Ok, three more questions/scenarios.
1) You are Fred (of HPMOR's Fred & George, who for this we'll assume are perfect copies). Voldemort comes up to you and George and says he will kill one of you. If he kills George, you live and nothing else happens. If he kills you, George lives and gets a dollar. Would you choose to allow you!Fred to die? And not just as the sacrifice you know it's reasonable to make in terms of total final utility but as the obvious correct choice from your perspective. (If the names are a problem, assume somebody makes a copy of you and immediately asks you this question.)
2) If all else is equal, would you rather have N*X copies than X copies for all positive values of X and all positive and greater than 1 values of N? (I don't know why I worded that like that. Would you rather have more copies than less for all values of more and less?)
3) You go to make copies of yourself for the first time. You have $100, with which you can pay for either 1 copy or 100 copies (with a small caveat). If you choose 100 copies, each copy's life is 10% less good, and the life of original/biological!you will be 20% less good (the copy maker is a magical wizard that can do things like this and likes to make people think). Do you choose the 100 copies? And do you think that it is obviously better and one would be stupid to choose otherwise?
Thanks.
Re: #1... there are all kinds of emotional considerations here, of course; I really don't know what I would do, much as I don't know what I would do given a similar deal involving my real-life brother or husband. But if I leave all of that aside, and I also ignore total expected utility calculations, then I prefer to continue living and let my copy die.
Re: #2... within some range of Ns where there aren't significant knock-on effects unrelated to what I think you're getting at (e.g., creating too much competition for the things I want, losing the benefits ...
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