Re: language, cloning and thought experiments

From: Stathis Papaioannou <stathisp.domain.name.hidden>
Date: Sat, 7 Mar 2009 00:31:59 +1100

2009/3/6 Jack Mallah <jackmallah.domain.name.hidden> wrote:

>> If you're not worried about the fair trade, then to be consistent you shouldn't be worried about the unfair trade either. In the fair trade, one version of you A disappears overnight, and a new version of you B is created elsewhere in the morning. The unfair trade is the same, except that there is an extra version of you A' which disappears overnight. Now why should the *addition* of another version make you nervous when you wouldn't have been nervous otherwise?
>
> It's not the addition of the other copy that's the problem; it's the loss of it.  Losing people is bad.

How would the addition then loss of the extra copy be bad for the
original, or for that matter for the disappearing extra copy, given
that neither copy has any greater claim to being resurrected in the
morning as B?

>> That Riker's measure increased is not the important thing here: it is that the two Rikers differentiated. Killing one of them after they had differentiated would be wrong, but killing one of them before they had differentiated would be OK.
>
> That would be equivalent to U = Sum_i Q_i in which no changes in the wavefunction matter at all, since M_i > 0 for all i no matter what.  I don't think you thought that one through.

I don't agree with the way you calculate utility at all. If I got $5
every time I pressed a button which decreased my absolute measure in
the multiverse a millionfold I would happily press the button all day.
It would be easy money and I'd feel exactly the same afterwards, just
$5 richer. On the other hand, if pressing the button decreased the
measure of those versions of me having good experiences by 1% relative
to the versions of me having bad experiences, then I wouldn't press
it, and certainly not repeatedly.


-- 
Stathis Papaioannou
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Received on Fri Mar 06 2009 - 08:32:08 PST

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