It occurs to me that we can express this problem in the following isomorphic way:
Omega makes an identical copy of you.
One copy exists for a week. You get to pick whether that week is torture or nirvana.
The other copy continues to exist as normal, or maybe is unconscious for a week first, and depending on what you picked for step 2, it may lose or receive lots of money.
I’m not sure how enlightening this is. But we can now tie this to the following questions, which we also don’t have answers to: is an existence of torture better than no existence at all? And is an existence of nirvana good when it does not have any effect on the universe?
It occurs to me that we can express this problem in the following isomorphic way:
Omega makes an identical copy of you.
One copy exists for a week. You get to pick whether that week is torture or nirvana.
The other copy continues to exist as normal, or maybe is unconscious for a week first, and depending on what you picked for step 2, it may lose or receive lots of money.
I’m not sure how enlightening this is. But we can now tie this to the following questions, which we also don’t have answers to: is an existence of torture better than no existence at all? And is an existence of nirvana good when it does not have any effect on the universe?