There’s a very plausible sense in which you may not actually get a choice to not exist.
In pretty much any sort of larger-than-immediately-visible universe, there are parts of the world (timelines, wavefunction sections, distant copies in an infinite universe, Tegmark ensembles, etc) in which you exist and have the same epistemic state as immediately prior to this choice, but weren’t offered the choice. Some of those versions of you are going to suffer for billions of years regardless of you choosing to no longer exist in this fragment of the world.
Granted, there’s nothing you can do about them—you can only choose your response in worlds where you get the choice.
From the wider point of view it may or may not change things. For example suppose you knew (or the superintelligence told you as follow-up information) that in worlds having an essentially identical “you” in them, 10% will be unconditionally tortured for billions of years, and 90% are offered the question (with a 2% chance of hell and 98% chance of utopia). The superintelligence knows that in most timelines leading to hellworlds there is no care for consent while utopias do, which is why conditional on consent the chance is only 2% rather than the overall 11.8%.
If you are the sort of person to choose “nonexistence” then 10% of versions of you go to hell and 90% die. If you choose “live” then in total 11.8% of you go to hell and 88.2% to utopia. The marginal numbers are the same, but you no longer get the option to completely save all versions of you from torture.
Is it still worthwhile for those who can to choose death? This is not rhetorical, it is a question that only you can answer for yourself. Certainly those in the 1.8% would regret being a “choose life” decider and joining the 10% who never got a choice.
If you are a naturalist or physicalist about humans—these copies are not me, they are my identical twins. If you want to go beyond naturalism or physicalism, that is perfectly fine, but based on our current understanding, these are identical twins of me and in no sense are they me. So whatever happens in these other universes—it is not going to be me going through the timeline, it will be my identical twin.
An infinite or very large universe/multiverse is highly speculative and no matter what I decide in this universe, if there is an infinite universe, it makes essentially no difference if all universes are the same. There is going to be 10^1000000 and far beyond that of my identical twins and I have no power to influence anything. To say that you can influence anything in that scenario is worse than saying that you can move earth to another galaxy by jumping on it. You have 0.00...0000...0001% effect on it, and in an infinite universe you have effectively zero effect on the fate of your copies—so no matter what you decide, you will not have any influence over it.
There’s a very plausible sense in which you may not actually get a choice to not exist.
In pretty much any sort of larger-than-immediately-visible universe, there are parts of the world (timelines, wavefunction sections, distant copies in an infinite universe, Tegmark ensembles, etc) in which you exist and have the same epistemic state as immediately prior to this choice, but weren’t offered the choice. Some of those versions of you are going to suffer for billions of years regardless of you choosing to no longer exist in this fragment of the world.
Granted, there’s nothing you can do about them—you can only choose your response in worlds where you get the choice.
From the wider point of view it may or may not change things. For example suppose you knew (or the superintelligence told you as follow-up information) that in worlds having an essentially identical “you” in them, 10% will be unconditionally tortured for billions of years, and 90% are offered the question (with a 2% chance of hell and 98% chance of utopia). The superintelligence knows that in most timelines leading to hellworlds there is no care for consent while utopias do, which is why conditional on consent the chance is only 2% rather than the overall 11.8%.
If you are the sort of person to choose “nonexistence” then 10% of versions of you go to hell and 90% die. If you choose “live” then in total 11.8% of you go to hell and 88.2% to utopia. The marginal numbers are the same, but you no longer get the option to completely save all versions of you from torture.
Is it still worthwhile for those who can to choose death? This is not rhetorical, it is a question that only you can answer for yourself. Certainly those in the 1.8% would regret being a “choose life” decider and joining the 10% who never got a choice.
If you are a naturalist or physicalist about humans—these copies are not me, they are my identical twins. If you want to go beyond naturalism or physicalism, that is perfectly fine, but based on our current understanding, these are identical twins of me and in no sense are they me. So whatever happens in these other universes—it is not going to be me going through the timeline, it will be my identical twin.
An infinite or very large universe/multiverse is highly speculative and no matter what I decide in this universe, if there is an infinite universe, it makes essentially no difference if all universes are the same. There is going to be 10^1000000 and far beyond that of my identical twins and I have no power to influence anything. To say that you can influence anything in that scenario is worse than saying that you can move earth to another galaxy by jumping on it. You have 0.00...0000...0001% effect on it, and in an infinite universe you have effectively zero effect on the fate of your copies—so no matter what you decide, you will not have any influence over it.