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Furcas comments on The Anthropic Trilemma - Less Wrong
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To condense my response to a number of comments here:
It seems to me that there's some level on which, even if I say very firmly, "I now resolve to care only about future versions of myself who win the lottery! Only those people are defined as Eliezer Yudkowskys!", and plan only for futures where I win the lottery, then, come the next day, I wake up, look at the losing numbers, and say, "Damnit! What went wrong? I thought personal continuity was strictly subjective, and I could redefine it however I wanted!"
You reply, "But that's just because you're defining 'I' the old way in evaluating the anticipated results of the experiment."
And I reply, "...I still sorta think there's more to it than that."
To look at it another way, consider the Born probabilities. In this case, Nature seems to have very definite opinions about how much of yourself flows where, even though both copies exist. Now suppose you try to redefine your utility function so you only care about copies of yourself that see the quantum coin land heads up. Then you are trying to send all of your measure to the branch where the coin lands up heads, by exercising your right to redefine personal continuity howsoever you please; whereas Nature only wants to send half your measure there. Now flip the coin a hundred times. I think Nature is gonna win this one.
Tired of being poor? Redefine personal continuity so that tomorrow you continue as Bill Gates and Bill Gates continues as you - just better hope Gates doesn't swap again the next day.
It seems to me that experience and anticipation operate at a more primitive level than my utility function. Perhaps I am wrong. But I would like a cleaner demonstration of how I am wrong, than pointing out how convenient it would be if there were no question.
Of course it must be a wrong question - it is unanswerable, therefore, it is a wrong question. That is not the same as there being no question.
I'm sorry, I don't think I can help. It's not that I don't believe in personal continuity, it's that I can't even conceive of it.
At t=x there's an Eliezer pattern and there's a Bill Gates pattern. At t=x+1 there's an Eliezer+1 pattern and a Bill Gates+1 pattern. A few of the instances of those patterns live in worlds in which they won the lottery, but most don't. There's nothing more to it than that. How could there be?
Some Eliezer instances might have decided to only care about Eliezer+1 instances that won the lottery, but that wouldn't change anything. Why would it?
I can't be the only one who sees this discussion as parallel to the argument over free will, right down to the existence of people who proudly complain that they can't see the problem.
Do you see how this is the same as saying "Of course there's no such thing as free will; physical causality rules over the brain"? Not false, but missing completely that which actually needs to be explained: what it is that our brain does when we 'make a choice', and why we have a deeply ingrained aversion to the first question being answered by some kind of causality.
There's a strong similarity, all right. In both cases, the bullet-biters describe reality as we have every reason to believe it is, and ask the deniers how reality would be different if free will / personal continuity existed. The deniers don't have an answer, but they're very insistent about this feeling they have that this undefined free will or continuity thing exists.
Explaining this feeling could be interesting, but it has very little to do with the question of whether what the feeling is about, is real.