Imagine it's over the cosmic horizon.
That's an interesting ingredient to throw in. I've been imagining scenarios where, though the copies don't interact with each other, there will nevertheless be people who can obtain information about both (e.g. music scholars who get to write treatises on Beethoven's 9th symphony vs "parallel-Beethoven's 9th symphony").
But if the copies are (to all intents and purposes) in causally disjoint parallel universes then intuitively it seems that an exact copy of Beethoven is (on average) no better or worse than a 'statistical copy'.
Hmm, this is certainly a more interesting question. My first instinct (which I'd easily be persuaded to reconsider) is to say that the question ceases to make sense when the 'copy' is in a 'parallel universe'. Questions about what is 'desirable' or 'good' for X only require (and only have) answers when there's some kind of information flow between the thinker and X. (But note that the case where X is an imaginary or simulated universe is quite different from that where X is a 'real' parallel universe that no-one has imagined or simulated.)
ETA: But we can imagine two people starting off in the same universe and then travelling so far apart that their future light cones become disjoint. And then we could consider the question of the relative value of the following three scenarios:
and ask "how much effort we should put in to bring about 2 or 3 rather than 1, and 3 rather than 2?"
This is an even more interesting question (or was this all along the question?) But I don't think it's really a question about copies of oneself or even of a person (except insofar as we regard utility as supervening on people's experiences), it's a general question about how we should 'account for' the fates of regions of the universe that become inaccessible from our own, when trying to judge whether our actions are good or bad.
Questions about what is 'desirable' or 'good' for X only require (and only have) answers when there's some kind of information flow between the thinker and X.
Suppose that your hour of hard labor creates a separate spacetime - black hole in our universe, Big Bang in theirs type scenario. Does that count as an information flow between you and an inhabitant (X) of the new universe? I'd think it does, so you're still on the hook to answer Roko's question.
In the future, it may be possible for you to scan your own brain and create copies of yourself. With the power of a controllable superintelligent AI, it may even be possible to create very accurate instances of your past self (and you could take action today or in the near future to make this easier by using lifelogging tools such as these glasses).
So I ask Less Wrong: how valuable do you think creating extra identical, non-interacting copies of yourself is? (each copy existing in its own computational world, which is identical to yours with no copy-copy or world-world interaction)
For example, would you endure a day's hard labor to create an extra self-copy? A month? A year? Consider the hard labor to be digging a trench with a pickaxe, with a harsh taskmaster who can punish you if you slack off.
Do you think having 10 copies of yourself made in the future is 10 times as good as having 1 copy made? Or does your utility in copies drop off sub-linearly?
Last time I spoke to Robin Hanson, he was extremely keen on having a lot of copies of himself created (though I think he was prepared for these copies to be emulant-wage-slaves).
I have created a poll for LW to air its views on this question, then in my next post I'll outline and defend my answer, and lay out some fairly striking implications that this has for existential risk mitigation.
For those on a hardcore-altruism trip, you may substitute any person or entity that you find more valuable than your own good self: would you sacrifice a day of this entity's life for an extra copy? A year? etc.
UPDATE: Wei Dai has asked this question before, in his post "The moral status of independent identical copies" - though his post focuses more on lock-step copies that are identical over time, whereas here I am interested in both lock-step identical copies and statistically identical copies (a statistically identical copy has the same probability distribution of futures as you do).