Yup, that makes sense, but doesn’t seem to describe my own experience.
For my own part, I think the parts of my psyche that judge the kinds of negative scenarios we’re talking about use a different kind of evaluation than the parts that judge the kinds of positive scenarios we’re talking about.
I seem to treat the “bad stuff” as bad for its own sake… avoiding torture feels worth doing, period end of sentence. But the “good stuff” feels more contingent, more instrumental, feels more like it’s worth doing only because it leads to… something. This is consistent with my experience of these sorts of thought experiments more generally… it’s easier for me to imagine “pure” negative value (e.g., torture, suffering, etc in isolation.) than “pure” positive value (e.g., joy, love, happiness, satisfaction in isolation). It’s hard for me to imagine some concrete thing that I would actually trade for a year of torture, for example, though in principle it seems like some such thing ought to exist.
And it makes some sense that there would be a connection between how instrumental something feels, and how I think about the prospect of repeating it. If torture feels bad for its own sake, then when I contemplate repetitions of the same torture, it makes sense that I would “add up the badness” in my head… and if good stuff doesn’t feel good for its own sake, it makes sense that I wouldn’t “add up the goodness” in my head in the same way.
WRT #4, what I’m saying is that copying the good moments feels essentially valueless to me, while copying the bad moments has negative value. So I’m being offered a choice between “bad thing + valueless thing” and “bad thing”, and I don’t seem to care. (That said, I’d probably choose the former, cuz hey, I might be wrong.)
I think I understand your viewpoint. I do have an additional question though, which is what you think about how to to evaluate moments that have a combination of good and bad.
For instance, let’s suppose you have the best day ever, except that you had a mild pain in your leg for the most of the day. All the awesome stuff you did during the day more than made up for that mild pain though.
Now let’s suppose you are offered the prospect of having a copy of you repeat that day exactly. We both agree that doing this would add no additional value, the question is whether it would be valueless, or add disvalue?
There are two possible ways I see to evaluate this:
You could add up all the events of the day and decide they contain more good than bad, therefore this was a “good” day. “Good” things have no value when repeated, so you would assign zero value to having a copy relive this day. You would not pay to have it happen, but you also wouldn’t exert a great effort to stop it.
You could assign value to the events first before adding them up, assigning zero value to all the good things and a slight negative value to the pain in your leg. Therefore you would assign negative value to having a copy relive this day and would pay to stop it from happening.
To me (1) seems to be an intuitively better way of evaluating the prospect of a copy reliving the day than (2). It also lines up with my intuition that it wouldn’t be bad news if MWI was true. But I wonder if you would think differently?
It’s worth noting that the question of what is a better way of evaluating such prospects is distinct from the question of how I in fact evaluate them. I am not claiming that having multiple incomensurable metrics for evaluating the value of lived experience is a good design, merely that it seems to be the way my brain works.
Given the way my brain works, I suspect repeating a typical day as you posit would add disvalue, for reasons similar to #2.
Would it be better if I instead evaluated it as per #1? Yeah, probably.
Still better would be if I had a metric for evaluating events such that #1 and #2 converged on the same answer.
It’s worth noting that the question of what is a better way of evaluating such prospects is distinct from the question of how I in fact evaluate them.
Good point. What I meant was closer to “which method of evaluation does the best job of capturing how you intuitively assign value” rather than which way is better in some sort of objective sense. For me #1 seems to describe how I assign value and disvalue to repeating copies better than #2 does, but I’m far from certain.
So I think that from my point of view Omega offering to extend the length of a repeated event so it contains a more even mixture of good and bad is the same as Omega offering to not repeat a bad event and repeat a good event instead. Both options contain zero value, I would rather Omega leave me alone and let me go do new things. But they’re better than him repeating a bad event.
Yup, that makes sense, but doesn’t seem to describe my own experience.
For my own part, I think the parts of my psyche that judge the kinds of negative scenarios we’re talking about use a different kind of evaluation than the parts that judge the kinds of positive scenarios we’re talking about.
I seem to treat the “bad stuff” as bad for its own sake… avoiding torture feels worth doing, period end of sentence. But the “good stuff” feels more contingent, more instrumental, feels more like it’s worth doing only because it leads to… something. This is consistent with my experience of these sorts of thought experiments more generally… it’s easier for me to imagine “pure” negative value (e.g., torture, suffering, etc in isolation.) than “pure” positive value (e.g., joy, love, happiness, satisfaction in isolation). It’s hard for me to imagine some concrete thing that I would actually trade for a year of torture, for example, though in principle it seems like some such thing ought to exist.
And it makes some sense that there would be a connection between how instrumental something feels, and how I think about the prospect of repeating it. If torture feels bad for its own sake, then when I contemplate repetitions of the same torture, it makes sense that I would “add up the badness” in my head… and if good stuff doesn’t feel good for its own sake, it makes sense that I wouldn’t “add up the goodness” in my head in the same way.
WRT #4, what I’m saying is that copying the good moments feels essentially valueless to me, while copying the bad moments has negative value. So I’m being offered a choice between “bad thing + valueless thing” and “bad thing”, and I don’t seem to care. (That said, I’d probably choose the former, cuz hey, I might be wrong.)
I think I understand your viewpoint. I do have an additional question though, which is what you think about how to to evaluate moments that have a combination of good and bad.
For instance, let’s suppose you have the best day ever, except that you had a mild pain in your leg for the most of the day. All the awesome stuff you did during the day more than made up for that mild pain though.
Now let’s suppose you are offered the prospect of having a copy of you repeat that day exactly. We both agree that doing this would add no additional value, the question is whether it would be valueless, or add disvalue?
There are two possible ways I see to evaluate this:
You could add up all the events of the day and decide they contain more good than bad, therefore this was a “good” day. “Good” things have no value when repeated, so you would assign zero value to having a copy relive this day. You would not pay to have it happen, but you also wouldn’t exert a great effort to stop it.
You could assign value to the events first before adding them up, assigning zero value to all the good things and a slight negative value to the pain in your leg. Therefore you would assign negative value to having a copy relive this day and would pay to stop it from happening.
To me (1) seems to be an intuitively better way of evaluating the prospect of a copy reliving the day than (2). It also lines up with my intuition that it wouldn’t be bad news if MWI was true. But I wonder if you would think differently?
It’s worth noting that the question of what is a better way of evaluating such prospects is distinct from the question of how I in fact evaluate them. I am not claiming that having multiple incomensurable metrics for evaluating the value of lived experience is a good design, merely that it seems to be the way my brain works.
Given the way my brain works, I suspect repeating a typical day as you posit would add disvalue, for reasons similar to #2.
Would it be better if I instead evaluated it as per #1? Yeah, probably.
Still better would be if I had a metric for evaluating events such that #1 and #2 converged on the same answer.
Good point. What I meant was closer to “which method of evaluation does the best job of capturing how you intuitively assign value” rather than which way is better in some sort of objective sense. For me #1 seems to describe how I assign value and disvalue to repeating copies better than #2 does, but I’m far from certain.
So I think that from my point of view Omega offering to extend the length of a repeated event so it contains a more even mixture of good and bad is the same as Omega offering to not repeat a bad event and repeat a good event instead. Both options contain zero value, I would rather Omega leave me alone and let me go do new things. But they’re better than him repeating a bad event.