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atucker 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: atucker 11 March 2011 06:17:54AM *  2 points [-]

I personally don't feel compelled to help non-existing people accomplish their goals.

I suspect that this has something to do with the fact that I seem to mostly care about things which activate my empathy, all of which have physically instantiated qualia (happiness, pain, etc.) that I care about, or are highly anthropomorphic and fake that effectively (like Wall-E).

Since non-existing people don't physically exist, I have yet to feel bad for them. This could just be a failure of my moral circuitry though, sort of how if I never found out about starving people in Africa, they wouldn't interact with me in way that would make me feel bad about them. However, I am confused about how mathematically specified but non-existing people work.