@ people who believe in pattern identity and also believe personal autonomy is a coherent concept and important moral value
you are confusing
please justify this
I’m fine with me controlling my future selves, I dislike other people doing it. As someone shares more of my values and facts, I object to them having influence over my life less. I object strongly to being desire-hacked by hostile corporations, but I like friends suggesting helpful things to me.
I’m not sure I want to defend personal autonomy as a coherent concept, but that seems like a minimally adequate reconciliation.
My ten-year-old self was a pro-war pro-dictatorship primitivist vegetarian. She was a British Empire apologist leaning slightly right-wing of Genghis Khan, believed the purpose of life was eternal war against all monotheists, and tried to start a fucking religion where she successfully got a bunch of other ten year olds to think she was a fairy prophet. She thought romance was degenerate and also like an evil mind virus which hacked your brain into wanting disgusting and objectively bad sex things, and incidentally wanted to enslave all men as revenge for the whole patriarchy thing. She believed racism didn't exist and suspected that people outside her home country were p-zombies, and was mostly aware that she made that up to reassure herself so she wouldn't have to cry about how awful global poverty is, but was kind of okay with that because believing things makes them true. She was fairly sure that the best way to achieve her goals was to write really inspiring books and be a great artist, and wanted to support this career choice by living cheaply in a camp in the forest and learning to catch her own food using archery. (This was okay, even though factory farming wasn't, because factory farming was dishonourable, whereas hunting gave the animals a fair chance to be properly defeated in battle.) If she started the glorious camp in the forest, people would see how much better the old ways were and come to do fun swordfighting in the forest with her. Then they would take over the world through being good at swordfighting, which would be okay and not like murder because swordfighting is honourable. She was deeply against charity because only poor people living via subsistence farming had meaningful lives, on account of how life can't have meaning unless you regularly have to fight for it. She thought animal lives were worth more than human lives because animals were innocent, except of course in the case of humans she cared about who were also innocent. She was working on a book in which the heroine was genuinely unsure whether to solve overpopulation via mass murder. She was like... if you took evil fascists, combined them with religious fundamentalists, added a dash of the worst "animal welfare" advocates and environmentalists, and then gave them books on bushido and how true friendships can only be forged in valorous battle.
I am currently a lefty Effective Altruist whose most strongly held political positions are "war is bad", "immigration is good", and "vaccines are very, very, very good, like the best thing ever, please let's have more vaccines". I love the NHS, hate animal welfare and am vehemently opposed to veganism, want open borders, and think we should give poor people more money. I am bi and poly and happy that way. I am trying to become a consultant because I love business, desire practical skills, and also want money. I kind of wish my younger self had spent less time swordfighting and songwriting, and more time learning any practical skills and making more friends. I am very very glad that my younger self failed in her attempts to bindingly commit me to never dating, never hurting animals and never supporting technological civilization.
Pick a random person I follow on tumblr, and they probably share my values and beliefs far more than I share the values and beliefs of my ten year old self.
I don't see any reason to believe this trend won't continue. Thirty-year-old-me will probably consider me an alien. There's a good chance she'll hate the binding decisions I'm making for her. There's a fairly solid chance she'll consider me to be abusively exploiting her - I probably ruin her life in countless ways just because I can, it's easy for me to do by avoiding aversive tasks or being tempted by fun-but-unhealthy things, and I find it really hard to care about her nearly as much as I care about my actual friends.
Luckily, laws protected me from my ten year old self; minors can't sign binding contracts. Absolutely nothing protects my thirty year old self from my current self. Maybe something should.
















