A similar problem can be created with other scenarios. For instance, suppose you are planning on spending all day doing some unpleasant activity that will greatly benefit you in the future. Omega tells you that some mad scientist plans on making a very large amount of independent lockstep-identical brain* emulators of you that will have the exact same experiences you will be having today, and then be painlessly stopped and deleted after the day is up (assume the unpleasant activity is solitary in order to avoid complications about him having to simulate other people too for the copies to have truly identical experiences).
Should you do the unpleasant activity, or should you sacrifice your future to try to make your many-copied day a good one?
I'm honestly unsure about this and it's making me a little sick. I don't want to have to live a crappy life because of weird anthropic scenarios. I have really complicated, but hopefully not inconsistent, moral values about copies of me, especially lockstep-identical ones, but I'm not sure how to apply them here. Generally I think that lockstep-identical copies whose lifetime utility is positive don't add any value (I wouldn't pay to create them), but it seems wrong to apply this lockstep-identical copies with negative lifetime utility (I might pay to avoid creating them). It seems obviously worse to create a hundred tortured lockstep copies than to create ten.
One fix that would allow me to act normally would be to add a stipulation to my values that in these kind of weird anthropic scenarios where most of my lockstep copies will die soon (and this is beyond my control), I get utility from taking actions that allow the whichever copies to survive to live good lives. If I decide to undergo the unpleasant experience for my future benefit, even if I have no idea if I'm going to be a surviving copy or not (but am reasonably certain there will be at least some surviving copies), I get utility that counterbalances the unpleasantness.
Obviously such a value would have to be tightly calibrated to avoid generating as crazy behavior as the problem I devised it to solve. It would have to only apply in weird lockstep anthropic scenarios and not inform the rest of my behavior at all. The utility would have to be high enough to counterbalance any dis-utility all of the mes would suffer, but low enough to avoid creating an incentive to create suffering-soon-to-die-lockstep-identical copies. It would also have to avoid creating an incentive for quantum suicide. I think it is possible to fit all these stipulations.
In fact, I'm not sure it's really a severe modification of my values at all. The idea of doomed mes valiantly struggling to make sure that at least some of them will have decent lives in the future has a certain grandeur to it, like I'm defying fate. It seems like there are far less noble ways to die.
If anyone has a less crazy method of avoiding these dilemma's though, please, please, please let me know. I like Wei Dai's idea, but am not sure I understand MWI enough to fully get it. Also, I don't know if it would apply to the artificially-created copy scenario in addition to the false vacuum one..
*By "lockstep" I mean that the copy will not just start out identical to me. It will have identical experiences to me for the duration of its lifetime. It may have a shorter lifespan than me, but for its duration the experiences will be the same (for instance, a copy of 18 year old me may be created and be deleted after a few days, but until it is deleted it will have the same experiences as 18 year old me did).
If anyone has a less crazy method of avoiding these dilemma's though, please, please, please let me know.
Ignore them?
Why do you need answers to these questions, so intensely that being unsure is "making [you] a little sick"? There is no Omega, and he/she/it is not going to show up to create these scenarios. What difference will an answer make to any practical decision in front of you, here and now?
Imagine that the universe is approximately as it appears to be (I know, this is a controversial proposition, but bear with me!). Further imagine that the many worlds interpretation of Quantum mechanics is true (I'm really moving out of Less Wrong's comfort zone here, aren't I?).
Now assume that our universe is in a situation of false vacuum - the universe is not in its lowest energy configuration. Somewhere, at some point, our universe may tunnel into true vacuum, resulting in a expanding bubble of destruction that will eat the entire universe at high speed, destroying all matter and life. In many worlds, such a collapse need not be terminal: life could go one on a branch of lower measure. In fact, anthropically, life will go on somewhere, no matter how unstable the false vacuum is.
So now assume that the false vacuum we're in is highly unstable - the measure of the branch in which our universe survives goes down by a factor of a trillion every second. We only exist because we're in the branch of measure a trillionth of a trillionth of a trillionth of... all the way back to the Big Bang.
None of these assumptions make any difference to what we'd expect to see observationally: only a good enough theory can say that they're right or wrong. You may notice that this setup transforms the whole universe into a quantum suicide situation.
The question is, how do you go about maximising expected utility in this situation? I can think of a few different approaches: