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army1987 comments on The Mere Cable Channel Addition Paradox - Less Wrong
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What's the difference between "On a purely selfish basis, is it better for me, personally, to exist or not to exist?" and "Would I commit suicide, all other things being equal?"?
"Would I commit suicide, all other things being equal?"?
My suicide affects other people. I have both selfish and altruistic desires; "not wanting other people to grieve for me" is a good enough reason not to kill myself.
I read "not existing" as "not ever existing", so the difference is everything that happened between when you would have started existing and when you would have committed suicide.
(English badly needs separate words for ‘physically exist at a particular time’ and ‘exist, in an abstract timeless sense’. Lots of philosophical discussion such as A-theory vs B-theory would then be shown to be meaningless: does the past exist? Taboo “exist”: the past no longer exists_1, but it exists_2 nevertheless.)
You can tell whether a timeless decision agent would prefer to have been born by giving it opportunities to make decisions that acausally increase its probability of being born.
EDIT: For example, you can convince the agent that it was created because its creator believed that the agent would probably make paperclips. If the TDT agent values its existence, it will make paperclips.
I don't think a causal decision agent has anything that can be called a "preference to have been born".