Tehom comments on Pascal's Muggle: Infinitesimal Priors and Strong Evidence - Less Wrong

43 Post author: Eliezer_Yudkowsky 08 May 2013 12:43AM

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Comment author: TabAtkins 09 May 2013 02:31:09AM 6 points [-]

Am I crazy, or does Bostrom's argument in that paper fall flat almost immediately, based on a bad moral argument?

His first, and seemingly most compelling, argument for Duplication over Unification is that, assuming an infinite universe, it's certain (with probability 1) that there is already an identical portion of the universe where you're torturing the person in front of you. Given Unification, it's meaningless to distinguish between that portion and this portion, given their physical identicalness, so torturing the person is morally blameless, as you're not increasing the number of unique observers being tortured. Duplication makes the two instances of the person distinct due to their differing spatial locations, even if every other physical and mental aspect is identical, so torturing is still adding to the suffering in the universe.

However, you can flip this over trivially and come to a terrible conclusion. If Duplication is true, you merely have to simulate a person until they experience a moment of pure hedonic bliss, in some ethically correct manner that everyone agrees is morally good to experience and enjoy. Then, copy the fragment of the simulation covering the experiencing of that emotion, and duplicate it endlessly. Each duplicate is distinct, and so you're increasing the amount of joy in the universe every time you make a copy. It would be a net win, in fact, if you killed every human and replaced the earth with a computer doing nothing but running copies of that one person experiencing a moment of bliss. Unification takes care of this, by noting that duplicating someone adds, at most, a single bit of information to the universe, so spamming the universe with copies of the happy moment counts either the same as the single experience, or at most a trivial amount more.

Am I thinking wrong here?

Comment author: Tehom 20 May 2013 06:25:44PM 4 points [-]

However, you can flip this over trivially and come to a terrible conclusion. If Duplication is true, you merely have to simulate a person until they experience a moment of pure hedonic bliss, in some ethically correct manner that everyone agrees is morally good to experience and enjoy. Then, copy the fragment of the simulation covering the experiencing of that emotion, and duplicate it endlessly.

True just if your summum bonum is exactly an aggregate of moments of happiness experienced.

I take the position that it is not.

I don't think one even has to resort to a position like "only one copy counts".

Comment author: TabAtkins 03 June 2013 10:14:04PM 0 points [-]

True, but that's then striking more at the heart of Bostrom's argument, rather than my counter-argument, which was just flipping Bostrom around. (Unless your summum malum is significantly different, such that duplicate tortures and duplicate good-things-equivalent-to-torture-in-emotional-effect still sum differently?)