>Survivor is edited after the fact, once the winners and all the arcs of contestants are known.
That might make it easier for the model to pick up on clues from the editing process. Like winners get more on-screen confessionals or something like that.
Version 1: A mad scientist swaps your mind with another person's (Linda's), then asks which resulting body he should torture. Intuition says spare the one with your personality, so personality looks like the key to identity.
Version 2: He's going to torture you, but first gives you amnesia, then makes you believe you're Linda, then gives Linda your memories. Intuition says don't torture your body, so the body looks like the key.
Premised on being utterly selfish and not caring about Linda.
Leaving that aside, is this really a great and clever question? In version 2, your minds are swapped, so it's the same question. The difference is that you have been "driven crazy" and "deluded", but in what sense? If the objective is to avoid yourself being tortured, it's unclear which one is yourself, simply because the question relies on the unclear fictional process of "making you believe you're the other person", and the question itself implies you shouldn't trust that process.
It could be made shorter: "A mad scientist comes along and does something mysterious, so that you might not be yourself any more! So, are you? Ah, you don't know! Gotcha!"
The original is in Problems of the Self, 1973. (Or it's an essay titled The Self and The Future.) I've got hold of that, am reading. The original version is really long.
The first six pages are just really making a meal out of describing all the ramifications of the simple sci-fi concept of a body swap.
Yes, unfortunately it seems to be not very good. "He now further adds that at the moment of torture I shall not only not remember the things I am now in a position to remember, but will have a different set of impressions of my past, quite different from the memories I now have. I do not think that this would cheer me up, either." So, the problem with this is that it's nonsense, like saying "You are not you, but you are! Now if something happens to that person, does it happen to you?" Well I don't know, Bernard, it depends what your rather silly words mean. He's just playing the shell game with the word I.
Then at the end (ten pages later) there's a messier version: "he could have gone on and produced two persons each with A-like character and memories, as well as one or two with B-like characteristics". So it seems that the confusion and non-neatness of the swap is the whole point. Thing is, I'm not even very concerned which one is me. I suppose, alright, I do prefer me-like characteristics. So I'll take the half-dozen clones who seem vaguely right, that's good enough for me. Whatever.
Cost plus have been disfavored in the FAR for a long time. That doesn't stop contract officers from writing them. The biggest thing, imo, is that congress needs to improve its oversight of ACAT I and ACAT II programs and stop waiting for them to be a hundred million overrun before yanking them.
That might make it easier for the model to pick up on clues from the editing process. Like winners get more on-screen confessionals or something like that.
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