I think this post is asking a very important and valuable question. However, I think it’s limiting the possible answers by making some unnecessary and unjustified assumptions. I agree that Bob, as described, is screwed, but I think we are sufficiently unlike Bob that that conclusion does not apply to us.
I don’t understand why you say “I want to travel back in time and ride a dinosaur” is meaningless. Even granting that it’s impossible (or, to say that more precisely, granting that greater understanding of reality tends to sharply reduce its probability), how does that make it meaningless? You seem to offer “By definition, someone in Bob’s past riding a dinosaur is not a future evolution of the present Bob” as an answer to that question, but that just completely confuses me. By definition of what, and why are we using that definition, and why is that important?
That was my reaction as well. In particular, “I want to go back in time and ride a dinosaur” is, on close inspection actually a rather vague value. It has many possible concrete interpretations and realizations. One more specific version of it is, “I want a physically future evolution of myself to ride a dinosaur in my physical past.” As the post points out, this is impossible. But why privilege this particular interpretation of the goal?
You say that Bob wants not just the subjective experience but also objective fact of riding a dinosaur. If that’s all he wants, then you’re right, he’s shit out of luck. I suspect though that we are not like Bob, and that our actual values are of the more vague sort with many possible realizations. And some of these will turn out to be meaningful and realizable and some won’t be.
If that’s so then the solution is to figure out which are the realizable interpretations of our goals and work towards those. I’m hopeful that this is not the empty set.
I think this post is asking a very important and valuable question. However, I think it’s limiting the possible answers by making some unnecessary and unjustified assumptions. I agree that Bob, as described, is screwed, but I think we are sufficiently unlike Bob that that conclusion does not apply to us.
As TheOtherDave says here,
That was my reaction as well. In particular, “I want to go back in time and ride a dinosaur” is, on close inspection actually a rather vague value. It has many possible concrete interpretations and realizations. One more specific version of it is, “I want a physically future evolution of myself to ride a dinosaur in my physical past.” As the post points out, this is impossible. But why privilege this particular interpretation of the goal?
You say that Bob wants not just the subjective experience but also objective fact of riding a dinosaur. If that’s all he wants, then you’re right, he’s shit out of luck. I suspect though that we are not like Bob, and that our actual values are of the more vague sort with many possible realizations. And some of these will turn out to be meaningful and realizable and some won’t be.
If that’s so then the solution is to figure out which are the realizable interpretations of our goals and work towards those. I’m hopeful that this is not the empty set.