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kaiokan12 comments on Open Thread: April 2010 - Less Wrong
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If Omega told me that the rest of my life would be more painful than it was pleasant I would still choose to live. I think most others here would choose similarly (except in cases of extreme pain like torture).
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Even if my life would be painful on net, there are still projects I want to finish and work I want to do for others that would prevent me from choosing death. Valuing things such as these is no more irrational than valuing your own pleasure.
Perhaps our disagreement is over the connection between pain/pleasure and utility. I would prefer a world in which I was in pain but am able to complete certain projects to one in which I was in pleasure but unable to complete certain projects. In the economic sense of utility (rank in an ordinal preference function), my utility would be higher in the former world than the latter world (even though the former is more painful).
I think your disagreement is over time preference. Which path you choose now depends on how much you discount future pain versus present moral guilt or empathy considerations.
In other words, you would make that choice now because that would make you feel best now. Of course (you project that) you would make the same choice at time T, for all T occurring between now and the completion of your projects.
This is known as having a high time preference. It might seem like a quintessential example of low time preference, because you get a big payoff if you can persist through to completing those projects. However, the initial assumption was that "the rest of my life would be more painful than it was pleasant," so ex hypothesi the payoff cannot possibly be big enough to balance out the pain.
Pleasure and pain have little to do with it.
Thanks, I read the article, and I think everything in it is actually answered by my post above. For instance:
He's confused about time structure here. He doesn't want to take the pill now, because that would have a dreadful effect on his happiness now. Whether we call it pleasure/pain, happiness/unhappiness or something else, there's no escaping it.
Eliezer says his values are not reducible to happiness. Yet how unhappy (or painful) would it be for him right now to watch the happy-all-the-time pill slowly being inched toward his mouth, knowing he'll be made to swallow it? I suspect those would be the worst few moments of his life.
It's not that values are not reducible to happiness, it's that happiness has a time structure that our language usually ignores.
What if you sneak up on him while he's sleeping and give him the happy-all-the-time injection before he knows you've done it? Then he wouldn't have that moment of unhappiness.
Yes, and he would never care about it as long as he never entertained the prospect. I don't think there is a definition of "value" that does everything he needs it to while at the some time not referring to happiness/unhappiness or similar. Charity requires that I continue to await such definition, but I am skeptical.
Preference satisfaction =! happiness. How many times do I have to make this point?
Which would you prefer to have happen, without any forewarning: 1) I wirehead you, and destroy the rest of the world, or 2) I torture you for a while, and leave the rest of the world alone.
If you don't pick 2, you're an asshole. :P
When do you think suicide would be the rational option?
When doing so causes a sufficiently large benefit for others (ie, 'a suicide mission', as opposed to mere suicide). Or when you have already experienced enough danger (that is, situations likely to have killed you) to overcome your prior and make you conclude that you have quantum immortality with high enough confidence.
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