If you even want to get to the point of thinking about how many people you’d have to create to get every possible person, you first have to justify the step where you collapse the entire equivalence class of copies into “one person”. Otherwise, the number of potential people is definitely infinite, and the probability of any one of them existing is definitely zero.
I didn’t consider this, because the part about infeasibility of getting the exact copy is very strong anyway. The point of the “solution” is to show how hard it is to get there. In this thought experiment, I think the pre-incarnation intelligence would be happy to get one person out of the equivalence class.
Your hack of creating them in some order that eventually reaches all of them assumes that you’ll be able to keep doing that for infinite time, which is false.
Yes, this is why I wrote “If we solve entropy problems”. I know the current physical understanding doesn’t let one run this process forever, but I wanted to note that I am not arguing that we have a mathematical impossibility (only very possibly physical impossibility). I should have been more clear on this point.
Another thing I should have mentioned more clearly is that when I started thinking about this issue, the “right to exist” claim sounded interesting but possibly dubious, and I wanted to see if I can figure out what makes it interesting. I’m not saying that the original position argument captures all of what people think when they refer to the right to exist. Rather, the application of the original position argument is interesting in itself here.
It’s even less clear that you should extend your concern to people who don’t and never will exist before you extend your concern to, say, rocks that do exist.
Most people value future humans’ happiness, even though they don’t yet exist. I don’t think I get very far away from that position? The reason we need to think about every possible human is that we don’t know which ones will get to exist. So in a way, most of the persons of concern will never exist, but this seems beside the point, as all considerations about future humans have this same issue.
If you “Tegmarkmaxx”, and possibly even if you “Everettmaxx”, every possible being, sentient or otherwise, does exist, and you have no power to change that anyway.
I didn’t want to go there, as infinite ethics is pretty hard. Even though we couldn’t affect whether or not every possible sentient being exists, Carlsmith (linked) says that we might still be able to affect the overall utility of of all those existences.
I think people spend way too much time and energy on this “right to exist” thing. It wouldn’t be worrying except that they also seriously seem to be trying Order The Entire Future according to it.
I was happy with the conclusion I got to, because it sounds so reasonable: more people is good, but if there’s trade-off with quality of life, then value QoL much more than total utilitarianism does. As I mentioned, this isn’t a complete solution, as one would at least need to determine what is the utility as a function of the number of people and their QoLs. Plus very probably consider other arguments and their corresponding modifications to the utility function. Pretty much the only thing I currently use this utility function for is check what it says about some thought experiments (like the Repugnant Conclusion mentioned in the footnotes).
I didn’t consider this, because the part about infeasibility of getting the exact copy is very strong anyway. The point of the “solution” is to show how hard it is to get there. In this thought experiment, I think the pre-incarnation intelligence would be happy to get one person out of the equivalence class.
Yes, this is why I wrote “If we solve entropy problems”. I know the current physical understanding doesn’t let one run this process forever, but I wanted to note that I am not arguing that we have a mathematical impossibility (only very possibly physical impossibility). I should have been more clear on this point.
Another thing I should have mentioned more clearly is that when I started thinking about this issue, the “right to exist” claim sounded interesting but possibly dubious, and I wanted to see if I can figure out what makes it interesting. I’m not saying that the original position argument captures all of what people think when they refer to the right to exist. Rather, the application of the original position argument is interesting in itself here.
Most people value future humans’ happiness, even though they don’t yet exist. I don’t think I get very far away from that position? The reason we need to think about every possible human is that we don’t know which ones will get to exist. So in a way, most of the persons of concern will never exist, but this seems beside the point, as all considerations about future humans have this same issue.
I didn’t want to go there, as infinite ethics is pretty hard. Even though we couldn’t affect whether or not every possible sentient being exists, Carlsmith (linked) says that we might still be able to affect the overall utility of of all those existences.
I was happy with the conclusion I got to, because it sounds so reasonable: more people is good, but if there’s trade-off with quality of life, then value QoL much more than total utilitarianism does. As I mentioned, this isn’t a complete solution, as one would at least need to determine what is the utility as a function of the number of people and their QoLs. Plus very probably consider other arguments and their corresponding modifications to the utility function. Pretty much the only thing I currently use this utility function for is check what it says about some thought experiments (like the Repugnant Conclusion mentioned in the footnotes).