From: Hal Finney (hal@finney.org)
Date: Wed Jun 12 2002 - 19:32:04 MDT
Wei writes:
> 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?
The problem with this answer is that really the question we are facing is
whether we *should* value re-runs. It's not something that we necessarily
know the answer to. So our goal is to discover what our subjective
preferences should be, hopefully with the aid of analogy and reasoning.
For example, if I am offered a choice between running a very pleasant
experience twice identically, or running the very pleasant experience
once and a slightly less pleasant experience once, which should I pick?
On the one hand, the average pleasantness is higher in the first
alternative. On the other hand, I have two different experiences in
the second alternative. I don't know which is better, so I don't have
an initial subjective preference between them.
> 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.
I think this is a good approach, but you could make an argument for
the opposite result. A person who seeks re-runs will strive to convert
more and more of the available resources into material to perform those
re-runs. So such people would tend to expand their sphere of influence,
and they would become... larger, or more numerous, depending on how you
look at it
Of course if you had those computing resources, it would arguably be
better from the survival perspective to do something else with them than
just re-run the same program over and over. But maybe survival is not
an issue; everyone's major wants and needs are met, and they are just
seeking pleasure. Then people who seek re-runs might come to control
more resources than people who don't care about them.
Hal
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