Vladimir_Nesov comments on Poll: What value extra copies? - Less Wrong

5 [deleted] 22 June 2010 12:15PM

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Comment author: Vladimir_Nesov 22 June 2010 05:04:09PM 0 points [-]

It's clear what the situations you talk about are, but these are not the kind of situation your brainware evolved to morally estimate. (This is not the case of a situation too difficult to understand, nor is it a case of a situation involving opposing moral pressures.) The "untranslatable" metaphor was intended to be a step further than you interpreted (which is more clearly explained in my second comment).

Comment deleted 22 June 2010 06:19:10PM [-]
Comment author: Wei_Dai 22 June 2010 11:11:06PM 4 points [-]

Roko, have you seen my post The Moral Status of Independent Identical Copies? There are also some links in the comments of that post to earlier discussions.

Comment author: Vladimir_Nesov 22 June 2010 06:29:17PM *  0 points [-]

Will see. I just have very little hope for progress to be made on this particular dead horse. I offered some ideas about how it could turn out that on human level progress can't in principle be made on this question (and some similar ones).

Comment author: orthonormal 22 June 2010 10:27:12PM *  3 points [-]

Can you call this particular issue a 'dead horse' when it hasn't been a common subject of argument before? (I mean, most of the relevant conversations in human history hadn't gone past the sophomoric question of whether a copy of you is really you.)

If you're going to be pessimistic on the prospect of discussion, I think you'd at very least need a new idiom, like "Don't start beating a stillborn horse".

Comment author: wedrifid 22 June 2010 10:52:41PM 0 points [-]

If you're going to be pessimistic on the prospect of discussion, I think you'd at very least need a new idiom, like "Don't start beating a stillborn horse".

I like the analogy!