I think that analogy doesn’t quite fit. The road doesn’t have a point of view, but people do. Two people headed to hell seems worse than one.
My question is really “if merging were possible, would we merge everybody into hell?” Copying minds didn’t seem possible a decade ago, but assuming digital sentience is a thing, it now seems quite routine. If we wouldn’t merge everybody into hell, then there are some unresolved issues in utilitarianism.
I think your notion of counting distinct paths has a less satisfactory answer than ‘standard’ util though.
Here’s a scenario I think shows the weirdness. Imagine a single mind. We copy this mind into two instantiations, which have slightly different experiences for a tenth of a second. We then merge these minds. We repeat this process a thousand times. There are then 2^1000 distinct experience paths here. But counting the future experiences of the 2^1000 merged mind at that full multiple seems quite silly.
Agreed that counting paths at a full multiple would seem silly.
My proposed fix is a bit different. It cares about immediate welfare plus the welfare of future types of observer-moments, where futures are weighted by how likely we are to continue into each one, so each time step adds up to a weight of one. In your example, splitting shares the future between the copies and merging adds the shares back up, so the merged mind’s future isn’t multiplied by 2^1000.
Each brief copy does count as its own observer-moment with its own future, so the splitting adds a little. But that grows with the number of experiences that actually happened, not exponentially.
I don’t go into the fix in this post. Post was mainly to raise the question.
I think that analogy doesn’t quite fit. The road doesn’t have a point of view, but people do. Two people headed to hell seems worse than one.
My question is really “if merging were possible, would we merge everybody into hell?” Copying minds didn’t seem possible a decade ago, but assuming digital sentience is a thing, it now seems quite routine. If we wouldn’t merge everybody into hell, then there are some unresolved issues in utilitarianism.
Merging & copying gets weird, no questions.
I think your notion of counting distinct paths has a less satisfactory answer than ‘standard’ util though.
Here’s a scenario I think shows the weirdness. Imagine a single mind. We copy this mind into two instantiations, which have slightly different experiences for a tenth of a second. We then merge these minds. We repeat this process a thousand times. There are then 2^1000 distinct experience paths here. But counting the future experiences of the 2^1000 merged mind at that full multiple seems quite silly.
Agreed that counting paths at a full multiple would seem silly.
My proposed fix is a bit different. It cares about immediate welfare plus the welfare of future types of observer-moments, where futures are weighted by how likely we are to continue into each one, so each time step adds up to a weight of one. In your example, splitting shares the future between the copies and merging adds the shares back up, so the merged mind’s future isn’t multiplied by 2^1000.
Each brief copy does count as its own observer-moment with its own future, so the splitting adds a little. But that grows with the number of experiences that actually happened, not exponentially.
I don’t go into the fix in this post. Post was mainly to raise the question.