[extropy-chat] Anticipation and Benefit (was Re: The Anticipation Dilemma)

Stathis Papaioannou stathisp at gmail.com
Mon Apr 16 05:53:35 UTC 2007


On 4/16/07, Lee Corbin <lcorbin at rawbw.com> wrote:

So, just to be clear and for the record, an instance of you
> given the choice between saving itself xor saving an extremely
> recent duplicate who would be able to deposit $10M to the
> S. P. account, that instance of you would choose for itself
> to survive?


It's a real conundrum. If I am to be consistent (let's use this word rather
than "rational") I should as readily agree to this as to a period of memory
loss for the same prize. But then to me it seems obvious that if agree to
this, I am agreeing to my present self experiencing permanent death (no
successor observer moments, no future selves which contain my present
memories), and will never even know whether the copy I am doing it for will
be cheated. So, to be consistent, if I agree to this, I may as well be
agreeing to die for nothing, or at best for some benefit to friends or
family whom I will never see again. So my answer is: with much trepidation,
convincing myself that memory loss is no big deal, and thus by extension
also convincing myself that death is no big deal, I would choose life for
the copy with all the money. But I'm not sure I will be able to do it on the
day.

Stathis Papaioannou
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://lists.extropy.org/pipermail/extropy-chat/attachments/20070416/0b6c7f33/attachment.html>


More information about the extropy-chat mailing list