I’m pointing out a possible position one might take
Yes, but you didn’t explain why anyone would want to take that position, and I didn’t manage to infer why. One obvious reason, that the fear of death (the fear of a decrease in measure) is some sort of legitimate signal about what matters to many people, prompts the question of why I should care about what evolution has programmed into me. Or perhaps, more subtly, the question of why my morality function should (logically) similarly weight two quite different things—a huge extrinsic decrease in my measure (involuntary death) vs. an self-imposed selective decrease in measure—that were not at all separate as far as evolution is concerned, where only the former was possible in the EEA, and perhaps where upon reflection only the reasons for the former seem intuitively clear.
ETA: Also, I totally don’t understand why you think that it’s a puzzle that evolution optimized us solely for the branches of reality with the greatest measure.
Um, what? Why did we evolve to fear death? I suspect I’m missing something here.
You’re converting an “is” to an “ought” there with no explanation, or else I don’t know in what sense you’re using “should”.
That the way we fear death has the effect of maximizing our measure, but not the number of branches we are in, is perhaps a puzzle. See also http://lesswrong.com/lw/19d/the_anthropic_trilemma/14r8 starting at “But a problem with that”.
I’m pointing out a possible position one might take, not one that I agree with myself. See http://lesswrong.com/lw/196/boredom_vs_scope_insensitivity/14jn
Yes, but you didn’t explain why anyone would want to take that position, and I didn’t manage to infer why. One obvious reason, that the fear of death (the fear of a decrease in measure) is some sort of legitimate signal about what matters to many people, prompts the question of why I should care about what evolution has programmed into me. Or perhaps, more subtly, the question of why my morality function should (logically) similarly weight two quite different things—a huge extrinsic decrease in my measure (involuntary death) vs. an self-imposed selective decrease in measure—that were not at all separate as far as evolution is concerned, where only the former was possible in the EEA, and perhaps where upon reflection only the reasons for the former seem intuitively clear.
ETA: Also, I totally don’t understand why you think that it’s a puzzle that evolution optimized us solely for the branches of reality with the greatest measure.