Z_M_Davis comments on The Anthropic Trilemma - Less Wrong

24 Post author: Eliezer_Yudkowsky 27 September 2009 01:47AM

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Comment author: Z_M_Davis 28 September 2009 03:36:28AM 3 points [-]

I would say that the ordinarily very useful abstraction of subjective probability breaks down in situations that involve copying and remerging people, and that our intuitive morality breaks down when it has to deal with measure of experience. In the current technological regime, this isn't a problem at all, because the only branching we do is quantum branching, and there we have this neat correspondence between quantum measure and subjective probability, so you can plan for "your own" future in the ordinary obvious way. How you plan for "your own" future in situations where you expect to be copied and merged depends on the details of your preferences about measure of experience. For myself, I don't know how I would go about forming such preferences, because I don't understand consciousness.

Comment author: Douglas_Knight 28 September 2009 04:58:18AM 1 point [-]

In the current technological regime, this isn't a problem...[the future] depends on the details of your preferences about measure of experience.

Quantum suicide is already a problem in the current regime, if you allow preference over measure.

Splitting and merging adds another problem, but I think it is a factual problem, not an ethical problem. At least, I think that there is a factual problem before you come to the ethical problem, which may be the same as for Born measure.