An exact copy of you is still not you, even ignoring the immediate divergence.
If you even want to get to the point of thinking about how many people you’d have to create to get every possible person, you first have to justify the step where you collapse the entire equivalence class of copies into “one person”. Otherwise, the number of potential people is definitely infinite, and the probability of any one of them existing is definitely zero.
Your hack of creating them in some order that eventually reaches all of them assumes that you’ll be able to keep doing that for infinite time, which is false. The energy isn’t there. You probably don’t even have trillions of years, let alone infinity. And I’m not even sure it works with infinite time if you refuse to collapse those equivalence classes; I think that infinity is probably not countable.
So, anyway, you have to get away from having an infinite number of entities of concern, and especially from having an infinite number of entities of “equal dignity”, or the measure of your impact is going to be zero and you’ll have no defensible way of saying when you’ve done “enough”. And you have to escape the infinity without losing your ability to believe in what you’re constructing.
Even if you do collapse equivalence classes, in any universe with a continuous space of states (like the one we probably live in), there are no exact copies. So you’re stuck in your “sufficiently similar” case even if you just want to escape the infinities and instantiate any fraction of the entities of concern who could exist, let alone a meaningful fraction.
I don’t think you solve that in a way that’s going to settle anything. I don’t think many people who’d buy into any of this to begin with are going to be ready to accept exploring the combinations of discrete values of a two-digit number of “personality parameters” as equivalent to “creating everybody who could possibly exist”. You might get me to accept that outcome… although frankly a lot of them would be assholes who by my lights probably should not exist. But I think my acceptance would be related to the reasons I don’t accept the whole premise that every possible person should exist. I’m outside of the intended audience for the solution.
The really fundamental problem is that the entire idea of a “right to exist” is bad and a dead end. You’re in a swamp as soon as you start to think that way. There’s no obvious, compelling reason you should extend your circle of concern without bound. It’s even less clear that you should extend your concern to people who don’t and never will exist before you extend your concern to, say, rocks that do exist. Remember, if you don’t exist, you don’t have any experiences… so how is any of this about “experiencing beings”, again?
To make it be anything you can act on or get people to agree on, you also have to be pretty careful with what sense of “exist” you pick. If you “Tegmarkmaxx”, and possibly even if you “Everettmaxx”, every possible being, sentient or otherwise, does exist, and you have no power to change that anyway. If you start counting being simulated as “existing”, you’re going to lose a lot of people, and more the less fidelity you demand in the simulation. If you demand the sort of embodied existence we all have right now, you’re going to lose a lot of “fellow travelers” who’d see that as a waste of resources that could be used to produce some other “perfectly good” kind of existence. And that’s on top of all the disagreements you’ll get about distinct beings. So it’s impractical as a way of guiding collective action as well as being philosophically bizarre.
The whole thing has the feel of the “ontological argument” for the existence of God. I don’t think it’s fallacious the same way. After all, it’s arguing for adopting an ethical stance, not a factual belief, and I hope we can agree that those are separate categories of argument. But it feels like the same kind of wandering off into the weeds.
I think people spend way too much time and energy on this “right to exist” thing. It wouldn’t be worrying except that they also seriously seem to be trying Order The Entire Future according to it. It’s probably still not a problem because there’s approximately zero chance that anybody can actually influence the future in that direction, but it’s kind of nervous-making to see people take that kind of thing seriously. Especially because when you realize you can’t achieve it, the next step is to start trying to approximate it...
If you even want to get to the point of thinking about how many people you’d have to create to get every possible person, you first have to justify the step where you collapse the entire equivalence class of copies into “one person”. Otherwise, the number of potential people is definitely infinite, and the probability of any one of them existing is definitely zero.
I didn’t consider this, because the part about infeasibility of getting the exact copy is very strong anyway. The point of the “solution” is to show how hard it is to get there. In this thought experiment, I think the pre-incarnation intelligence would be happy to get one person out of the equivalence class.
Your hack of creating them in some order that eventually reaches all of them assumes that you’ll be able to keep doing that for infinite time, which is false.
Yes, this is why I wrote “If we solve entropy problems”. I know the current physical understanding doesn’t let one run this process forever, but I wanted to note that I am not arguing that we have a mathematical impossibility (only very possibly physical impossibility). I should have been more clear on this point.
Another thing I should have mentioned more clearly is that when I started thinking about this issue, the “right to exist” claim sounded interesting but possibly dubious, and I wanted to see if I can figure out what makes it interesting. I’m not saying that the original position argument captures all of what people think when they refer to the right to exist. Rather, the application of the original position argument is interesting in itself here.
It’s even less clear that you should extend your concern to people who don’t and never will exist before you extend your concern to, say, rocks that do exist.
Most people value future humans’ happiness, even though they don’t yet exist. I don’t think I get very far away from that position? The reason we need to think about every possible human is that we don’t know which ones will get to exist. So in a way, most of the persons of concern will never exist, but this seems beside the point, as all considerations about future humans have this same issue.
If you “Tegmarkmaxx”, and possibly even if you “Everettmaxx”, every possible being, sentient or otherwise, does exist, and you have no power to change that anyway.
I didn’t want to go there, as infinite ethics is pretty hard. Even though we couldn’t affect whether or not every possible sentient being exists, Carlsmith (linked) says that we might still be able to affect the overall utility of of all those existences.
I think people spend way too much time and energy on this “right to exist” thing. It wouldn’t be worrying except that they also seriously seem to be trying Order The Entire Future according to it.
I was happy with the conclusion I got to, because it sounds so reasonable: more people is good, but if there’s trade-off with quality of life, then value QoL much more than total utilitarianism does. As I mentioned, this isn’t a complete solution, as one would at least need to determine what is the utility as a function of the number of people and their QoLs. Plus very probably consider other arguments and their corresponding modifications to the utility function. Pretty much the only thing I currently use this utility function for is check what it says about some thought experiments (like the Repugnant Conclusion mentioned in the footnotes).
Most people value future humans’ happiness, even though they don’t yet exist. I don’t think I get very far away from that position?
Usually what I hear on this is that people want to take a timeless view, and I’m actually kind of sympathetic to that. But it’s always followed by assuming that “yet”.
Somebody who doesn’t exist yet seems really, really, qualitatively different from somebody who will never exist. One stakes out an actual presence in the “space-time continuum”, and the other doesn’t. You can point at a 4D volume occupied by one, and not by the other. Insofar as you believe experience is connected with physics, you can point at the experiences of one and not the other.
I’m actually really confused about why people just blithely slip in the “yet”, because the distinction seems so obvious to me, and the “yet” denies it.
The reason we need to think about every possible human is that we don’t know which ones will get to exist. So in a way, most of the persons of concern will never exist, but this seems beside the point, as all considerations about future humans have this same issue.
If you don’t know who will exist (but doesn’t exist yet), then you might want to apply your best guess about it, and if you can’t do that, you might want to try to leave them a world approximating what the “average person” would want to live in. You don’t know who they’ll be, but you it’s pretty likely that somebody will exist, and you can make some reasonable guesses about what they’d prefer.
Talking about a “right to exist” makes it a question about whether you’re obliged to act to move people from the category of “never will exist” to “will exist”. If you don’t care about “never will exist” people to begin with, then you can have no such obligation toward them. So to even bring up such a right, you first have to extend your concern people who never will exist. Not “not yet”, but never.
It seems obviously wrong to me to worry at all about entities that definitely won’t exist.
If an entity won’t exist unless you take some positive steps to create them, and you don’t take those steps… then they definitely won’t exist.
That means that if you’re trying to decide whether to create them, it makes no sense to act as if you’ve failed in any duty to them if you don’t… because if that’s your decision, they won’t exist.
… on the other hand, if you do create them, then you have reason to be concerned about them. In that case, they will exist, and not only that but their experiences will in some part be your doing.
It’s only when you do assign a “right to exist” that you start having to make repugnant conclusion tradeoffs, or try to find ways to get around those tradeoffs by arguing about which beings are diverse enough to count. That’s the point at which you’re accepting a really serious obligation to create more people just for the sake of doing so.
I tend to get worked up about that because it has an actual practical impact[2]. Most of the people who see a “right to exist” don’t seem to end up where you are, and I don’t think they’ll be very amenable to being convinced to go there. Many more of them seem to end up absolutely wallowing in the repugnant conclusion. I find the Bostromian program of tiling the light cone with people (for whatever value of “people”) to be really, really creepy.
I’m sorry for the repetition, but I seem to have trouble finding the right words to point out the distinction I’m trying to make in a way that people actually understand, so I thought I’d make more than one attempt.
An exact copy of you is still not you, even ignoring the immediate divergence.
If you even want to get to the point of thinking about how many people you’d have to create to get every possible person, you first have to justify the step where you collapse the entire equivalence class of copies into “one person”. Otherwise, the number of potential people is definitely infinite, and the probability of any one of them existing is definitely zero.
Your hack of creating them in some order that eventually reaches all of them assumes that you’ll be able to keep doing that for infinite time, which is false. The energy isn’t there. You probably don’t even have trillions of years, let alone infinity. And I’m not even sure it works with infinite time if you refuse to collapse those equivalence classes; I think that infinity is probably not countable.
So, anyway, you have to get away from having an infinite number of entities of concern, and especially from having an infinite number of entities of “equal dignity”, or the measure of your impact is going to be zero and you’ll have no defensible way of saying when you’ve done “enough”. And you have to escape the infinity without losing your ability to believe in what you’re constructing.
Even if you do collapse equivalence classes, in any universe with a continuous space of states (like the one we probably live in), there are no exact copies. So you’re stuck in your “sufficiently similar” case even if you just want to escape the infinities and instantiate any fraction of the entities of concern who could exist, let alone a meaningful fraction.
I don’t think you solve that in a way that’s going to settle anything. I don’t think many people who’d buy into any of this to begin with are going to be ready to accept exploring the combinations of discrete values of a two-digit number of “personality parameters” as equivalent to “creating everybody who could possibly exist”. You might get me to accept that outcome… although frankly a lot of them would be assholes who by my lights probably should not exist. But I think my acceptance would be related to the reasons I don’t accept the whole premise that every possible person should exist. I’m outside of the intended audience for the solution.
The really fundamental problem is that the entire idea of a “right to exist” is bad and a dead end. You’re in a swamp as soon as you start to think that way. There’s no obvious, compelling reason you should extend your circle of concern without bound. It’s even less clear that you should extend your concern to people who don’t and never will exist before you extend your concern to, say, rocks that do exist. Remember, if you don’t exist, you don’t have any experiences… so how is any of this about “experiencing beings”, again?
To make it be anything you can act on or get people to agree on, you also have to be pretty careful with what sense of “exist” you pick. If you “Tegmarkmaxx”, and possibly even if you “Everettmaxx”, every possible being, sentient or otherwise, does exist, and you have no power to change that anyway. If you start counting being simulated as “existing”, you’re going to lose a lot of people, and more the less fidelity you demand in the simulation. If you demand the sort of embodied existence we all have right now, you’re going to lose a lot of “fellow travelers” who’d see that as a waste of resources that could be used to produce some other “perfectly good” kind of existence. And that’s on top of all the disagreements you’ll get about distinct beings. So it’s impractical as a way of guiding collective action as well as being philosophically bizarre.
The whole thing has the feel of the “ontological argument” for the existence of God. I don’t think it’s fallacious the same way. After all, it’s arguing for adopting an ethical stance, not a factual belief, and I hope we can agree that those are separate categories of argument. But it feels like the same kind of wandering off into the weeds.
I think people spend way too much time and energy on this “right to exist” thing. It wouldn’t be worrying except that they also seriously seem to be trying Order The Entire Future according to it. It’s probably still not a problem because there’s approximately zero chance that anybody can actually influence the future in that direction, but it’s kind of nervous-making to see people take that kind of thing seriously. Especially because when you realize you can’t achieve it, the next step is to start trying to approximate it...
I didn’t consider this, because the part about infeasibility of getting the exact copy is very strong anyway. The point of the “solution” is to show how hard it is to get there. In this thought experiment, I think the pre-incarnation intelligence would be happy to get one person out of the equivalence class.
Yes, this is why I wrote “If we solve entropy problems”. I know the current physical understanding doesn’t let one run this process forever, but I wanted to note that I am not arguing that we have a mathematical impossibility (only very possibly physical impossibility). I should have been more clear on this point.
Another thing I should have mentioned more clearly is that when I started thinking about this issue, the “right to exist” claim sounded interesting but possibly dubious, and I wanted to see if I can figure out what makes it interesting. I’m not saying that the original position argument captures all of what people think when they refer to the right to exist. Rather, the application of the original position argument is interesting in itself here.
Most people value future humans’ happiness, even though they don’t yet exist. I don’t think I get very far away from that position? The reason we need to think about every possible human is that we don’t know which ones will get to exist. So in a way, most of the persons of concern will never exist, but this seems beside the point, as all considerations about future humans have this same issue.
I didn’t want to go there, as infinite ethics is pretty hard. Even though we couldn’t affect whether or not every possible sentient being exists, Carlsmith (linked) says that we might still be able to affect the overall utility of of all those existences.
I was happy with the conclusion I got to, because it sounds so reasonable: more people is good, but if there’s trade-off with quality of life, then value QoL much more than total utilitarianism does. As I mentioned, this isn’t a complete solution, as one would at least need to determine what is the utility as a function of the number of people and their QoLs. Plus very probably consider other arguments and their corresponding modifications to the utility function. Pretty much the only thing I currently use this utility function for is check what it says about some thought experiments (like the Repugnant Conclusion mentioned in the footnotes).
Thanks for the reply.
Usually what I hear on this is that people want to take a timeless view, and I’m actually kind of sympathetic to that. But it’s always followed by assuming that “yet”.
Somebody who doesn’t exist yet seems really, really, qualitatively different from somebody who will never exist. One stakes out an actual presence in the “space-time continuum”, and the other doesn’t. You can point at a 4D volume occupied by one, and not by the other. Insofar as you believe experience is connected with physics, you can point at the experiences of one and not the other.
I’m actually really confused about why people just blithely slip in the “yet”, because the distinction seems so obvious to me, and the “yet” denies it.
If you don’t know who will exist (but doesn’t exist yet), then you might want to apply your best guess about it, and if you can’t do that, you might want to try to leave them a world approximating what the “average person” would want to live in. You don’t know who they’ll be, but you it’s pretty likely that somebody will exist, and you can make some reasonable guesses about what they’d prefer.
Talking about a “right to exist” makes it a question about whether you’re obliged to act to move people from the category of “never will exist” to “will exist”. If you don’t care about “never will exist” people to begin with, then you can have no such obligation toward them. So to even bring up such a right, you first have to extend your concern people who never will exist. Not “not yet”, but never.
In steps [1] :
It seems obviously wrong to me to worry at all about entities that definitely won’t exist.
If an entity won’t exist unless you take some positive steps to create them, and you don’t take those steps… then they definitely won’t exist.
That means that if you’re trying to decide whether to create them, it makes no sense to act as if you’ve failed in any duty to them if you don’t… because if that’s your decision, they won’t exist.
… on the other hand, if you do create them, then you have reason to be concerned about them. In that case, they will exist, and not only that but their experiences will in some part be your doing.
It’s only when you do assign a “right to exist” that you start having to make repugnant conclusion tradeoffs, or try to find ways to get around those tradeoffs by arguing about which beings are diverse enough to count. That’s the point at which you’re accepting a really serious obligation to create more people just for the sake of doing so.
I tend to get worked up about that because it has an actual practical impact [2] . Most of the people who see a “right to exist” don’t seem to end up where you are, and I don’t think they’ll be very amenable to being convinced to go there. Many more of them seem to end up absolutely wallowing in the repugnant conclusion. I find the Bostromian program of tiling the light cone with people (for whatever value of “people”) to be really, really creepy.
I’m sorry for the repetition, but I seem to have trouble finding the right words to point out the distinction I’m trying to make in a way that people actually understand, so I thought I’d make more than one attempt.
Well, quasi-practical. As I said, I don’t think anybody’s actually in a position to do much about any of this in a truly practical sense.