Is it bad to have experienced pain in the past, if you don’t remember it? Or, can your utility function coherently include facts about the past, even if they have no causal connection to the present? My intuition here says yes, but I’d be interested in others’ thoughts.
Your utility function shouldn’t bother to include the past at all. You can’t affect the past, so measuring it’s utility/disutility is a waste of resources. (Unless you are an “average happiness measured over all time” maximiser, or similar)
To make this concrete, imaging that you have a choice between medium pain that you will remember, or extreme pain followed by memory erasure.
This is a question about the future, not about the past.
And I’d take the medium pain= more experiences, shouldn’t break my mind, no version of me has to be killed (reverting to a saved version is killing the divergence)
Your utility function shouldn’t bother to include the past at all. You can’t affect the past, so measuring it’s utility/disutility is a waste of resources. (Unless you are an “average happiness measured over all time” maximiser, or similar)
This is a question about the future, not about the past.
And I’d take the medium pain= more experiences, shouldn’t break my mind, no version of me has to be killed (reverting to a saved version is killing the divergence)