This has filled me with the distressing thought that the badness of death might somehow be diminished because of this. I am aware that Eliezer has written articles that seem to explain why this is not the case (“Living in Many Worlds” and “For the People Who are Still Alive,”) but I have read them and am having trouble grasping his arguments.
This is a question that comes up (comparatively) frequently and it can be tricky to convey all the intuitions and conclusions in the space of a comment. My attempt to explain how this and related evaluations “mostly add up to normal” can be found in Preference For (Many) Future Worlds.
Short answer: If you believe you think a 50%/50% split of death vs gaining $200 is drastically better if done with a quantum coin than with a deterministic one then you are probably confused. It’s technically possible to have coherent values where future Everett branches where you die don’t count but it is a weird and arbitrary preference system. It is worth being very, very, sure about values, meta-ethics and physics before actually biting a bullet that encourages quantum immortality based decision making.
But starting from the viewpoint that Everett branches where I die don’t count to me, the viewpoint of weighing of universes over mental states is the one that feels weird. ‘As is any’, because the ‘weirdness’, or ‘non-normalcy’ of anything depends on what you consider to be normal at the start.
This is a question that comes up (comparatively) frequently and it can be tricky to convey all the intuitions and conclusions in the space of a comment. My attempt to explain how this and related evaluations “mostly add up to normal” can be found in Preference For (Many) Future Worlds.
Short answer: If you believe you think a 50%/50% split of death vs gaining $200 is drastically better if done with a quantum coin than with a deterministic one then you are probably confused. It’s technically possible to have coherent values where future Everett branches where you die don’t count but it is a weird and arbitrary preference system. It is worth being very, very, sure about values, meta-ethics and physics before actually biting a bullet that encourages quantum immortality based decision making.
As is any, I’ve never seen a convincing reason to preference valuing other Everett branches vs only your experienced one.
EDIT: I stand by this even with the downvotes.
Most things are not weird. That’s kind of the point of the word.
Focus on arbitrary then.
But starting from the viewpoint that Everett branches where I die don’t count to me, the viewpoint of weighing of universes over mental states is the one that feels weird. ‘As is any’, because the ‘weirdness’, or ‘non-normalcy’ of anything depends on what you consider to be normal at the start.