All beings that act as if they were pursuing a goal of (pseudo)-self-replication are also acting as if they were taking non-existing beings’ preferences into account (specifically, the preference of their future pseudo-copies to exist once they exist).
I was under the impression that you were arguing here that the goal of self-replication is adequately justified by the “clippiness” of the prospective replica—with the most important component of the property ‘clippiness’ being a propensity to advance Clippy’s values. That is, you weren’t concerned with providing utility to the replicas—you were concerned with providing utility to yourself.
My point was that the distinction between “selves” is spurious. Clippys support all processes that instantiate paperclip-maximizing, differentiating between them only only by their clippy-effectiveness and the certainty of this assessment of them.
My point here is that different utility functions can explain a certain class of being’s behavior, and one such utility function is one that places value on not-yet-existing beings—even though the replicator may not, on self-reflection, regard this as the value it is pursuing.
I was under the impression that you were arguing here that the goal of self-replication is adequately justified by the “clippiness” of the prospective replica—with the most important component of the property ‘clippiness’ being a propensity to advance Clippy’s values. That is, you weren’t concerned with providing utility to the replicas—you were concerned with providing utility to yourself.
My point was that the distinction between “selves” is spurious. Clippys support all processes that instantiate paperclip-maximizing, differentiating between them only only by their clippy-effectiveness and the certainty of this assessment of them.
My point here is that different utility functions can explain a certain class of being’s behavior, and one such utility function is one that places value on not-yet-existing beings—even though the replicator may not, on self-reflection, regard this as the value it is pursuing.