So wouldn't you press the button, since the person in the box is not a copy of you (unless you place no value on the happiness of others or something like that)?
You seem to be indifferent between being in pain for a few minutes, then dying and being tortured for a few years then dying ("the (terminal) utility of the existence of a particular computation is bounded below at zero"). This strikes me as odd.
Also, I take an approach to the idea of anticipating subjective experience that is basically what Eliezer describes as the third horn of the anthropic trilemma but with more UDT, so I regard many of the concepts you discuss as meaningless.
When there's nothing real at stake, I might decide to press the button or take the few minutes of pain, in order to get the warm fuzzies. But if there was something that actually mattered on the line, this stuff would go right out the window.
I reject all five horns of the anthropic trilemma. My position is that the laws of probability mostly break down whenever weird anthropic stuff happens, and that the naive solution to the forgetful driver problem is correct. In the hotel with the presumptuous philosopher, I take the bet for an expected $10.
(Apologies to RSS users: apparently there's no draft button, but only "publish" and "publish-and-go-back-to-the-edit-screen", misleadingly labeled.)
You have a button. If you press it, a happy, fulfilled person will be created in a sealed box, and then be painlessly garbage-collected fifteen minutes later. If asked, they would say that they're glad to have existed in spite of their mortality. Because they're sealed in a box, they will leave behind no bereaved friends or family. In short, this takes place in Magic Thought Experiment Land where externalities don't exist. Your choice is between creating a fifteen-minute-long happy life or not.
Do you push the button?
I suspect Eliezer would not, because it would increase the death-count of the universe by one. I would, because it would increase the life-count of the universe by fifteen minutes.
Actually, that's an oversimplification of my position. I actually believe that the important part of any algorithm is its output, additional copies matter not at all, the net utility of the existence of a group of entities-whose-existence-constitutes-utility is equal to the maximum of the individual utilities, and the (terminal) utility of the existence of a particular computation is bounded below at zero. I would submit a large number of copies of myself to slavery and/or torture to gain moderate benefits to my primary copy.
(What happens to the last copy of me, of course, does affect the question of "what computation occurs or not". I would subject N out of N+1 copies of myself to torture, but not N out of N. Also, I would hesitate to torture copies of other people, on the grounds that there's a conflict of interest and I can't trust myself to reason honestly. I might feel differently after I'd been using my own fork-slaves for a while.)
So the real value of pushing the button would be my warm fuzzies, which breaks the no-externalities assumption, so I'm indifferent.
But nevertheless, even knowing about the heat death of the universe, knowing that anyone born must inevitably die, I do not consider it immoral to create a person, even if we assume all else equal.