The thought experiment is not about the idea that your VNM utility could theoretically be doubled, but instead about rejecting diminishing returns to actual matter and energy in the universe. SBF said he would flip with a 51% of doubling the universe’s size (or creating a duplicate universe) and 49% of destroying the current universe. Taking this bet requires a stronger commitment to utilitarianism than most people are comfortable with; your utility needs to be linear in matter and energy. You must be the kind of person that would take a 0.001% chance of colonizing the universe over a 100% chance of colonizing merely a thousand galaxies. SBF also said he would flip repeatedly, indicating that he didn’t believe in any sort of bound to utility.
This is not necessarily crazy—I think Nate Soares has a similar belief—but it’s philosophically fraught. You need to contend with the unbounded utility paradoxes, and also philosophical issues: what if consciousness is information patterns that become redundant when duplicated, so that only the first universe “counts” morally?
The thought experiment is not about the idea that your VNM utility could theoretically be doubled, but instead about rejecting diminishing returns to actual matter and energy in the universe. SBF said he would flip with a 51% of doubling the universe’s size (or creating a duplicate universe) and 49% of destroying the current universe. Taking this bet requires a stronger commitment to utilitarianism than most people are comfortable with; your utility needs to be linear in matter and energy. You must be the kind of person that would take a 0.001% chance of colonizing the universe over a 100% chance of colonizing merely a thousand galaxies. SBF also said he would flip repeatedly, indicating that he didn’t believe in any sort of bound to utility.
This is not necessarily crazy—I think Nate Soares has a similar belief—but it’s philosophically fraught. You need to contend with the unbounded utility paradoxes, and also philosophical issues: what if consciousness is information patterns that become redundant when duplicated, so that only the first universe “counts” morally?