From: Wei Dai (weidai@weidai.com)
Date: Wed Nov 13 2002 - 20:12:45 MST
On Mon, Nov 11, 2002 at 11:23:19PM -0800, Lee Corbin wrote:
> If you were Yevgeni, in my story "The Pit and the Duplicate",
> http://www.leecorbin.com/PitAndDuplicate.html, and the alien
> Itself placed you in the pit, how many times would you press
> the button? What would you expect to happen when you did?
Let's distinguish between two versions of your second question.
1. What would you expect to happen in objective terms?
2. What would you expect to experience subjectively?
Question 1 is easy to answer. I would expect an extra copy of me to come
into existence every time I press the button. In the story, you say:
And only if you phrase everything of value to you (including your own
immortality, for example) in these objective terms, do the linguistic and
semantic problems become tractable.
Perhaps you would also agree with my position that all decisions
(including the decision of whether or not to press the button) should be
made by considering the consequences in objective terms. The answer to
question 2 should not matter and therefore there is no point in answering
it or defining its semantics. (I believe the difficulty of defining the
semantics of expectations of subjective experience in the context of
duplication is related to its inadequecy as a decision making tool.) You
should press the button if and only if you prefer having two copies of
yourself, one in the hole and one outside, to having one copy in the hole.
Unfortunately, evolution didn't program us to make decisions this way most
of the time. Usually we make decisions based on how we expect them to
affect our subjective future experiences. We tend to eat when
we feel hungry, even if the extra calories are harmful. We can
imagine an alternate universe where human beings have conscious
knowledge of all the internal data related to deciding when to eat (fat
reserves, blood sugar level, etc.) and make a calculated decision each
time. We don't because it takes more computing power, and the alternative
worked well enough in the past. Notice that now there is an evolutionary
pressure towards making eating decisions based on objective
considerations, and some people are already doing it this way,
counting calories and measuring blood sugar levels.
I think the duplication issue is similar. Once duplication becomes
possible, there will be an evolutionary pressure towards making
duplication-related decisions based on objective rather than
subjective considerations. Your story is a nice demonstration of how badly
the latter works when duplication is involved.
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