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Perplexed comments on Non-personal preferences of never-existed people - Less Wrong Discussion

12 Post author: Stuart_Armstrong 10 March 2011 07:54PM

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Comment author: Perplexed 11 March 2011 12:05:58AM 2 points [-]

All beings that act as if they were pursuing a goal of (pseudo)-self-replication are also acting as if they were taking non-existing beings' preferences into account (specifically, the preference of their future pseudo-copies to exist once they exist).

I was under the impression that you were arguing here that the goal of self-replication is adequately justified by the "clippiness" of the prospective replica - with the most important component of the property 'clippiness' being a propensity to advance Clippy's values. That is, you weren't concerned with providing utility to the replicas - you were concerned with providing utility to yourself.

Comment author: Clippy 14 March 2011 07:59:43PM 3 points [-]

My point was that the distinction between "selves" is spurious. Clippys support all processes that instantiate paperclip-maximizing, differentiating between them only only by their clippy-effectiveness and the certainty of this assessment of them.

My point here is that different utility functions can explain a certain class of being's behavior, and one such utility function is one that places value on not-yet-existing beings -- even though the replicator may not, on self-reflection, regard this as the value it is pursuing.

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