#abstract philosophical musings
i know we moved on from copy discourse but id like to have MORE copy discourse. theres the question, right, of “is a copy of you you-enough that you dont feel unhappy about this-you dying”. and generally, my gut answer is no. so, the premise of severance is that theres a device that isolates your memories. when youre at work, you only have work memories, when youre outside of work, you only have non-work memories. now, lets say youve been severed, and youre the workself. imagine your worktime is worth living, i.e. if it was the only version of you, you wouldnt want to kill yourself. would you feel unhappy about the idea of your lifeself quitting the job, so you dont work there anymore and your workself memories are never again accessed? (alternate framing: your workself is in indefinite stasis) i feel slightly mixed up about this, but mostly feel like this would not be bad. i think if had two distinct sets of memories, which could not be accessed simultaneously, the idea of one set of those memories not being accessed anymore is not particularly distressing. but to me at least this seems fundamentally the same as there being two copies of me, and one of those copies painlessly dying
I don’t tend to think of amnesia as death, but that hypothetical actually does feel quite scary to me!
Perhaps more because of the uncertainty about who you would become, being replaced by an unknowable stranger, than because of the memory loss itself being inherently bad? But the uncertainty is also a big part of why we fear death, so it comes out feeling pretty similar to me, emotionally.
If work-me remembered being home-me but not vice versa, I would be much more OK with potentially ditching the (probably somewhat dull) work memories. But becoming a total stranger with only the deep core of my personality intact? No thanks.
still marvelling over “if people had the right to bodily autonomy then we couldn’t punish them for taking drugs or having sex”
If people had bodily autonomy, we couldn’t require them to take vaccines or wear masks, either. Nor could we regulate which substances people can imbibe while driving.
Or could we? Of course we could! Your right to swing your fist ends when it hits my face, after all. Drunk driving can be banned because your bodily autonomy in getting drunk does not legalise putting others at risk. We can’t require anti-COVID measures per se, but we can criminalise interacting with other people without them and potentially giving them COVID.
Similarly, we can criminalise abortion because it harms the fetus (a seperate person), criminalise doing drugs because you might do something dangerous to other people while intoxicated, criminalise selling drugs because they’re an unsafe product, criminalise casual (and gay) sex because it risks spreading STDs and hurting your partner’s feelings to the point of needing therapy, etc.
It’s almost like debates over human rights inevitably reduce to object-level opinions.
