Wei_Dai 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 27 September 2009 04:39:32AM 8 points [-]

Following Nominull and Furcas, I bite the third bullet without qualms for the perfectly ordinary obvious reasons. Once we know how much of what kinds of experiences will occur at different times, there's nothing left to be confused about. Subjective selfishness is still coherent because you're not just an arbitrary observer with no distinguishing characteristics at all; you're a very specific bundle of personality traits, memories, tendencies of thought, and so forth. Subjective selfishness corresponds to only caring about this one highly specific bundle: only caring about whether someone falls off a cliff if this person identifies as such-and-such and has such-and-these specific memories and such-and-those personality traits: however close a correspondence you need to match whatever you define as personal identity.

The popular concepts of altruism and selfishness weren't designed for people who understand materialism. Once you realize this, you can just recast whatever it was you were already trying to do in terms of preferences over histories of the universe. It all adds up to, &c., &c.

Comment author: Wei_Dai 30 September 2009 10:09:41AM *  2 points [-]

I agree that giving up anticipation does not mean giving up selfishness. But as Dan Armak pointed out there is another reason why you may not want to give up anticipation: you may prefer to keep the qualia of anticipation itself, or more generally do not want to depart too much from the subjective experience of being human.

Eliezer, if you are reading this, why do you not want to give up anticipation? Do you still think it means giving up selfishness? Is it for Dan Armak's reason? Or something else?