From: Wei Dai (weidai@weidai.com)
Date: Fri Mar 14 2003 - 11:58:52 MST
On Tue, Mar 11, 2003 at 09:46:30AM -0800, Lee Corbin wrote:
> 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.
I'm not sure what distinction you're making between value and benefit. And
just how will it become clear that I experience twice the benefit if I
have twice the number of copies running in a given volume of spacetime?
Will I, after running multiple copies of myself, suddenly realize the
truth of this statement as an epiphany? How can that happen, given that
having multiple identical copies of oneself has no subjective feel? It
seems much more likely that after running multiple identical copies of
myself, I'll say "I don't feel any different. This is pointless. Let's go
back to running just one copy."
> 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.
You can claim anything as an axiom, but it's not self-evident to me.
We know that if you run the same computation twice in a row, it's usually
faster the second time because some of the necessary data will already be
in cache. So with the same resources, the number of identical computations
you can run can be higher than the number of different computations you
can run.
With that in mind, consider the following thought experiment. Suppose you
run a charity, which provides memory and computational power to those who
can no longer afford enough to sustain their mind. Let's say you currently
serve 4 people, all of whom are living in seperate closed virtual worlds,
and because you respect their privacy, you have no idea what's going on
inside these worlds. Three of them are identical and determinstic (so
they'll always be identical). Now suppose due to a budget crunch, you can
only support either 3 identical worlds, or 2 different worlds. Would you
always choose to terminate the one world that's different? Or if you were
to receive a budget increase, would you always just make more copies of
the person you already have, rather than consider new applications?
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