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bogdanb comments on MWI, copies and probability - Less Wrong
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Exactly my view.
A clarification: suppose Roko throws such a qGrenade (TM) at me, and I get $100. I will become angry and my attempt to inflict violence upon Roko. However, that is not because I’m sad about the 50% of parallel, untouchable universes where I’m dead. Instead, that is because Roko’s behavior is strong evidence that in the future he may do dangerous things; righteous anger now (and, perhaps, violence) is simply intended to reduce the measure of my current “futures” where Roko kills me.
On a slightly different note, worrying about my “parallel” copies (or even about their futures) seems to me quite akin to worrying about my past selves. I simply doesn’t mean anything. I really don’t care that my past self a year ago had a toothache — except in the limited sense that it’s slight evidence that I may be in the future predisposed to tooth aches. I do care about the probability of my future selves having aching teeth, because I may become them.
Like Sly, I don’t put much value in “versions” of me I can’t interact with. (The “much” is there because, of course, I don’t know with 100% certainty how the universe works, so I can’t be 100% sure what I can interact with.) But my “future selves” are in a kind of interaction with me: what I do influences which of those future selves I’ll become. The value assigned to them is akin to the value someone in free-fall assigns to the rigidity of the surface below them: they aren’t angry because (say) the pavement is hard, in itself; they are angry because it implies a squishy future for themselves. On the other hand, they really don’t care about the surface they’ve fallen from.
With this in mind it seems that you treat a qGrenade in exactly the same way you would treat a pseudo-random grenade. You don't care whether the probability was quantum or just 'unknown'. My reasoning may be very slightly different but in this regard we are in agreement.
Yep. Grenades in MY past are always duds, otherwise I wouldn’t be here to talk about them. It doesn’t matter if they were fake, or malfunctioned, or had a pseudorandom or quantum probability to blow up. Past throwers of grenades are only relevant in the sense that they are evidence of future grenade-throwing.
Grenades in my future are those that I’m concerned about. With regards to people intending to throw grenades at me, the only distinction is how sure I am I’ll live; even something deterministic but hard to compute (for me) I consider a risk, and I’d be angry with the presumptive thrower.
(A fine point: I would be less angry to find out that someone who threw a grenade at me knew it wouldn’t blow, even if I didn’t know it at the time. I’d still be pissed, though.)
I would still kill them, even if I knew they were now completely reformed or impotent. If convenient, I'd beat them to death with a single box just to ram the point home.