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Houshalter comments on Open thread, Aug. 10 - Aug. 16, 2015 - Less Wrong Discussion
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Omega places a button in front of you. he promises that each press gives you an extra year of life, plus whatever your discounting factor is. If you walk away, the button is destroyed. Do you press the button forever and never leave?
That's a variant of a known problem in any decision theory that admits unbounded utility: there's something inside a box which every minute increases its utility, but it stops when you open the box and you get to enjoy it.
When do you open the box?
A similar problem is: pick a number. Gain that many utilons.
That's when Scott Aaronson's essay Who Can Name the Bigger Number comes in handy!
Since I don't spend all my time inside avoiding every risk hoping for someone to find the cure to aging, I probably value a infinite life a large but finite amount times more than a year of life. This means that I must discount in such a way that after a finite number of button press Omega would need to grant me an infinite life span.
So I preform some Fermi calculations to obtain an upper bound on the number of button presses I need to obtain Immortality, press the button that often, then leave.
Assuming those are QALY, not just years, spend a week or so pressing the button non-stop, then use the extra million years to become Omega.