And my problem, here, is that "death is bad" cannot be an unqualified truth. "Human death is bad" can be aspirationally true, and I am willing to believe that the unprecedented depth of Harry's aspiration might be the key that unlocks the power of his Patronus -- but it does look like EY means it literally, and that means that Harry should at some point need to distinguish between his ideology and that of, as Edward Abbey puts it, "the ideology of the cancer cell."
Well, and here's where it gets interesting: are there any other places where we see Harry use logic that he knows (or should know) to be unsound in an instrumental fashion? That is, where he makes a tactical choice to argue nonsense, believing it to have a better chance of convincing someone who disagrees with him?
Harry should consider the possibility that he "might actually welcome [death] even just one day after a day when [he] didn't welcome it" -- if he can't anticipate the possibility of his utility function changing based on an infinity of new evidence, he should stop pretending to be solely rationalist. Which, interestingly, Chapter 82 seems to be hinting at.
Ah! Thanks for that background. Can you explain, though, why you think that statement is meant to be Harry taking the piss? (Within the text, that is -- Eliezer does rightly frame it as a joke in those links). Harry's surrounding statements are sincerely put, and the next paragraph suggests to me that Harry believes that the induction argument should have refuted Dumbledore:
The two cultures stared at each other across a vast gap of incommensurability.
In any case, I do hope that, at some point, Harry has to face down the taboo tradeoffs (to be topical t...
I have a confusion!
Way back in Chapter 39, Harry says:
"I want to live one more day. Tomorrow I will still want to live one more day. Therefore I want to live forever, proof by induction on the positive integers."
This immediately caught my attention, given that Harry talks in earlier chapters about his worldview relying on Bayesian inference. Yet, for induction over an infinite sequence of unknown, informative experiences to hold, he has to have assigned an integral prior. Hijinks!
My first thought was that this was a clue dropped by the author...
Eliezer has used that line in nonfiction too; I'm very confident that Harry's pro-immortality stance is endorsed by the author, but that the "induction proof" is meant rhetorically and should not be construed to imply infinite certainty.
Found this by random clicking around, I expect no one's still reading this, but maybe we'll catch each other via Inbox:
How about "optimize the worst case" from in game theory? It settles both the dust speck vs. torture and the the Utility Monster Felix problems neatly.