They make no such claim, so they do not bear that burden.

One problem with these sorts of tools is that they encourage people to split their arguments into lots of little pieces, which means arguments for C often end up being A->B, B'->C where B and B' look alike but on closer inspection turn out to be different.

In the title, you named an opponent. You lost most of us right there, because debating against a person and searching for truth are incompatible mindsets. Since you tried to turn it into a status competition, we can't treat anything you say on the subject as trustworthy; you're too likely to deceive yourself and pass misconceptions on to us.

I propose that the operation of creating and torturing copies of someone be referred to as "soul eating". Because "let me out of the box or I'll eat your soul" has just the right ring to it.

It is worth noting that in Christian theology, heaven is only reached after death, and both going there early and sending people there early are explicitly forbidden.

While an infinite duration of bliss has very high utility, that utility must be finite, since infinite utility anywhere causes things to go awry when handling small probabilities of getting that utility. It is also not the only term in a human utility function; living as a non-wirehead for awhile to collect other types of utilons and then getting wireheaded is better than getting wireheaded immediately. Therefore, it seems like the sensible thing for a FAI to do is to offer wireheading as an option, but not to force the issue except in cases of imminent death.

Imagine Omega came to you and said, "Cryonics will work; it will be possible for you to be resurrected and have the choice between a simulation and a new healthy body, and I can guarantee you live for at least 100,000 years after that. However, for reasons I won't divulge, your surviving to experience this is wholly contingent upon you killing the next three people you see.

This offer could have positive expected value in terms of number of lives if, for example, you were a doctor who expected to save more than three lives during the next 100,000 years. However, no matter what any decision theory or expected utility calculation says, Omega's offer falls into several reference classes which mean it cannot be accepted without formal safeguards.

First, it involves trading for a resource (years of life) in an amount several orders of magnitude different from what we normally deal with. An entity which accepts offers in that class is likely to be a paperclipper. Second, it involves a known immoral act - killing people, as opposed to failing to save them. And third, it is so implausible that confusion, deception, brain damage or misprogramming are more likely than the offer being valid. Omega can remove statements from this last reference class in thought experiments, but no entity can do so in real life.

If quantum suicide works, then there's little hurry to use it, since it's not possible to die before getting the chance. Anyone who does have quantum immortality should expect to have it proven to them, by going far enough over the record age if nothing else. So attempting quantum suicide without such proof would be wrong.

I tried melatonin for the first time last night after reading this article. I will report back my results in two weeks.

I think we should taboo the words "outside" and "inside" for purposes of this discussion. They obscure the actual reasoning processes being used, and they bring along analogies to situations that are qualitatively very different.

The Top Contributors list hasn't been sorted by karma since the karma system was changed to give 10 karma per vote for top level posts. For awhile they were obviously out of order; now, the top 10 list is internally sorted, but does not accurately represent the top 10 users by karma (I have more karma than 3 of them). Perhaps it's sorting by number of upvotes instead of amount of karma?