This is the fungibility objection I address above:
Note that this assumes “happy humans” are fungible, which I don’t actually believe—I care about the overall diversity of human experience throughout the multiverse. However, I don’t think that changes the bottom line conclusion, since, if anything, centralizing the happy humans rather than spreading them out seems like it would make it easier to ensure that their experiences are as diverse as possible.
Ah, I think I didn’t understand that parenthetical remark and skipped over it. Questions:
I thought your bottom line conclusion was “you should have linear returns to whatever your final source of utility is” and I’m not sure how “centralizing the happy humans rather than spreading them out seems like it would make it easier to ensure that their experiences are as diverse as possible” relates to that.
I’m not sure that the way my utility function deviates from fungibility is “I care about overall diversity of human experience throughout the multiverse”. What if it’s “I care about diversity of human experience in this Everett branch” then I could get a non-linear diminishing returns effect where as humans colonize more stars or galaxies, each new human experience is more likely to duplicate an existing human experience or be too similar to an existing experience so that its value has to be discounted.
The thing I was trying to say there is that I think the non-fungibility concern pushes in the direction of superlinear rather than sublinear local returns to “happy humans” per universe. (Since concentrating the “happy humans” likely makes it easier to ensure that they’re all different.)
I agree that this will depend on exactly in what way you think your final source of utility is non-fungible. I would argue that “diversity of human experience in this Everett branch” is a pretty silly thing to care about, though. I don’t see any reason why spatial distance should behave differently than being in separate Everett branches here.
I read it, and I think I broadly agree with it, but I don’t know why you think it’s a reason to treat physical distance differently to Everett branch distance, holding diversity constant. The only reason that you would want to treat them differently, I think, is if the Everett branch happy humans are very similar, whereas the physically separated happy humans are highly diverse. But, in that case, that’s an argument for superlinear local returns to happy humans, since it favors concentrating them so that it’s easier to make them as diverse as possible.
but I don’t know why you think it’s a reason to treat physical distance differently to Everett branch distance
I have a stronger intuition for “identical copy immortality” when the copies are separated spatially instead of across Everett branches (the latter also called quantum immortality). For example if you told me there are 2 identical copies of Earth spread across the galaxy and 1 of them will instantly disintegrate, I would be much less sad than if you told me that you’ll flip a quantum coin and disintegrate Earth if it comes up heads.
I’m not sure if this is actually a correct intuition, but I’m also not sure that it’s not, so I’m not willing to make assumptions that contradict it.
This is the fungibility objection I address above:
Ah, I think I didn’t understand that parenthetical remark and skipped over it. Questions:
I thought your bottom line conclusion was “you should have linear returns to whatever your final source of utility is” and I’m not sure how “centralizing the happy humans rather than spreading them out seems like it would make it easier to ensure that their experiences are as diverse as possible” relates to that.
I’m not sure that the way my utility function deviates from fungibility is “I care about overall diversity of human experience throughout the multiverse”. What if it’s “I care about diversity of human experience in this Everett branch” then I could get a non-linear diminishing returns effect where as humans colonize more stars or galaxies, each new human experience is more likely to duplicate an existing human experience or be too similar to an existing experience so that its value has to be discounted.
The thing I was trying to say there is that I think the non-fungibility concern pushes in the direction of superlinear rather than sublinear local returns to “happy humans” per universe. (Since concentrating the “happy humans” likely makes it easier to ensure that they’re all different.)
I agree that this will depend on exactly in what way you think your final source of utility is non-fungible. I would argue that “diversity of human experience in this Everett branch” is a pretty silly thing to care about, though. I don’t see any reason why spatial distance should behave differently than being in separate Everett branches here.
I tried to explain my intuitions/uncertainty about this in The Moral Status of Independent Identical Copies (it was linked earlier in this thread).
I read it, and I think I broadly agree with it, but I don’t know why you think it’s a reason to treat physical distance differently to Everett branch distance, holding diversity constant. The only reason that you would want to treat them differently, I think, is if the Everett branch happy humans are very similar, whereas the physically separated happy humans are highly diverse. But, in that case, that’s an argument for superlinear local returns to happy humans, since it favors concentrating them so that it’s easier to make them as diverse as possible.
I have a stronger intuition for “identical copy immortality” when the copies are separated spatially instead of across Everett branches (the latter also called quantum immortality). For example if you told me there are 2 identical copies of Earth spread across the galaxy and 1 of them will instantly disintegrate, I would be much less sad than if you told me that you’ll flip a quantum coin and disintegrate Earth if it comes up heads.
I’m not sure if this is actually a correct intuition, but I’m also not sure that it’s not, so I’m not willing to make assumptions that contradict it.