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entirelyuseless comments on Open thread, Oct. 19 - Oct. 25, 2015 - Less Wrong Discussion

3 Post author: MrMind 19 October 2015 06:59AM

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Comment author: entirelyuseless 22 October 2015 05:07:08PM 0 points [-]

If you're going to worry about things like that if big world immortality is true, you can just worry about them anyway, because the only thing that you will ever observe (even if big world immortality is false) is that you always continue to survive, even when other people die, even from things like nuclear war.

Your observations will always be compatible with your personal immortality, no matter what the truth is.

Comment author: qmotus 28 October 2015 06:32:40PM 0 points [-]

Well, sort of, but I still think there is an important difference in that without big world immortality all the survival scenarios may be so unlikely that they aren't worthy of serious consideration, whereas with it one is guaranteed to experience survival, and the likelihood of experiencing certain types of survival becomes important.

Let's suppose you're in a situation where you can sacrifice yourself to save someone you care about, and there's a very, very big chance that if you do so, you die, but a very, very small chance that you end up alive but crippled, but the crippled scenarios form the vast majority of the scenarios in which you survive. Wouldn't your choice depend at least to some degree on whether you expect to experience survival no matter what, or not?