From: Wei Dai (weidai@weidai.com)
Date: Wed Mar 05 2003 - 18:05:43 MST
On Wed, Mar 05, 2003 at 12:39:05PM -0800, Hal Finney wrote:
> One of the paradoxes that I have always struggled with is this: if you
> run exactly the same conscious program twice, does it matter? Does it
> increase the "measure" or "probability" of that conscious experience?
> Do I do good by re-running someone's pleasant experience, and harm by
> re-running a bad one?
When I try to think about this question, it always comes back to: how do I
know I do good by running (or helping to run) someone's pleasant
experience the first time? Sure, some of us have a moral intuition that
tells us it's good, but this intution is not shared universally (some
people don't think pleasure or even happiness is inherently good) and it
does not help in the case of re-runs anyway. If we had a set of
self-evident moral axioms which allow us to derive as a logical conclusion
that running the original pleasant experience is good, we could use it to
reason about the value of re-runs, but unfortunately we don't.
I guess my point is that I doubt anyone is going to be able to make much
headway on this problem, because it is really just a reflection of the
general poor state of moral philosophy.
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