Oh, I see. I appear to have initially missed the phrase `much of my values'.
I am wary of referring to my current inconsistent values rather than their reflective equilibrium as `my values' because of the principle of explosion, but I am unsure of how to resolve this into my current self even having values.
It seems our positions can be summed up like this: You are wary of referring to your current values rather than their reflective equilibrium as 'your values', because your current values are inconsistent. I am wary of referring to the reflective equilibrium rather than my current values as 'my values', because I expect the transition to reflective equilibrium to be a very aggressive operation. (One could say that I embrace my ignorance.)
My concern is that the reflective equilibrium is far from my current position in the dynamical system of values. Meanwhile, Marcello and Wei Dai are concerned that the dynamical system is chaotic and has multiple reflective equilibria.
(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.