One way to approach this empirically would be to ask what beliefs would
spread in a society of agents which are capable of backup/restore,
or perhaps equivalently of some form of destructive teleportation.
Would agents evolve to act as if their "successors" (after a backup and
restore cycle) were as important to them as future selves which had not
gone through such a change?
If accepting backup/restore as benign were to increase survival prospects
for the successors, then agents which adopted such beliefs would tend
to increase in numbers, and eventually these beliefs would come to
be widely accepted.
Hal
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