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MineCanary comments on The Domain of Your Utility Function - Less Wrong
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A mild defense of PDU:
The other could also reply: "You say now that you would die because it gives you pleasure now to think of yourself as the sort of person who would die to save others. Moreover, if you do someday actually sacrifice yourself for others, it would be because the disutility of shattering your self-perception would seem to outweigh (in that moment) the disutility of dying."
(And now we have come back yet again to Newcomb, it seems.)
Or perhaps the pain of being a survivor when other's didn't and when you could have saved them (which can have an ongoing effect for the rest of your life) would outweigh the pleasure you could experience as a person living with survivor's guilt.
Although, if you were rational, you could probably overcome the survivor's guilt, but still.
I think in actual humans, if you were using this model as a metaphor for how they think, you'd have to say they sometimes irrational perceive another's brain as their own, so they're counting the net pleasure of the people they save in the utility calculation for their future mind. After all, throughout the past they've been able to derive pleasure from other people's pleasure or from imagining it, and it takes rational thought to eliminate that component from the calculation upon realizing that their brain will no longer be able to feel.