If you essentially agree that there is fact of the matter about whether a given decision is the right one, what did you mean by the following?
I can assign positive utility to whatever interpretation of an event I please. If the map changes, the utility changes, even if the territory stays the same. Preferences are not in the territory.
In this exchange
If Will’s probability is correct, then I fail to see how his post makes sense: it wouldn’t make sense for anyone to pay for cryo.
There are important subjective considerations, such as age and definition of identity,
Nope, “definition of identity” doesn’t influence what actually happens as a result of your decision, and thus doesn’t influence how good what happens will be.
Will, by “definition of identity”, meant a part of preference, making the point that people might have varying preferences (this being the sense in which preference is “subjective”) that make cryonics a good idea for some but not others. He read your response as a statement of something like moral realism/externalism; he intended his response to address this, though it was phrased confusingly.
That would be a potentially defensible view (What are the causes of variation? How do we know it’s there?), but I’m not sure it’s Will’s (and using the word “definition” in this sense goes very much against the definition of “definition”).
In this exchange
Will, by “definition of identity”, meant a part of preference, making the point that people might have varying preferences (this being the sense in which preference is “subjective”) that make cryonics a good idea for some but not others. He read your response as a statement of something like moral realism/externalism; he intended his response to address this, though it was phrased confusingly.
That would be a potentially defensible view (What are the causes of variation? How do we know it’s there?), but I’m not sure it’s Will’s (and using the word “definition” in this sense goes very much against the definition of “definition”).