Why would you or I have such a preference that cares about my ancestor’s time-evolved descendants rather than just my time-evolved descendants? My guess is that
a human’s preferences are (fairly) stable under time-evolution, and
the only humans that survive are the ones that care about their descendants, and
humans that we see around us are the time-evolution of similar humans,
So e.g. I[now] care approximately about what I[5-minutes-ago] cared about, and I[5-minutes-ago] didn’t just care about me[now], he also cared about me[now-but-in-a-parallel-branch].
Why would you or I have such a preference that cares about my ancestor’s time-evolved descendants rather than just my time-evolved descendants? My guess is that
a human’s preferences are (fairly) stable under time-evolution, and
the only humans that survive are the ones that care about their descendants, and
humans that we see around us are the time-evolution of similar humans,
So e.g. I[now] care approximately about what I[5-minutes-ago] cared about, and I[5-minutes-ago] didn’t just care about me[now], he also cared about me[now-but-in-a-parallel-branch].