Still not sure how that makes sense. The only thing I can think of that could work is us simulating another reality and having someone in that reality happen to say "Hey, whoever's simulating this realty, you'd better do x or we'll simulate your reality and torture all of you!", followed by us believing them, not realizing that it doesn't work that way. If the Level IV Multiverse hypothesis is correct, then the elements of this multiverse are unsupervised universes; there's no way for people in different realities to threaten each other if they mutually understand that. If you're simulating a universe, and you set up the software such that you can make changes in it, then every time you make a change, you're just switching to simulating a different structure. You can push the "torture" button, and you'll see your simulated people getting tortured, but that version of the reality would have existed (in the same subjunctive way as all the others) anyway, and the original non-torture reality also goes on subjunctively existing.
You don't grok UDT control. You can control the behavior of fixed programs, programs that completely determine their own behavior.
Take a "universal log program", for example: it enumerates all programs, for each program enumerates all computational steps, on all inputs, and writes all that down on an output tape. This program is very simple, you can easily give a formal specification for it. It doesn't take any inputs, it just computes the output tape. And yet, the output of this program is controlled by what the mathematician ate for breakfast,...
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).