From: Jef Allbright (jef@jefallbright.net)
Date: Wed Nov 13 2002 - 17:35:40 MST
Hal Finney wrote:
> The simplest conclusion is that forgotten experiences "don't count".
> Unless you can remember it, it might as well not have happen. Hence
> you should choose the 55 because the experience effectively didn't
> happen.
As time goes on, the person who chooses 55 would accumulate pain-free
experience.
The person who chooses 10 would accumulate more and more painful experience.
...
> Depending on how much bad the memory and anticipation of suffering is
> vs the suffering itself, some people would prefer the first or second
> choice. For someone for whom the actual experience is far worse than
> the memory and anticipation, the 10 would be the preferred choice.
> Their average happiness is higher with 10 than with 55, because the
> 55 seconds of suffering counts very much against that choice.
"Average happiness" as described doesn't apply in this scenario, because a
practical definition would be accumulated experience / time. For the person
who chooses 55, none of the painful experience is being accumulated. It
would have no practical, measurable effect on the subject, so it doesn't
matter to him (within the artificially limited context of this
thought-experiment.)
Let the scraps of warning papers from the non-experienced 55 seconds
continue to pile up. It easy to understand what's generating them, but they
don't matter to the person making the choice.
A related, but perhaps more grotesque thought experiment would be one where
a mad scientist creates a human clone, and due to his madness, spends years
torturing the cloned human organism before killing it. What is the net
result of all that human suffering? How would you choose to evaluate it?
- Jef
This archive was generated by hypermail 2.1.5 : Wed Jan 15 2003 - 17:58:06 MST