I might have been misinterpreting Pavrita's original statement, and may have been unclear about my position.
People should be allowed to torture themselves without ability to change their mind, if they need to. (However, this is something that in real life would happen rarely for extreme reasons. I think that if people start doing that all the time, we should stop and question whether something is wrong with the system).
The key is that you must firmly understand that you, personally, will be getting tortured. I'm okay with making the decision to get tortured, and then fork yourself. I guess. (Although for small utility, I think it's a bad decision). What I'm not okay with is making the decision to fork yourself, and then have one of your copies get tortured while one of you doesn't. Whoever decides to BEGIN the torture must be aware that they, personally, will never receive any benefit from it.
Um.
I think I agree with you, but I'm not sure, and I'm not sure if the problem is language or that I'm just really confused.
For the sake of clarity, let's consider a specific hypothetical: Sam is given a button which, if pressed, Sam believes will do two things. First, it will cause there to be two identical-at-the-moment-of-pressing copies of Sam. Second, it will cause one of the copies (call it Sam-X) to suffer a penalty P, and the other copy (call it Sam-Y) to receive a benefit B.
If I've understood you correctly, you would say that for Sam to press that button is an ethical choice, though it might not be a wise choice, depending on the value of (B-P).
Yes?
(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.