[ExI] The Anticipation Dilemma

[Lee Corbin]

Stathis writes

> If I forget everything about my past, too bad for my past
> self (who is now effectively dead) and too bad about the
> inconvenience, but from this point on, I am forging a new life
> for the new me.

Whereas I regard such catastropic amnesia as equivalent to
dying.  The "new me" that you refer to I regard as a different
person almost one-hundred percent.

One supporting argument is to suppose again that the body I'm
in awoke tomorrow morning with your memories, and vice-versa.
Wouldn't you definitely "be" in California as a result?  Certainly
I would expect to be in Australia, and I might spend the rest of
the evening boning up on Australian idioms.

If that is agreed to, then for your memories to get instead just
obliterated---i.e. my body wakes up tomorrow with no memories
---then it would seem that you've died completely, no?

> If, on the other had, I was forewarned that
> I would lose all memory of the next 24 hours, I would feel that in a
> sense the person I was *now* has only 24 hours to live.

Then under midazolam, provided that you overcome the psychological
effects you mentioned, you ought to be similarly apprehensive about
going to sleep (the normal time at which the patient goes
back to being normal, as I undersand it).  Same thing, I would think.

>> > Having past versions of myself eliminated isn't normally an
>> > option, but the thought experiment in another post in which I consider
>> > a model of a block universe in parallel computers provides just such
>> > an opportunity, and I would selfishly sacrifice all my past selves to
>> > gain any extra runtime for my future selves.
>> 
>> You seem to be using "to survive" as meaning to "get runtime",
>> and in the sense of denying a past self his runtime (in your bombing
>> scenario), whereas I usually think of "to survive" as whether from
>> a given point the future solar system will host "you".
> 
> But you still seem to be preferring future runtime to past runtime.

So far as I know, this is only because in the vast majority of cases
(those not in quite contrived thought experiements) the future is all
that can be affected. So survival takes on the meaning of getting
more runtime in the future.

And that brings up an obvious scenario:  what if I could choose 
between (A) getting to live only one more year and then dying,
or (B) getting to live five more years, but at the cost of actual
past experience (once again, our complicated thought experiments
that enable one to decide whether or not things that I think happened
to me really happened or I merely got the memories of them), as
in my http://www.leecorbin.com/UseOfNewcombsParadox.html

> One way you could justify this is by saying that past runtime can't be
> "lost", so you need only focus on the future if your ultimate strategy
> is to maximise total runtime.

Oh, yes.  Right.

> However, in my bombing scenario that isn't so: you could as easily
> lose the past as the future,

yes

> and in either case the total loss of runtime would be the same.
> Would you therefore say it is no worse to lose
> the next decade as the last decade to the bombers?

In principle, Yes.  In practice, I'd have to guess whether I got 
more benefit out of the last decade, or am more likely to gain
greater benefit out of the next.  To me, the logic of all this
forces me to come to this conclusion, and I don't find it totally
non-intuitive or inconceivable.

Lee