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steven0461 comments on Preference For (Many) Future Worlds - Less Wrong
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In what sense would I want to translate these preferences? Why wouldn't I just discard the preferences, and use the mind that came up with them to generate entirely new preferences in the light of its new, improved world-model? If I'm asking myself, as if for the first time, the question, "if there are going to be a lot of me-like things, how many me-like things with how good lives would be how valuable?", then the answer my brain gives is that it wants to use empathy and population ethics-type reasoning to answer that question, and that it feels no need to ever refer to "unique next experience" thinking. Is it making a mistake?
I think in the sense that the new world-model ought to add up to normality. The move you propose probably only works (i.e., is intuitively acceptable) for someone who already has a strong intuition that they ought to apply empathy and population ethics-type reasoning to all decisions, not just those that only affect other people. For others who don't share such intuition, switching from "unique thread of experience" to empathy and population ethics-type reasoning would imply making radically different decisions, even for current real-world (i.e., not thought experiment) decisions, like whether to donate most of their money to charity (the former says "no" while the latter says "yes", since the difference in empathy-level between "someone like me" and "a random human" isn't that great).
What makes you think a mind came up with them?
I don't understand what point you're making; could you expand?
You can't use the mind that came up with your preferences if no such mind exists. That's my point.
What would have come up with them instead?
Evolution.
In the sense that evolution came up with my mind, or in some more direct sense?
That's one approach to take, with various attractive features, but one needs to be careful in that case in thinking about thought-experiments like those Wei Dai offers (which are implicitly callling on the thread model).