even still alive). It is pretty clear that what makes you you is not the physical atoms. If this were true then you are definitely not the same person moment to moment.
The only other alternative is that it is the configuration of the atoms that is you. This explains why you feel like the same person even though your atoms are constantly changing. This also makes people unfomfortable because it also implies that you can be copied because your particular configuration can just as easily be made from different atoms. But this discomfort is not a good reason to believe this idea is wrong.
Also if the configuration is what makes you you, what does it mean if you can make a different configuration that has the same functional effect (i.e. a silicon copy). It acts like you, it has the same feelings, taste in music, loves the same peoople, has the same memories. Even if you want to call this thing a mere "copy", it would appear to be a copy that's as good as the original. There would be in my view as much utility in distinguishing these copies as there would be in trying to figure out which one of every set of identical twins got the soul.
I think it will be closer to 20 or 30 years.
The "original you" dies every time something in your brain changes. What's the difference?
What if you replaced every neuron in your brain with an artificial one, one at a time. Would this make it easier to pretend their is continuity? What if we hide the blob of meat that used to be your brain after the process is over?
Well if you do it right and use brain state rather than just tweets and facebook posts, then you don't need to greive at all, because you'd still be alive, and your consciousness would be housed in a silicon brain rather than a meat brain.
Right - we have a word for companies that perform those services: "banks".
I never said that these would not be considered banks. I only said that they were not necessary with bitcoin, but this does not mean they can't exist with bitcoin.
Odd as it sounds, the government "making people whole" on widespread bank failures by "printing money" doesn't actually change the money supply.
Lets say hypothetically that all the banks invested in something that ultimately provided a poor return (e.g. they invested in quantum computers that turned out not to work or something). They did this by indirectly spending X dollars of depositors on engineers and materials to build the quantum computers. Those engineers (an materials suppliers) then take their X dollars and put it back in the bank. Now we find out the quantum computers don't work, and the bank can't give the engineers and the depositors their money back because the bank only has X dollars, but owes 2X dollars. So now the FDIC needs to step in and provide the additional X dollars.
Maybe the government can just send X fewer dollars on other stuff to cover the FDIC, or maybe it can't and it needs to "print" money to cover them.
Had the quantum computers worked, then the bank would be able to sell or rent these quantum computers (indirectly through the companies they invested in) and everything would have been fine. It would be fine because each dollar in the supply represents the same amount of wealth. If the quantum computers didn't work, then now we need to somehow spread the losses
We can "print" more money more money, so everyone has the same amount of dollars but they are now worth less. Or we can tax people more i.e. a 50% tax (maybe not an income tax, but something like the Cyprian haircut) that leaves both the depositors and the engineers with only X/2 dollars, or the government can provide X dollars less of services, in which case we need to spend X more dollars to acquire services the government used to provide.
Somehow that loss needs to get covered. Maybe the money supply increases, or maybe it doesn't. But my (new) argument is that the T = (number of dollars) * (value of a dollar) will go down. Whereas the value of other stuff like gold, houses, bitcoins, etc, might actually stay the same (i.e. go up compared to T).
I realize this is a hypothetical toy example that oversimplifies things. Please let me know if you see any glaring holes in my logic. All this stuff is a bit confusing for me, and I could have easily missed something very important.
I also realize that this is all probably a tangent off of the bitcoin subject. Just say the word if we are done going down this path, either because we agree or whether ti's no longer interesting.