I assume you also, then, think it would be horrible news to think you’re in a simulation?
I don’t see why this follows? I would find it sad if the substrate forming my self ceased to exist, but nothing about a simulation implies that—my “body” wouldn’t exist, but there would be something somewhere that hosted the signals forming me.
Like, the mere fact that we don’t know whether we’re being destroyed and recreated innumerable times every second, seems to rule out the idea that there’s an experiential difference here.
We don’t know in the present, yeah. But in my model it’s like if Omega decided to torture all of us in half the Everett branches leading forward—to the the ones in the remaining branches, there wouldn’t be any experiential difference. But we’d still value negatively that happening to copies of ourselves.
It’s less intuitive in a case where Omega instead decides to kill us in those branches because death by definition isn’t experiential—and I think that might lead to some ontological confusion? Like, I don’t really see there being much of a difference between the two apart from that in one we suffer, and in the other we die. In the case where us being destroyed and recreated constantly is how reality works, I would think that’s sad for the same reason it’s sad if it were Omega making a copy of us constantly and torturing it instead.
I think it’s possible we might agree on some of the practical points if “I anticipate dying as one of the experiences if I use a teletransporter” is valid in your eyes? My disagreement past that would only be that for a given body / substrate my thoughts are currently hosted on, I anticipate just the experiences those thoughts undergo, which I’ll address in the last paragraph.
I can see how parts of this resemble soul-theory behaviourally (but not completely I think? Unless this is just my being bad at modelling soul-theorists, I don’t think they’d consider a copy of themselves to be a perfectly normal sentient being in all ways), but I don’t think they’re the same internally (while this might explain why I believed it in the first place if the object-level arguments were wrong, I’m not convinced of that, so it doesn’t feel that way to me on reflection).
It doesn’t really matter whether I value “my” life over “his”, because we’re going to have the same experiences going forward regardless. But if something breaks this symmetry (note that at that point we’d need to clarify that there are two separate streams of consciousness here, not just one), my preference before the symmetry is broken should be indifferent between which of the copies gets the reward, because both versions of me bear the correct memory-relationship to my present self.
I’m somewhat sceptical about this. If a copy of yourself appeared before your eyes right now, and Omega riddled him with bullets until he died, would you at that moment assign that the same amount of negative utility as you having gotten shot yourself? Insofar as we assign the pain we experience a unique utility value relative to knowing someone else is experiencing it, it’s (at least partly) because we’re feeling it, and the you in that body wouldn’t have. In that view, preferences before the symmetry is broken should still care about the specific body one copy is in. That’s the difference I guess I’m talking about?
(I spent way too long writing this before deciding to just post it, so apologies if it seems janky).
I don’t see why this follows? I would find it sad if the substrate forming my self ceased to exist, but nothing about a simulation implies that—my “body” wouldn’t exist, but there would be something somewhere that hosted the signals forming me.
We don’t know in the present, yeah. But in my model it’s like if Omega decided to torture all of us in half the Everett branches leading forward—to the the ones in the remaining branches, there wouldn’t be any experiential difference. But we’d still value negatively that happening to copies of ourselves.
It’s less intuitive in a case where Omega instead decides to kill us in those branches because death by definition isn’t experiential—and I think that might lead to some ontological confusion? Like, I don’t really see there being much of a difference between the two apart from that in one we suffer, and in the other we die. In the case where us being destroyed and recreated constantly is how reality works, I would think that’s sad for the same reason it’s sad if it were Omega making a copy of us constantly and torturing it instead.
I think it’s possible we might agree on some of the practical points if “I anticipate dying as one of the experiences if I use a teletransporter” is valid in your eyes? My disagreement past that would only be that for a given body / substrate my thoughts are currently hosted on, I anticipate just the experiences those thoughts undergo, which I’ll address in the last paragraph.
I can see how parts of this resemble soul-theory behaviourally (but not completely I think? Unless this is just my being bad at modelling soul-theorists, I don’t think they’d consider a copy of themselves to be a perfectly normal sentient being in all ways), but I don’t think they’re the same internally (while this might explain why I believed it in the first place if the object-level arguments were wrong, I’m not convinced of that, so it doesn’t feel that way to me on reflection).
I’m somewhat sceptical about this. If a copy of yourself appeared before your eyes right now, and Omega riddled him with bullets until he died, would you at that moment assign that the same amount of negative utility as you having gotten shot yourself? Insofar as we assign the pain we experience a unique utility value relative to knowing someone else is experiencing it, it’s (at least partly) because we’re feeling it, and the you in that body wouldn’t have. In that view, preferences before the symmetry is broken should still care about the specific body one copy is in. That’s the difference I guess I’m talking about?
(I spent way too long writing this before deciding to just post it, so apologies if it seems janky).