Thank you for the thoughtful response! I'm not convinced that your assertion successfully breaks the link between effective altruism and the blender.
Is your argument consistent with making the following statement when discussing the inpending age of em?
If your mind is uploaded, a future version of you will likely subjectively experience hell. Some other version of you may also subjectively experience heaven. Many people, copies of you split off at various points, will carry all the memories of your human life' If you feel like your brain is in a blender trying to conceive of this, you may want to put it into an actual blender before someone with temporal power and an uploading machine decides to define your eternity for you.
Well, if we're implying that time travellers could go back and invisibly copy you at any point in time and then upload you to whatever simulation they feel inclined towards... I don't see how blendering yourself now will prevent them from just going to the moment before that and copying that version of you.
So, reality is that blendering yourself achieves only one thing, which is to prevent the future possible yous from existing. Personally I think that does a disservice to future you. That can similarly be expanded to others. We cannot conceivably prev...
I need help getting out of a logical trap I've found myself in after reading The Age of Em.
Some statements needed to set the trap:
If mind-uploading is possible, then a mind can theoretically exist for an arbitrary length of time.
If a mind is contained in software, it can be copied, and therefore can be stolen.
An uploaded mind can retain human attributes indefinitely.
Some subset of humans are sadistic jerks, many of these humans have temporal power.
All humans, under certain circumstances, can behave like sadistic jerks.
Human power relationships will not simply disappear with the advent of mind uploading.
Some minor negative implications:
Torture becomes embarrassingly parallel.
US states with the death penalty may adopt death plus simulation as a penalty for some offenses.
The trap:
Over a long enough timeline, the probability of a copy of any given uploaded mind falling into the power of a sadistic jerk approaches unity. Once an uploaded mind has fallen under the power of a sadistic jerk, there is no guarantee that it will ever be 'free', and the quantity of experienced sufferring could be arbitrarily large, due in part to the embarrassingly parallel nature of torture enabled by running multiple copies of a captive mind.
Therefore! If you believe that mind uploading will become possible in a given individual's lifetime, the most ethical thing you can do from the utilitarian standpoint of minimizing aggregate suffering, is to ensure that the person's mind is securely deleted before it can be uploaded.
Imagine the heroism of a soldier, who faced with capture by an enemy capable of uploading minds and willing to parallelize torture spends his time ensuring that his buddies' brains are unrecoverable at the cost of his own capture.
I believe that mind uploading will become possible in my lifetime, please convince me that running through the streets with a blender screaming for brains is not an example of effective altruism.
On a more serious note, can anyone else think of examples of really terrible human decisions that would be incentivised by the development of AGI or mind uploading? This problem appears related to AI safety.