From: Wei Dai (weidai@eskimo.com)
Date: Wed Jun 12 2002 - 17:39:55 MDT
On Sun, Jun 09, 2002 at 07:21:19PM -0700, Hal Finney wrote:
> Lee Corbin writes:
> > (Also I'm tickled
> > pink that people are coming to understand that re-running someone's
> > life is not a no-op. It should matter to you whether or not two
> > completely identical runs of your life occur, or only one! Yay.)
>
> I'm not sure about people "coming to understand" this; I know Wei has
> explored these ideas quite intensely for several years.
The final conclusion I came to was that it's a matter of subjective
preferences whether re-running a life is a no-op. The argument is pretty
simple. Ask yourself, is the billionth re-run worth as much as the first
re-run (the second run)? If not, then why should the second run be worth
the same as the first run, or be worth anything at all?
To make the first question more concrete, consider the following thought
experiment. Suppose someone offers to re-run your life up to now for a
fee, and the most you're willing to pay is a million dollars. Now suppose
you already had a coupon worth a billion re-runs. Would you still pay a
million dollars to to do one more re-run?
If you agree that it's a matter of subjective preferences, we could still
ask what most people's preferences in this are or will be in the future.
I think most people currently do not consider re-running a life to be a
no-op. But it seems that valuing re-runs highly is not going to be
evolutionarily adaptive in the future, since it implies you're willing to
spend resources on something (i.e. doing re-runs) that doesn't help
survival or reproduction. So if we stay in an evolutionary regime it's
likely that re-runs will be considered increasingly worthless.
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