I push the button, because it causes net happiness (not that I am necessarily a classical utilitarian, but there are no other factors here that I would take into account). I would be interested to hear what Eliezer thinks of this dilemma.
The post you linked only applies to identical copies. If one copy is tortured while the other lives normally, they are no longer running the same computation, so this is a different argument. Where do you draw the line between other people and copies? Is it only based on differing origins? What about an imperfect copy? If the person who was created for 15 minutes was completely unlike any other person, wouldn't you create em then, according to your stated values? Wouldn't you press the button even if you thought that the person had no moral value because you are not certain of your own values and the possibility that the person's existence has moral value outweighs the possibility that it has negative moral value or vice versa?
Identicalness of copies doesn't matter much to me. The important thing is that I fork myself knowing that I might become the unhappy one (or, more properly, that I will definitely become both), so that I only harm myself. This reduces the problem from a moral dilemma to a question of mere strategy.
(Apologies to RSS users: apparently there's no draft button, but only "publish" and "publish-and-go-back-to-the-edit-screen", misleadingly labeled.)
You have a button. If you press it, a happy, fulfilled person will be created in a sealed box, and then be painlessly garbage-collected fifteen minutes later. If asked, they would say that they're glad to have existed in spite of their mortality. Because they're sealed in a box, they will leave behind no bereaved friends or family. In short, this takes place in Magic Thought Experiment Land where externalities don't exist. Your choice is between creating a fifteen-minute-long happy life or not.
Do you push the button?
I suspect Eliezer would not, because it would increase the death-count of the universe by one. I would, because it would increase the life-count of the universe by fifteen minutes.
Actually, that's an oversimplification of my position. I actually believe that the important part of any algorithm is its output, additional copies matter not at all, the net utility of the existence of a group of entities-whose-existence-constitutes-utility is equal to the maximum of the individual utilities, and the (terminal) utility of the existence of a particular computation is bounded below at zero. I would submit a large number of copies of myself to slavery and/or torture to gain moderate benefits to my primary copy.
(What happens to the last copy of me, of course, does affect the question of "what computation occurs or not". I would subject N out of N+1 copies of myself to torture, but not N out of N. Also, I would hesitate to torture copies of other people, on the grounds that there's a conflict of interest and I can't trust myself to reason honestly. I might feel differently after I'd been using my own fork-slaves for a while.)
So the real value of pushing the button would be my warm fuzzies, which breaks the no-externalities assumption, so I'm indifferent.
But nevertheless, even knowing about the heat death of the universe, knowing that anyone born must inevitably die, I do not consider it immoral to create a person, even if we assume all else equal.