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.
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.