And the third horn of the trilemma is to reject the idea of the personal future—that there’s any meaningful sense in which I can anticipate waking up as myself tomorrow, rather than Britney Spears. Or, for that matter, that there’s any meaningful sense in which I can anticipate being myself in five seconds, rather than Britney Spears. In five seconds there will be an Eliezer Yudkowsky, and there will be a Britney Spears, but it is meaningless to speak of the current Eliezer “continuing on” as Eliezer+5 rather than Britney+5; these are simply three different people we are talking about.
There are no threads connecting subjective experiences. There are simply different subjective experiences. Even if some subjective experiences are highly similar to, and causally computed from, other subjective experiences, they are not connected.
I still have trouble biting that bullet for some reason. Maybe I’m naive, I know, but there’s a sense in which I just can’t seem to let go of the question, “What will I see happen next?” I strive for altruism, but I’m not sure I can believe that subjective selfishness—caring about your own future experiences—is an incoherent utility function; that we are forced to be Buddhists who dare not cheat a neighbor, not because we are kind, but because we anticipate experiencing their consequences just as much as we anticipate experiencing our own. I don’t think that, if I were really selfish, I could jump off a cliff knowing smugly that a different person would experience the consequence of hitting the ground.
I do bite the bullet, but I think you are wrong about the implications of biting this bullet.
Eliezer Yudkowsky cares about what happens to Eliezer Yudkowsky+5 seconds, in a way that he doesn’t care about what happens to Ishaan+5 or Brittany+5.
E+5 holds a special place in E’s utility function. To E, universes in which E+5 is happy are vastly superior to universes in which E+5 is unhappy or dead.
It makes no difference to E that E+5 is not identical to E. E still cares about E+5, and E aught not need any magic subjective thread connecting E and E+5 to justify this preference. It’s not incoherent to prefer a future where certain entities that are causally connected to you continue to thrive—That’s all “selfishness” really means.
E anticipates the universe that E+5 will experience. E+5 will carry the memory of this anticipation. If there are lotteries and clones, E will anticipate a universe with a 1% chance of a bunch of E+5 clones winning the lottery and a 99% chance of no E+5 clones winning the lottery. Anticipation is expectation concerning what you+5 will experience in the future. You’re basically imagining your future self and experiencing a specialized and extreme version of “empathy”. It doesn’t matter whether or not there is a magical thread tying you to your future self. If you strip the emotional connotation on “anticipation” and just call it “prediction”, you can even predict what happens after you die (it’s just that there is no future version of you to “empathize” with anymore)
There are no souls. That holds spatially and temporally.
I do bite the bullet, but I think you are wrong about the implications of biting this bullet.
Eliezer Yudkowsky cares about what happens to Eliezer Yudkowsky+5 seconds, in a way that he doesn’t care about what happens to Ishaan+5 or Brittany+5.
E+5 holds a special place in E’s utility function. To E, universes in which E+5 is happy are vastly superior to universes in which E+5 is unhappy or dead.
It makes no difference to E that E+5 is not identical to E. E still cares about E+5, and E aught not need any magic subjective thread connecting E and E+5 to justify this preference. It’s not incoherent to prefer a future where certain entities that are causally connected to you continue to thrive—That’s all “selfishness” really means.
E anticipates the universe that E+5 will experience. E+5 will carry the memory of this anticipation. If there are lotteries and clones, E will anticipate a universe with a 1% chance of a bunch of E+5 clones winning the lottery and a 99% chance of no E+5 clones winning the lottery. Anticipation is expectation concerning what you+5 will experience in the future. You’re basically imagining your future self and experiencing a specialized and extreme version of “empathy”. It doesn’t matter whether or not there is a magical thread tying you to your future self. If you strip the emotional connotation on “anticipation” and just call it “prediction”, you can even predict what happens after you die (it’s just that there is no future version of you to “empathize” with anymore)
There are no souls. That holds spatially and temporally.