What's the difference between ethics and morals?
By morals, I mean terminal values. By ethics, I mean advanced forms of strategy involving things like Hofstadter's superrationality. I'm not sure what the standard LW jargon is for this sort of thing, but I think I remember reading something about deciding as though you were deciding on behalf of everyone who shares your decision theory.
I want to maximize the degree of personhood that exists in the universe.
So, if you create a person, and torture them for their entire life, that's worth it?
If the most conscious person possible would be unhappy, I'd rather create them than not. The consensus among science fiction writers seems to be with me on this: a drug that makes you happy at the expense of your creative genius is generally treated as a bad thing.
By ethics, I mean advanced forms of strategy involving things like Hofstadter's superrationality. I'm not sure what the standard LW jargon is for this sort of thing
Sounds like decision theory.
(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.