steven0461 comments on Cryonics without freezers: resurrection possibilities in a Big World - Less Wrong
You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.
You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.
Comments (129)
I think it's clear that there is also terminal value in caring about the well-being of "me". As with most other human psychological drives, it acts as a sloppily optimized algorithm of some instrumental value, but while its purpose could be achieved more efficiently by other means, the particular way it happens to be implemented contributes an aspect of human values that is important in itself, in a way that's unrelated to the evolutionary purpose that gave rise to the psychological drive, or to instrumental value of its present implementation.
(Relevant posts: Evolutionary Psychology, Thou Art Godshatter, In Praise of Boredom.)
It's not clear to me. To get us to behave selfishly, evolution could have instilled false aliefs to the effect that other people's mental processes aren't as real as ours, in which case we may want to just disregard those. Even if there's no such issue, there's not necessarily any simple one-to-one mapping from urges to components of reflected preference, especially when the urges seem to involve concepts like "me" that are hard to extend beyond a low-tech human context. (If I recall correctly, on previous occasions when you've made this argument, you were thinking of "me" in terms of similarity in person-space, which is not as hard to make sense out of as the threads of experience being discussed in this thread.)