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Viliam comments on Open thread, Aug. 10 - Aug. 16, 2015 - Less Wrong Discussion
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A question that I noticed I'm confused about. Why should I want to resist changes to my preferences?
I understand that it will reduce the chance of any preference A being fulfilled, but my answer is that if the preference changes from A to B, then at that time I'll be happier with B. If someone told me "tonight we will modify you to want to kill puppies," I'd respond that by my current preferences that's a bad thing, but if my preferences change then I won't think it's a bad thing any more, so I can't say anything against it. If I had a button that could block the modification, I would press it, but I feel like that's only because I have a meta-preference that my preferences tend to maximizing happiness, and the meta-preference has the same problem.
A quicker way to say this is that future-me has a better claim to caring about what the future world is like than present-me does. I still try to work toward a better world, but that's based on my best prediction for my future preferences, which is my current preferences.
If I offered you now a pill that would make you (1) look forward to suicide, and (2) immediately kill yourself, feeling extremely happy about the fact that you are killing yourself... would you take it?
No, but I don’t see this as a challenge to the reasoning. I refuse because of my meta-preference about the total amount of my future-self’s happiness, which will be cut off. A nonzero chance of living forever means the amount of happiness I received from taking the pill would have to be infinite. But if the meta-preference is changed at the same time, I don’t know how I would justify refusing.