I bite the third bullet. I am not as gifted with words as you are to describe why biting it is just and good and even natural if you look at it from a certain point of view, but...
You are believing in something mystical. You are believing in personal identity as something meaningful in reality, without giving any reason why it ought to be, because that is how your algorithm feels from the inside. There is nothing special about your brain as compared to your brain+your spinal cord, or as compared to your brain+this pencil I am holding. How could there be? Reality doesn’t know what a brain is. Brains are not baked into the fundaments of reality, they are emergent from within. How could there be anything meaningful about them?
Consider this thought experiment. We take “you”, and for a brief timespan, say, epsilon seconds, we replace “you” with “Brittany Spears”. Then, after the epsilon seconds have passed, we swap “you” back in. Does this have a greater than order epsilon effect on anything? If so, what accounts for this discontinuity?
It sounds to me like EY is equating the second bullet with “perfect altruism is coherent, as is caring only about one’s self at the current moment, but nothing in between is.” To that, though, as Furcas says, one can be selfish according to similarity of pattern rather than ontologically privileged continuity.
Or one could be selfish according to a non-fundamental, ontologically reducible continuity. At least, I don’t see why not. Has anyone offered an argument for pattern over process?
And for the same reason you buy things for yourself more often than for other people? And for the same reason you (probably) prefer someone else falling off a cliff than yourself?
Considering that your cute comment was consistent with your other comments in this discussion, I think I can be forgiven for thinking you were serious.
Actually, which of your other comments here are just being cute?
Right, so of course I’m rather selfish in the sense of valuing things-like-myself, and so of course I buy more things for myself than I do for random strangers, and so forth. But I also know that I’m not ontologically fundamental; I’m just a conjunction of traits that can be shared by other observers to various degrees. So “I don’t throw myself off cliffs for very roughly the same reason I don’t throw other people off cliffs” is this humorously terse and indirect way of saying that identity is a scalar, not a binary attribute. (Notice that I said “very roughly the same reason” and not “exactly the same reason”; that was intentional.)
I am sad to see this comment. Perhaps you were mistaken in how clear the comment was to how broad an audience, but I think the original comment was valuable and that we lose a lot of our ability to communicate if we are too careful.
Except this wasn’t an issue of being too careful, and it definitely doesn’t count as good communication!
Z_M_Davis made a remark that was both poorly-reasoned and supportive of every other comment he left in the discussion (in trivializing the privileged state of any choice of identity). If he had been arguing against the third horn, okay, maybe it could have been read as “oh, he’s cleverly mocking a position he disagrees with”.
But then he comes back with, “I was trying to be cute.” Okay, so he’s … doing self-parody. Great—we all need to be able to laugh at ourselves. So what’s his real position, then?
Oh, you see, he was making a very subtle point about identity being scalar rather than binary (which has some as-of-yet unspecified implication for the merit of his position). And there was a hidden argument in there that allows him to see his life as no different from any others and yet still act in preference to himself. And it was obvious what distinction he was making by using the words “very roughly the same reason” instead of “exactly the same reason”.
I’m sorry, but that’s just not “how it works”. You can claim illusion of transparency issues if the assumed common knowledge is small, and you have a reasonable basis for assuming it, and your full explanation doesn’t look blatantly ad hoc.
In other words, anywhere but here.
I’m sorry to belabor the point, but yes, sometimes you just have to admit you goofed. Mistakes are okay! We all make them! But we don’t all try to say “I meant to do that”.
that allows him to see his life as no different from any others and yet still act in preference to himself
I never said it was no different. Elsewhere in the thread, I had argued that selfishness is entirely compatible with biting the third bullet. Egan’s Law.
And it was obvious what distinction he was making by using the words “very roughly the same reason” instead of “exactly the same reason”.
I disagree; if it had been obvious, I wouldn’t have had to point it out explicitly. Maybe the cognitive history would help? I had originally typed “the same reason,” but added “very roughly” before posting because I anticipated your objection. I think the original was slightly funnier, but I thought it was worth trading off a little of the humor value in exchange for making the statement more defensible when taken literally.
I’m sorry, but that’s just not “how it works”. [...] your full explanation [looks] blatantly ad hoc.
I’m curious. If what actually happened looks ad hoc to you, what’s your alternative theory? If you don’t trust what I say about what I was thinking, then what do you believe instead? You seem to think I’ve committed some error other than writing two admittedly somewhat opaque comments, but I’m not sure what it’s supposed to be.
Is there any chance that you will soon mature / calm down / whatever it is you need to do to stop being so hostile, so frequently? This is only the latest example of you coming down on people with the utmost contempt for fairly minor offenses, if they’re offenses at all. It looks increasingly like you think anyone who conducts themselves in the comments differently than you prefer ought to be beheaded or something. It’s really unpleasant to read, and I don’t think it’s likely to be effective in getting people to adopt your standards of behavior. (I can think of few posters I’m less motivated to emulate than you, as one data point.)
Edit: I downvoted the parent of this comment because I would like to see fewer comments that resemble it.
I hate to play tu quoque, but it’s rather strange of you to make this criticism considering that just a few months ago you gave a long list of very confining restrictions you wanted on commenters, enforced by bannings. Despite their best efforts, no one could discern the pattern behind what made something beyond-the-pale offensive, so you were effectively asking for unchecked, arbitrary authority to remove comments you don’t like.
You even went so far as to ask to deputize your own hand-picked cadre of posters “with their heads on right” to assist in classifying speech as unacceptable!
Yes, Alicorn, I’ve been very critical of those who claim objectivity in modding people they’re flaming, but I don’t think I’ve ever demanded the sort of arbitrary authority over the forum that you feel entitled to.
I will gladly make my criticisms more polite in the future, but I’m not going to apologize for having lower karma than if I abused the voting system the way some of you seem to.
And in the meantime, perhaps you could make it a habit of checking if the criticisms you make of others could apply to yourself. I’m not asking that you be perfect or unassailable in this respect. I’m not even asking that you try to adhere to your own standards. I just ask that you check for whether you’re living up to it.
Edit: I didn’t downvote the parent of this comment because I’m not petty like that.
I’m glad you pointed this out, because I never would have figured it out on my own. It’s subtle!
you gave a long list of very confining restrictions you wanted on commenters, enforced by bannings
I dispute “long”, “very confining”, and “bannings”. There were a handful of things on my list, and they could all be summed up as “sexism”, which is only one thing. Many commenters have no trouble abiding by the restrictions. I also don’t remember ever proposing actual bans, just social mechanisms of discouragement and some downvoting.
Despite their best efforts, no one could discern the pattern behind what made something beyond-the-pale offensive, so you were effectively asking for unchecked, arbitrary authority to remove comments you don’t like.
I dispute “their best efforts”, “no one”, “asking for unchecked, arbitrary authority”, and “don’t like”. I am not convinced that everyone tried their very best. I am convinced that many people understood me very well. I did not request any personal authority, much less the unchecked arbitrary kind. My requests had to do with comments that had a particular feature, which does not overlap completely with things I do not like.
You even went so far as to ask to deputize your own hand-picked cadre of posters “with their heads on right” to assist in classifying speech as unacceptable!
That was in response to discomfort with being implicitly given, because of my gender, the “authority” you accused me of requesting. I did not go on to actually deputize anyone.
I will gladly make my criticisms more polite in the future
Yaaaaaaaay!
I’m not going to apologize for having lower karma than if I abused the voting system the way some of you seem to.
Wait, you’re saying that some people conduct an abuse of the voting system that increases their own karma? As opposed to increasing or decreasing others’? What accusation are you making, exactly? Against whom? What’s your evidence for it? Or are you saying that if you abused the voting system, you could get others to upvote you more and downvote you less?
And in the meantime, perhaps you could make it a habit of checking if the criticisms you make of others could apply to yourself.
I don’t think, in ordinary language, it’s possible to make a habit of the same thing twice, so unfortunately, I can’t do that, anymore.
I’m not asking that you be perfect or unassailable in this respect. I’m not even asking that you try to adhere to your own standards.
I’m so glad you said so. Subtle.
Edit: I didn’t downvote the parent of this comment because I’m not petty like that.
Okay. You have my blanket approval to refrain from downvoting anything you are disinclined to downvote.
Can I elaborate? When the discussion has become polarized to the point where people will downmod pretty much any future comment on the grounds that it’s perpetuating a flamewar or they view the poster as being on “the other side”? Not a chance, I’m afraid.
I do, however, feel very honored that at least some people sympathize with me here.
A lot of people, especially religious people, equate lack of belief in a fundamental meaning of life with throwing oneself off cliffs. Eliezer is committing the same sort of mistake.
No, I think he’s just pointing out that the common intuitions behind anticipatory fear are grossly violated by the third horn.
I’d like to see you chew this bullet a bit more, so try this version. You are to be split (copied once). One of you is randomly chosen to wake up in a red room and be tortured for 50 years, while the other wakes up in a green room and suffers a mere dust speck. Ten minutes will pass for both copies before the torture or specking commences.
How much do you fear being tortured before the split? Does this level of fear go up/down when you wake up in a red/green room? To accept the third horn seems to imply that you should feel no relief upon waking in the green room.
Good point, I should have phrased that differently: “To accept the third horn seems to imply that any relief you feel upon waking in the green room is just ‘legacy’ human intuition, rather than any rational expectation of having avoided future suffering.”
You know, your example is actually making that horn look more attractive: replace the torture to the person with ’50000 utilities subtracted from the cosmos’, etc, and then it’s obvious that the green-room is no grounds for relief since the −50000 is still a fact. More narrowly, if you valued other persons equal to yourself, then the green room is definitely no cause for relief.
We could figure out how much you value other people by varying how bad the torture, is and maybe adding a deal where if the green-room person will flip a fair coin (heads, the punishment is swapped; tails, no change), the torture is lessened by n. If you value the copy equal to yourself, you’ll be willing to swap for any difference right down to 1, since if it’s tails, there’s no loss or gain, but if it’s heads, there’s a n profit.
Now, of course even if the copy is identical to yourself, and even if we postulate that somehow the 2 minds haven’t diverged (we could do this by making the coinflip deal contingent on being the tortured one − 2 identical rooms, neither of which knows whether they are the tortured one; by making it contingent, there’s no risk in not taking the bet), I think essentially no human would take the coinflip for just +1 - they would only take it if there was a major amelioration of the torture. Why? Because pain is so much realer and overriding to us, which is a fact about us and not about agents we can imagine.
(If you’re not convinced, replace the punishments with rewards and modify the bet to increase the reward but possibly switch it to the other fellow; and imagine a parallel series of experiments being run with rational agents who don’t have pain/greed. After a lot of experiments, who will have more money?)
More narrowly, if you valued other persons equal to yourself, then the green room is definitely no cause for relief.
Yes, and this hypothesis can even be weakened a bit, since the other persons involved are nearly identical to you. All it takes is a sufficiently “fuzzy” sense of self.
Now, of course even if the copy is identical to yourself, and even if we postulate that somehow the 2 minds haven’t diverged [...] I think essentially no human would take the coinflip for just +1 - they would only take it if there was a major amelioration of the torture.
To clarify what you mean by “haven’t diverged”… does that include the offer of the flip? E.g., both receive the offer, but only one of the responses “counts”? Because I can’t imagine not taking the flip if I knew I was in such a situation… my anticipation would be cleanly split between both outcomes due to indexical uncertainty. It’s a more complicated question once I know which room I’m in.
To clarify what you mean by “haven’t diverged”… does that include the offer of the flip? E.g., both receive the offer, but only one of the responses “counts”? Because I can’t imagine not taking the flip if I knew I was in such a situation… my anticipation would be cleanly split between both outcomes due to indexical uncertainty. It’s a more complicated question once I know which room I’m in.
Well, maybe I wasn’t clear. I’m imagining that there are 2 green rooms, say, however, one room has been secretly picked out for the torture and the other gets the dustspeck.
Each person now is made the offer: if you flip this coin, and you are not the torture room, the torture will be reduced by n and the room tortured may be swapped if the coin came up heads; however, if you are the torture room, the coin flip does nothing.
Since the minds are the same, in the same circumstances, with the same offer, we don’t need to worry about what happens if the coins fall differently or if one accepts and the other rejects. The logic they should follow is: if I am not the other, then by taking the coin flip I am doing myself a disservice by risking torture, and I gain under no circumstance and so should never take the bet; but if I am the other as well, then I lose under no circumstance so I should always take the bet.
(I wonder if I am just very obtusely reinventing the prisoner’s dilemma or newcomb’s paradox here, or if by making the 2 copies identical I’ve destroyed an important asymmetry. As you say, if you don’t know whether “you” have been spared torture, then maybe the bet does nothing interesting.)
The logic they should follow is: if I am not the other, then by taking the coin flip I am doing myself a disservice by risking torture, and I gain under no circumstance and so should never take the bet; but if I am the other as well, then I lose under no circumstance so I should always take the bet.
I’m not sure what “not being the other” means here, really. There may be two underlying physical processes, but they’re only giving rise to one stream of experience. From that stream’s perspective, its future is split evenly between two possibilities, so accepting the bet strictly dominates. Isn’t this just straightforward utility maximization?
The reason the question becomes more complicated if the minds diverge is that the concept of “self” must be examined to see how the agent weights the experiences of an extremely similar process in its utility function. It’s sort of a question of which is more defining: past or future. A purely forward-looking agent says “ain’t my future” and evaluates the copy’s experiences as those of a stranger. A purely backward-looking agent says “shares virtually my entire past” and evaluates the copy’s experiences as though they were his own. This all assumes some coherent concept of “selfishness”—clearly a purely altruistic agent would take the flip.
I wonder if I am just very obtusely reinventing the prisoner’s dilemma or newcomb’s paradox here, or if by making the 2 copies identical I’ve destroyed an important asymmetry.
The identical copies scenario is a prisoner’s dilemma where you make one decision for both sides, and then get randomly assigned to a side. It’s just plain crazy to defect in a degenerate prisoner’s dilemma against yourself. I think this does destroy an important asymmetry—in the divergent scenario, the green-room agent knows that only his decision counts.
Speaking for my own values, I’m still thoroughly confused by the divergent scenario. I’d probably be selfish enough not to take the flip for a stranger, but I’d be genuinely unsure of what to do if it was basically “me” in the red room.
I bite the third bullet. I am not as gifted with words as you are to describe why biting it is just and good and even natural if you look at it from a certain point of view, but...
You are believing in something mystical. You are believing in personal identity as something meaningful in reality, without giving any reason why it ought to be, because that is how your algorithm feels from the inside. There is nothing special about your brain as compared to your brain+your spinal cord, or as compared to your brain+this pencil I am holding. How could there be? Reality doesn’t know what a brain is. Brains are not baked into the fundaments of reality, they are emergent from within. How could there be anything meaningful about them?
Consider this thought experiment. We take “you”, and for a brief timespan, say, epsilon seconds, we replace “you” with “Brittany Spears”. Then, after the epsilon seconds have passed, we swap “you” back in. Does this have a greater than order epsilon effect on anything? If so, what accounts for this discontinuity?
EY seems to have equated the third bullet with throwing oneself off of cliffs. Do you throw yourself off of cliffs? Why or why not?
It sounds to me like EY is equating the second bullet with “perfect altruism is coherent, as is caring only about one’s self at the current moment, but nothing in between is.” To that, though, as Furcas says, one can be selfish according to similarity of pattern rather than ontologically privileged continuity.
Or one could be selfish according to a non-fundamental, ontologically reducible continuity. At least, I don’t see why not. Has anyone offered an argument for pattern over process?
randallsquared has it dead right, I think.
I don’t throw myself off cliffs for very roughly the same reason I don’t throw other people off cliffs.
And for the same reason you buy things for yourself more often than for other people? And for the same reason you (probably) prefer someone else falling off a cliff than yourself?
I was trying to be cute.
Considering that your cute comment was consistent with your other comments in this discussion, I think I can be forgiven for thinking you were serious.
Actually, which of your other comments here are just being cute?
Right, so of course I’m rather selfish in the sense of valuing things-like-myself, and so of course I buy more things for myself than I do for random strangers, and so forth. But I also know that I’m not ontologically fundamental; I’m just a conjunction of traits that can be shared by other observers to various degrees. So “I don’t throw myself off cliffs for very roughly the same reason I don’t throw other people off cliffs” is this humorously terse and indirect way of saying that identity is a scalar, not a binary attribute. (Notice that I said “very roughly the same reason” and not “exactly the same reason”; that was intentional.)
And … you expected everyone else to get that out of your cute comment?
You know, sometimes you just have to throw in the towel and say, “Oops. I goofed.”
ETA: I’m sure that downmod was because this comment was truly unhelpful to the discussion, rather than because it made someone look bad.
Oops. I goofed.
I am sad to see this comment. Perhaps you were mistaken in how clear the comment was to how broad an audience, but I think the original comment was valuable and that we lose a lot of our ability to communicate if we are too careful.
Except this wasn’t an issue of being too careful, and it definitely doesn’t count as good communication!
Z_M_Davis made a remark that was both poorly-reasoned and supportive of every other comment he left in the discussion (in trivializing the privileged state of any choice of identity). If he had been arguing against the third horn, okay, maybe it could have been read as “oh, he’s cleverly mocking a position he disagrees with”.
But then he comes back with, “I was trying to be cute.” Okay, so he’s … doing self-parody. Great—we all need to be able to laugh at ourselves. So what’s his real position, then?
Oh, you see, he was making a very subtle point about identity being scalar rather than binary (which has some as-of-yet unspecified implication for the merit of his position). And there was a hidden argument in there that allows him to see his life as no different from any others and yet still act in preference to himself. And it was obvious what distinction he was making by using the words “very roughly the same reason” instead of “exactly the same reason”.
I’m sorry, but that’s just not “how it works”. You can claim illusion of transparency issues if the assumed common knowledge is small, and you have a reasonable basis for assuming it, and your full explanation doesn’t look blatantly ad hoc.
In other words, anywhere but here.
I’m sorry to belabor the point, but yes, sometimes you just have to admit you goofed. Mistakes are okay! We all make them! But we don’t all try to say “I meant to do that”.
See Furcas’s comment.
I never said it was no different. Elsewhere in the thread, I had argued that selfishness is entirely compatible with biting the third bullet. Egan’s Law.
I disagree; if it had been obvious, I wouldn’t have had to point it out explicitly. Maybe the cognitive history would help? I had originally typed “the same reason,” but added “very roughly” before posting because I anticipated your objection. I think the original was slightly funnier, but I thought it was worth trading off a little of the humor value in exchange for making the statement more defensible when taken literally.
I’m curious. If what actually happened looks ad hoc to you, what’s your alternative theory? If you don’t trust what I say about what I was thinking, then what do you believe instead? You seem to think I’ve committed some error other than writing two admittedly somewhat opaque comments, but I’m not sure what it’s supposed to be.
Is there any chance that you will soon mature / calm down / whatever it is you need to do to stop being so hostile, so frequently? This is only the latest example of you coming down on people with the utmost contempt for fairly minor offenses, if they’re offenses at all. It looks increasingly like you think anyone who conducts themselves in the comments differently than you prefer ought to be beheaded or something. It’s really unpleasant to read, and I don’t think it’s likely to be effective in getting people to adopt your standards of behavior. (I can think of few posters I’m less motivated to emulate than you, as one data point.)
Edit: I downvoted the parent of this comment because I would like to see fewer comments that resemble it.
I hate to play tu quoque, but it’s rather strange of you to make this criticism considering that just a few months ago you gave a long list of very confining restrictions you wanted on commenters, enforced by bannings. Despite their best efforts, no one could discern the pattern behind what made something beyond-the-pale offensive, so you were effectively asking for unchecked, arbitrary authority to remove comments you don’t like.
You even went so far as to ask to deputize your own hand-picked cadre of posters “with their heads on right” to assist in classifying speech as unacceptable!
Yes, Alicorn, I’ve been very critical of those who claim objectivity in modding people they’re flaming, but I don’t think I’ve ever demanded the sort of arbitrary authority over the forum that you feel entitled to.
I will gladly make my criticisms more polite in the future, but I’m not going to apologize for having lower karma than if I abused the voting system the way some of you seem to.
And in the meantime, perhaps you could make it a habit of checking if the criticisms you make of others could apply to yourself. I’m not asking that you be perfect or unassailable in this respect. I’m not even asking that you try to adhere to your own standards. I just ask that you check for whether you’re living up to it.
Edit: I didn’t downvote the parent of this comment because I’m not petty like that.
I’m glad you pointed this out, because I never would have figured it out on my own. It’s subtle!
I dispute “long”, “very confining”, and “bannings”. There were a handful of things on my list, and they could all be summed up as “sexism”, which is only one thing. Many commenters have no trouble abiding by the restrictions. I also don’t remember ever proposing actual bans, just social mechanisms of discouragement and some downvoting.
I dispute “their best efforts”, “no one”, “asking for unchecked, arbitrary authority”, and “don’t like”. I am not convinced that everyone tried their very best. I am convinced that many people understood me very well. I did not request any personal authority, much less the unchecked arbitrary kind. My requests had to do with comments that had a particular feature, which does not overlap completely with things I do not like.
That was in response to discomfort with being implicitly given, because of my gender, the “authority” you accused me of requesting. I did not go on to actually deputize anyone.
Yaaaaaaaay!
Wait, you’re saying that some people conduct an abuse of the voting system that increases their own karma? As opposed to increasing or decreasing others’? What accusation are you making, exactly? Against whom? What’s your evidence for it? Or are you saying that if you abused the voting system, you could get others to upvote you more and downvote you less?
I don’t think, in ordinary language, it’s possible to make a habit of the same thing twice, so unfortunately, I can’t do that, anymore.
I’m so glad you said so. Subtle.
Okay. You have my blanket approval to refrain from downvoting anything you are disinclined to downvote.
Thanks: when I make my future posts more mature and less hostile, I can use this as a guide.
Since at least one person seems to agree with you, I’m genuinely curious now. Assuming I’m correct in detecting sarcasm there, can you elaborate?
Can I elaborate? When the discussion has become polarized to the point where people will downmod pretty much any future comment on the grounds that it’s perpetuating a flamewar or they view the poster as being on “the other side”? Not a chance, I’m afraid.
I do, however, feel very honored that at least some people sympathize with me here.
It is not the case that the only way to share information with me is by publicly commenting on Less Wrong.
Yes, you would like to see fewer comments that have “SilasBarta” at the top.
A lot of people, especially religious people, equate lack of belief in a fundamental meaning of life with throwing oneself off cliffs. Eliezer is committing the same sort of mistake.
No, I think he’s just pointing out that the common intuitions behind anticipatory fear are grossly violated by the third horn.
I’d like to see you chew this bullet a bit more, so try this version. You are to be split (copied once). One of you is randomly chosen to wake up in a red room and be tortured for 50 years, while the other wakes up in a green room and suffers a mere dust speck. Ten minutes will pass for both copies before the torture or specking commences.
How much do you fear being tortured before the split? Does this level of fear go up/down when you wake up in a red/green room? To accept the third horn seems to imply that you should feel no relief upon waking in the green room.
Only if you assume feelings of relief should bind to reality (or reality+preferences) in a particular way.
Good point, I should have phrased that differently: “To accept the third horn seems to imply that any relief you feel upon waking in the green room is just ‘legacy’ human intuition, rather than any rational expectation of having avoided future suffering.”
You know, your example is actually making that horn look more attractive: replace the torture to the person with ’50000 utilities subtracted from the cosmos’, etc, and then it’s obvious that the green-room is no grounds for relief since the −50000 is still a fact. More narrowly, if you valued other persons equal to yourself, then the green room is definitely no cause for relief.
We could figure out how much you value other people by varying how bad the torture, is and maybe adding a deal where if the green-room person will flip a fair coin (heads, the punishment is swapped; tails, no change), the torture is lessened by n. If you value the copy equal to yourself, you’ll be willing to swap for any difference right down to 1, since if it’s tails, there’s no loss or gain, but if it’s heads, there’s a n profit.
Now, of course even if the copy is identical to yourself, and even if we postulate that somehow the 2 minds haven’t diverged (we could do this by making the coinflip deal contingent on being the tortured one − 2 identical rooms, neither of which knows whether they are the tortured one; by making it contingent, there’s no risk in not taking the bet), I think essentially no human would take the coinflip for just +1 - they would only take it if there was a major amelioration of the torture. Why? Because pain is so much realer and overriding to us, which is a fact about us and not about agents we can imagine.
(If you’re not convinced, replace the punishments with rewards and modify the bet to increase the reward but possibly switch it to the other fellow; and imagine a parallel series of experiments being run with rational agents who don’t have pain/greed. After a lot of experiments, who will have more money?)
Yes, and this hypothesis can even be weakened a bit, since the other persons involved are nearly identical to you. All it takes is a sufficiently “fuzzy” sense of self.
To clarify what you mean by “haven’t diverged”… does that include the offer of the flip? E.g., both receive the offer, but only one of the responses “counts”? Because I can’t imagine not taking the flip if I knew I was in such a situation… my anticipation would be cleanly split between both outcomes due to indexical uncertainty. It’s a more complicated question once I know which room I’m in.
Well, maybe I wasn’t clear. I’m imagining that there are 2 green rooms, say, however, one room has been secretly picked out for the torture and the other gets the dustspeck.
Each person now is made the offer: if you flip this coin, and you are not the torture room, the torture will be reduced by n and the room tortured may be swapped if the coin came up heads; however, if you are the torture room, the coin flip does nothing.
Since the minds are the same, in the same circumstances, with the same offer, we don’t need to worry about what happens if the coins fall differently or if one accepts and the other rejects. The logic they should follow is: if I am not the other, then by taking the coin flip I am doing myself a disservice by risking torture, and I gain under no circumstance and so should never take the bet; but if I am the other as well, then I lose under no circumstance so I should always take the bet.
(I wonder if I am just very obtusely reinventing the prisoner’s dilemma or newcomb’s paradox here, or if by making the 2 copies identical I’ve destroyed an important asymmetry. As you say, if you don’t know whether “you” have been spared torture, then maybe the bet does nothing interesting.)
I’m not sure what “not being the other” means here, really. There may be two underlying physical processes, but they’re only giving rise to one stream of experience. From that stream’s perspective, its future is split evenly between two possibilities, so accepting the bet strictly dominates. Isn’t this just straightforward utility maximization?
The reason the question becomes more complicated if the minds diverge is that the concept of “self” must be examined to see how the agent weights the experiences of an extremely similar process in its utility function. It’s sort of a question of which is more defining: past or future. A purely forward-looking agent says “ain’t my future” and evaluates the copy’s experiences as those of a stranger. A purely backward-looking agent says “shares virtually my entire past” and evaluates the copy’s experiences as though they were his own. This all assumes some coherent concept of “selfishness”—clearly a purely altruistic agent would take the flip.
The identical copies scenario is a prisoner’s dilemma where you make one decision for both sides, and then get randomly assigned to a side. It’s just plain crazy to defect in a degenerate prisoner’s dilemma against yourself. I think this does destroy an important asymmetry—in the divergent scenario, the green-room agent knows that only his decision counts.
Speaking for my own values, I’m still thoroughly confused by the divergent scenario. I’d probably be selfish enough not to take the flip for a stranger, but I’d be genuinely unsure of what to do if it was basically “me” in the red room.
The SIA predicts that you will say “no”.