Tom_McCabe comments on Pascal's Mugging: Tiny Probabilities of Vast Utilities - Less Wrong

39 Post author: Eliezer_Yudkowsky 19 October 2007 11:37PM

You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.

Comments (334)

Sort By: Old

You are viewing a single comment's thread.

Comment author: Tom_McCabe 23 October 2007 02:48:00AM 2 points [-]

"Congratulations, you made my brain asplode."

Read http://www.spaceandgames.com/?p=22 if you haven't already. Your utility function should not be assigning things arbitrarily large additive utilities, or else you get precisely this problem (if pigs qualify as minds, use rocks), and your function will sum to infinity. If you "kill" by destroying the exact same information content over and over, it doesn't seem to be as bad, or even bad at all. If I made a million identical copies of you, froze them into complete stasis, and then shot 999,999 with a cryonics-proof Super-Plasma-Vaporizer, would this be immoral? It would certainly be less immoral than killing a million ordinary individuals, at least as far as I see it.