(Not sure where to put this:) Yvain’s position doesn’t seem sane to me, and not just for reasons of preference; attempting to commit suicide will just push most of your experienced moments backwards to regions where you’ve never heard of quantum suicide or where for whatever reason you thought it was a stupid idea. Anticipating ending up in a world with basically no measure just doesn’t make sense: you’re literally making yourself counterfactual. If you decided to carve up experience space into bigger chunks of continuity then this problem goes away, but most people agree that (as Katja put it) “anthropics makes sense with shorter people”. Suicide only makes sense if you want to shift your experience backwards in time or into other branches, not in order to have extremely improbable experiences. I mean, that’s why those branches are extremely improbable: there’s no way you can experience them, quantum suicide or no.
Yvain’s position doesn’t seem sane to me, and not just for reasons of preference; attempting to commit suicide will just push most of your experienced moments backwards to regions where you’ve never heard of quantum suicide or where for whatever reason you thought it was a stupid idea.
This doesn’t seem to be a problem that comes from being quantum suicidal but rather from an entirely different kind of anthropic based suicidal insanity. That is, I would not predict that experience as evaluated by Yvain’s model of caring would be perceived this way. It certainly could be but that would be an additional insanity to the one that makes quantum roulette desirable. (No offense to Yvain and his Quantum Suicidal ilk by referring to this as ‘insanity’. I mean only ‘drastically different preferences preferences to my own in an agent similar enough to me that such comparison is meaningful’. In fact, if you’re going to limit your optimisation to tiny amounts of measure then go ahead and exterminate humanity to maximise paperclips for all I care!)
To expand somewhat: Quantum suiciding at (subjective) time t results in you at time t-1 having more measure than you at time t+1 but under default quantum-suicidal preferences these are in no way in competition. Relative measure between past and future selves isn’t any particular issue. There are just various different subjective experiences at t-1, t and t+1, a desire to have each of them as positive-on-average as can be but no particular inclination to trim measure in one part of a timeline to increase it in another. For example, I wouldn’t expect Yvain to (consider it rational to) commit conventional-and-complete suicide whenever it seemed like all his peak experiences are in the past and all that remained in life is to make the most of the remaining dregs.
You’re not saying that if I perform QS I should literally anticipate that my next experience will be from the past, are you? (AFAICT, if QS is not allowed, I should just anticipate whatever I would anticipate if I was going to die everywhere, that is, going to lose all of my measure.)
(Not Will, but I think I mostly agree with him on this point)
There is no such thing as an uniquely specified “next experience”. There are going to be instances of you that remember being you and consider themselves the same person as you, but there is no meaningful sense in which exactly one of them is right. Granted, all instances of you that remember a particular moment will be in the future of that moment, but it seems silly to only care about the experiences of that subset of instances of you and completely neglect the experiences of instances that only share your memories up to an earlier point. If you weight the experiences more sensibly then in the case of a rigorously executed quantum suicide the bulk of the weight will be in instances that diverged before the decision to commit quantum suicide. There will be no chain of memory leading from the QS to those instances, but why should that matter?
(Not sure where to put this:) Yvain’s position doesn’t seem sane to me, and not just for reasons of preference; attempting to commit suicide will just push most of your experienced moments backwards to regions where you’ve never heard of quantum suicide or where for whatever reason you thought it was a stupid idea. Anticipating ending up in a world with basically no measure just doesn’t make sense: you’re literally making yourself counterfactual. If you decided to carve up experience space into bigger chunks of continuity then this problem goes away, but most people agree that (as Katja put it) “anthropics makes sense with shorter people”. Suicide only makes sense if you want to shift your experience backwards in time or into other branches, not in order to have extremely improbable experiences. I mean, that’s why those branches are extremely improbable: there’s no way you can experience them, quantum suicide or no.
Here is fine.
This doesn’t seem to be a problem that comes from being quantum suicidal but rather from an entirely different kind of anthropic based suicidal insanity. That is, I would not predict that experience as evaluated by Yvain’s model of caring would be perceived this way. It certainly could be but that would be an additional insanity to the one that makes quantum roulette desirable. (No offense to Yvain and his Quantum Suicidal ilk by referring to this as ‘insanity’. I mean only ‘drastically different preferences preferences to my own in an agent similar enough to me that such comparison is meaningful’. In fact, if you’re going to limit your optimisation to tiny amounts of measure then go ahead and exterminate humanity to maximise paperclips for all I care!)
To expand somewhat: Quantum suiciding at (subjective) time t results in you at time t-1 having more measure than you at time t+1 but under default quantum-suicidal preferences these are in no way in competition. Relative measure between past and future selves isn’t any particular issue. There are just various different subjective experiences at t-1, t and t+1, a desire to have each of them as positive-on-average as can be but no particular inclination to trim measure in one part of a timeline to increase it in another. For example, I wouldn’t expect Yvain to (consider it rational to) commit conventional-and-complete suicide whenever it seemed like all his peak experiences are in the past and all that remained in life is to make the most of the remaining dregs.
You’re not saying that if I perform QS I should literally anticipate that my next experience will be from the past, are you? (AFAICT, if QS is not allowed, I should just anticipate whatever I would anticipate if I was going to die everywhere, that is, going to lose all of my measure.)
(Not Will, but I think I mostly agree with him on this point)
There is no such thing as an uniquely specified “next experience”. There are going to be instances of you that remember being you and consider themselves the same person as you, but there is no meaningful sense in which exactly one of them is right. Granted, all instances of you that remember a particular moment will be in the future of that moment, but it seems silly to only care about the experiences of that subset of instances of you and completely neglect the experiences of instances that only share your memories up to an earlier point. If you weight the experiences more sensibly then in the case of a rigorously executed quantum suicide the bulk of the weight will be in instances that diverged before the decision to commit quantum suicide. There will be no chain of memory leading from the QS to those instances, but why should that matter?