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ArisKatsaris comments on How Many of Me Are There? - Less Wrong Discussion
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I think you're striving too much to justify your position on the basis of sheer self-interest (that you want to experience being such a person, that you want to live in such a world) -- that you're missing the more obvious solution that your utility function isn't completely selfish, that you care about the rest of the real world, not just your own subjective experiences.
If you didn't care about other people for themselves, you wouldn't care about experiencing being the sort of person who cares about other people. If you didn't care about the future of humanity for itself, you wouldn't care about whether you're the sort of person who presses or doesn't press the button.
Oh I totally agree. But satisfying my utility function is still based on my own subjective experiences.
The original comment, which I agreed with, wasn't framing things in terms of "do I care more about myself or about saving the world." It was about "do I care about PERSONALLY having experiences or about other people who happen to be similar/identical to me having those experiences?"
If there are multiple copies of me, and one of them dies, I didn't get smaller. One of them died. If I get uploaded to a server and then continue on my life, periodically hearing about how another copy of me is having transhuman sex with every Hollywood celebrity at the same time, I didn't get to have that experience. And if a clone of me saves the world, I didn't get to actually save the world.
I would rather save the world than have a clone do it. (But that preference is not so strong that I'd rather have the world saved less than optimally if it meant I got to do it instead of a clone)
I entirely agree - I noticed Raemon's comment earlier and was vaguely planning to say something like this, but you've put it very eloquently.