We've been talking as though there was one "real" me and several xeroxes, but you seem to be acting as if that were the case on a moral level, which seems wrong. Surely, if I fork myself, each branch is just as genuinely me as any other? If I build and lock a cage, arrange to fork myself with one copy inside the cage and one outside, press the fork button, and find myself inside the cage, then I'm the one who locked myself in.
Surely, if I fork myself, each branch is just as genuinely me as any other?
Fundamental disagreement here, which I don't expect to work through. Once you fork yourself, I would treat each copy as a unique individual. (It's irrelevant whether one of you is "real" or not. They're identical people, but they're still separate people).
If those people all actually make the same decisions, great. I am not okay with exposing hundreds of copies to years of torture based on a decision you made in the comfort of your computer room.
(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.