Yeah, it was your last paragraph that I was meaning. In a given moment, I don't value something about me 20 seconds from now. I value the current experience of thoughts that involve simulations about an idealization of me extrapolated in time. The thing I am valuing are immediate thoughts though. Much like altruistic values being rooted in your own immediate value of anticipations. My meat computer will act on observations to induce an anticipation of X in my brain. If I want to anticipate Y then I should do Z to bring about the actions that lead to the anticipation of Y. Once I am at the precise instant that I'm experiencing Y, I'm not valuing Y because my mind is valuing anticipations post-Y.

It is very interesting given things like closed-timelike curves and so on that there is no anticipation of past selves. It would be great to see a write up of why the perceived flow of entropy causes me to only future-value an anticipation like being proud of my former actions or accomplishments. I'm sure that the right level of articulation is evolutionary biology. I don't see how having visceral cognitive anticipations of the past could be adaptive. But it's still interesting. And even more interesting to think that there is some most-like-me entity within the subspace of entities that do have past-looking anticipations, probably wondering why people don't have future-looking anticipations right now (in a Big Universe, anyway)