RE: Spacetime/Inflation/Civilizations

From: Lee Corbin (lcorbin@tsoft.com)
Date: Tue Mar 11 2003 - 10:46:30 MST

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    Wei Dai writes

    > Hal Finney wrote:
    > > In this way I reach a contradiction between the belief that the number
    > > of copies doesn't matter, the belief that the existence of distant
    > > parallel copies of myself doesn't make much difference in what I should
    > > do, and the idea that there is value in making people happy. Of these,
    > > the most questionable seems to be the assumption that copies don't matter,
    > > so this line of reasoning turns me away from that belief.
    >
    > I agree with you that "copies don't matter" probably isn't true. Since
    > everything exists, if the number of copies doesn't matter, than nothing
    > matters. What I reject is the idea that value is strictly proportional to
    > the global number of copies and with it the implication that you always do
    > good by re-running someone's pleasant experience.

    Value? Value to whom? I take it that in a volume of
    spacetime under your control, an ensemble of Wei Dai
    programs would experience variety. That's your pleasure.

    > But what to replace this with? How should copies matter?

    We replace *value* by *benefit* in our analysis. It's clear
    (or, at the rate we are making progress here, it soon will be)
    that you experience twice the benefit if you have twice the
    number of copies running in a given volume of spacetime.

    In 1990 or so, I published an article in The Immortalist
    claiming as an axiom that benefit is additive over disjoint
    volumes of spacetime, and even went through the perhaps
    pointless exercise of specifying this in an equation (using
    the principle of countable additivity from measure theory).
    I need to dig that up.

    Following Hal's example, one notes that if X is a positive
    experience such that a person will barely flip a coin the
    yield of which is either X or -X (a negative experience
    as bad as X is good), then four copies receiving X and
    three copies receiving -X provides as much benefit as
    one copy receiving X.

    (As for me, in my own value system, I've gone ahead and
    equated value to benefit, except---just like in relativity
    and quantum mechanics!---when we enter into either the very
    small realms or the extremely vast.)

    > How should copies matter? This is the question that I
    > don't think we'll be able to make much progress on until
    > we have a more general advance in moral philosophy.

    Oh, don't give up so soon! 8^D

    > Although we can speculate on possibilities. Maybe it
    > has something to do with distance? Maybe the value of
    > copies are diminished if they're close together in
    > space-time?

    I rather doubt it. Suppose two brothers decide to enter
    into a twin-paradox type scenario, and one lives on Earth
    in his tight little religious colony, but then dies at 89.
    The other gets on a starship and accelerates nearly to the
    speed of light, travels in large circles, and sweeps by
    the Earth every so often. When he also dies at age 89
    their lives obviously had comparable benefit (he had a
    large number of co-religionists on board).

    So now suppose that two duplicates decide to experience only
    one second per century, one stays on Earth, the other gets
    his benefit only in 100 light year increments. Whatever the
    trajectory of the second one, no matter how many galaxies he
    visits (and periodically sweeps back through the local
    vicinity), it seems artificial to suppose that there is some
    difference in the total value of their lives (to you), even
    though the distances between them become arbitrarily large
    from time to time.

    Lee



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