Importantly, I value every intermediate organism in this chain
An interesting and personally relevant variant of this is if the approval only goes one direction in time. This happened to me: 2025!Mo is vastly different from 2010!Mo in large part due to step-changes in my “coming of age” story that would’ve left 2010!Mo horrified (indeed he tried to fight the step-changes for months) but that 2025!Mo retrospectively fully endorses post-reflective equilibrium.
So when I read something like Anders Sandberg’s description here
There is a kind of standard argument you sometimes hear if you’re a transhumanist — like I am — that talks about life extension, where somebody cleverly points out that you would change across your lifetime. If it’s long enough, you will change into a different person. So actually you don’t get an indefinitely extended life; you just get a very long life thread. I think this is actually an interesting objection, but I’m fine with turning into a different future person. Anders Prime might have developed from Anders in an appropriate way — we all endorse every step along the way — and the fact that Anders Prime now is a very different person is fine. And then Anders Prime turns into Anders Biss and so on — a long sequence along a long thread.
I think: it’s not all that likely that I’m done with the whole “coming of age” reflective equilibrium thing, so I find it very likely that there are more step-changes I’ll experience that 2025!Mo would find horrifying but Future!Mo would fully endorse, contra Anders’ “we all endorse every step along the way”. It’s not just the outcomes that Past!Mos disendorse: reflection changes what changes are endorsed too.
This is the sort of retrospection that makes me sympathetic to what Scott said in his review of Hanson’s Age of Em:
A short digression: there’s a certain strain of thought I find infuriating, which is “My traditionalist ancestors would have disapproved of the changes typical of my era, like racial equality, more open sexuality, and secularism. But I am smarter than them, and so totally okay with how the future will likely have values even more progressive and shocking than my own. Therefore I pre-approve of any value changes that might happen in the future as definitely good and better than our stupid hidebound present.”
I once read a science-fiction story that depicted a pretty average sci-fi future – mighty starships, weird aliens, confederations of planets, post-scarcity economy – with the sole unusual feature that rape was considered totally legal, and opposition to such as bigoted and ignorant as opposition to homosexuality is today. Everybody got really angry at the author and said it was offensive for him to even speculate about that. Well, that’s the method by which our cheerful acceptance of any possible future values is maintained: restricting the set of “any possible future values” to “values slightly more progressive than ours” and then angrily shouting down anyone who discusses future values that actually sound bad. But of course the whole question of how worried to be about future value drift only makes sense in the context of future values that genuinely violate our current values. Approving of all future values except ones that would be offensive to even speculate about is the same faux-open-mindedness as tolerating anything except the outgroup.
Hanson deserves credit for positing a future whose values are likely to upset even the sort of people who say they don’t get upset over future value drift. I’m not sure whether or not he deserves credit for not being upset by it. Yes, it’s got low-crime, ample food for everybody, and full employment. But so does Brave New World. The whole point of dystopian fiction is pointing out that we have complicated values beyond material security. Hanson is absolutely right that our traditionalist ancestors would view our own era with as much horror as some of us would view an em era. He’s even right that on utilitarian grounds, it’s hard to argue with an em era where everyone is really happy working eighteen hours a day for their entire lives because we selected for people who feel that way. But at some point, can we make the Lovecraftian argument of “I know my values are provincial and arbitrary, but they’re my provincial arbitrary values and I will make any sacrifice of blood or tears necessary to defend them, even unto the gates of Hell?”
Except that I’m pretty sure Future!Mos won’t be defending Past!Mos’ “provincial and arbitrary values”, the way 2025!Mo doesn’t defend and in fact flatly rejects a lot 2010!Mo’s core values. I’m not sure how to think of all this.
An interesting and personally relevant variant of this is if the approval only goes one direction in time. This happened to me: 2025!Mo is vastly different from 2010!Mo in large part due to step-changes in my “coming of age” story that would’ve left 2010!Mo horrified (indeed he tried to fight the step-changes for months) but that 2025!Mo retrospectively fully endorses post-reflective equilibrium.
So when I read something like Anders Sandberg’s description here
I think: it’s not all that likely that I’m done with the whole “coming of age” reflective equilibrium thing, so I find it very likely that there are more step-changes I’ll experience that 2025!Mo would find horrifying but Future!Mo would fully endorse, contra Anders’ “we all endorse every step along the way”. It’s not just the outcomes that Past!Mos disendorse: reflection changes what changes are endorsed too.
This is the sort of retrospection that makes me sympathetic to what Scott said in his review of Hanson’s Age of Em:
Except that I’m pretty sure Future!Mos won’t be defending Past!Mos’ “provincial and arbitrary values”, the way 2025!Mo doesn’t defend and in fact flatly rejects a lot 2010!Mo’s core values. I’m not sure how to think of all this.