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gjm comments on What makes us think _any_ of our terminal values aren't based on a misunderstanding of reality? - Less Wrong
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I didn't mean it literally. I meant, everything on which we base our long-term plans.
For example:
You go to school, save up money, try to get a good job, try to advance in your career... on the belief that you will find the results rewarding. However, this is pretty easily dismantled if you're not a life-extensionist and/or cryonicist (and don't believe in an afterlife). All it takes is for you to have the realization that
1) If your memory of an experience is erased thoroughly enough (and you don't have access to anything external that will have been altered by the experience) then the experience might as well have not happened. Or insofar that it altered you through some other way than your memories, is interchangeable with any other experience that would have altered you in the same way.
2) In the absence of an afterlife, if you die all your memories get permanently deleted shortly after, and you have no further access to anything influenced by your past experiences including yourself. Therefore, death robs you of your past, present, and future making it as if you had never lived. Obviously other people will remember you for a while, but you will have no awareness of that because you will simply not exist.
Therefore, no matter what you do, it will get cancelled out completely. The way around it is to make a superhuman effort at doing the not-literally-prohibited-by-physics-as-far-as-we-know kind of impossible by working to make cryonics, anti-aging, uploading, or AI (which presumably will then do one of the preceding three for you) possible. But perhaps at an even deeper level our idea of what it is these courses of action are attempting to preserve is itself self-contradictory.
Does that necessarily discredit these courses of action?
Why? If I have to choose between "happy for an hour, then memory-wiped" and "miserable for an hour, then memory-wiped" I unhesitatingly choose the former. Why should the fact that I won't remember it mean that there's no difference at all between the two? One of them involves someone being happy for an hour and the other someone being miserable for an hour.
How so? Obviously my experience 100 years from now (i.e., no experience since I will most likely be very dead) will be the same as if I had never lived. But why on earth should what I care about now be determined by what I will be experiencing in 100 years?
I don't understand this argument when I hear it from religious apologists ("Without our god everything is meaningless, because infinitely many years from now you will no longer exist! You need to derive all the meaning in your life from the whims of an alien superbeing!") and I don't understand it here either.
If you know you will be memory-wiped after an hour, it does not make sense to make long-term plans. For example, you can read a book you enjoy, if you value the feeling. But if you read a scientific book, I think the pleasure from learning would be somewhat spoiled by knowing that you are going to forget this all soon. The learning would mostly become a lost purpose, unless you can use the learned knowledge within the hour.
Knowing that you are unlikely to be alive after 100 years prevents you from making some plans which would be meaningful in a parallel universe where you are likely to live 1000 years. Some of those plans are good according to the values you have now, but are outside of your reach. Thus future death does not make life completely meaningless, but it ruins some value even now.
I do agree that there are things you might think you want that don't really make sense given that in a few hundred years you're likely to be long dead and your influence on the world is likely to be lost in the noise.
But that's a long way from saying -- as bokov seems to be -- that this invalidates "everything on which we base our long-term plans".
I wouldn't spend the next hour reading a scientific book if I knew that at the end my brain would be reset to its prior state. But I will happily spend time reading a scientific book if, e.g., it will make my life more interesting for the next few years, or lead to higher income which I can use to retire earlier, buy nicer things, or give to charity, even if all those benefits take place only over (say) the next 20 years.
Perhaps I'm unusual, or perhaps I'm fooling myself, but it doesn't seem to me as if my long-term plans, or anyone else's, are predicated on living for ever or having influence that lasts for hundreds of years.