If at 20 years old you thinks that the decade from 100 to 110 is less valuable than the decade from 20 to 30, but your 100-year self disagrees, I don’t know how much to weight your 20-year-old views but they need to have some weight in order for us to really be taking your preferences about your own life seriously—which then drags down the value we place on that decade.
Hm, maybe this follows if we’re just allowing each individual to have a fixed amount of preferences, and so as your life gets longer, each new person-moment’s preferences matter less because they’re somehow averaged out. But if your 100-year old self has changed a lot, and in fact have quite different preferences, then this seems kind of unfair to them. Maybe we should weigh their preferences just as much as we would weigh a 20-year old’s preferences, and accept that this means that longer-lived people get to have more preferences?
Here’s one possible take on how this could work:
I care selfishly/intuitively about my well-being in the near term.
So when I’m evaluating “do I want to live for another 10 years?”, I ask “would I enjoy living for another 10 years? do I have goals I want to accomplish in the next 10 years?”, etc.
But as I consider myself further and further away in time, I care less and less about myself in a selfish/intuitive way. Instead, I seem more and more like a stranger, who I care about in an impartial fashion.
So when I’m evaluating “do I want 1000-year old me to live for another 10 years”, I mostly ask “how good is it for the world for 1000-year old me to live for another 10 years? How much do 1000-year old me want to live for another 10 years?”, etc.
So when evaluating “should we extend my life to 1010 years, or create a new life”, maybe we ask...
young me, who says “eh, they seem similarly good from my perspective,”
1000-year old me, who (maybe) says “I’d like to live longer, please”
And thus we just indefinitely extend my life.
(Depending on your philosophy of identity, maybe this is actually a world where my young self has died, gradually, via changing into someone else.)
Hm, maybe this follows if we’re just allowing each individual to have a fixed amount of preferences, and so as your life gets longer, each new person-moment’s preferences matter less because they’re somehow averaged out. But if your 100-year old self has changed a lot, and in fact have quite different preferences, then this seems kind of unfair to them. Maybe we should weigh their preferences just as much as we would weigh a 20-year old’s preferences, and accept that this means that longer-lived people get to have more preferences?
Here’s one possible take on how this could work:
I care selfishly/intuitively about my well-being in the near term.
So when I’m evaluating “do I want to live for another 10 years?”, I ask “would I enjoy living for another 10 years? do I have goals I want to accomplish in the next 10 years?”, etc.
But as I consider myself further and further away in time, I care less and less about myself in a selfish/intuitive way. Instead, I seem more and more like a stranger, who I care about in an impartial fashion.
So when I’m evaluating “do I want 1000-year old me to live for another 10 years”, I mostly ask “how good is it for the world for 1000-year old me to live for another 10 years? How much do 1000-year old me want to live for another 10 years?”, etc.
So when evaluating “should we extend my life to 1010 years, or create a new life”, maybe we ask...
young me, who says “eh, they seem similarly good from my perspective,”
1000-year old me, who (maybe) says “I’d like to live longer, please”
And thus we just indefinitely extend my life.
(Depending on your philosophy of identity, maybe this is actually a world where my young self has died, gradually, via changing into someone else.)