I had trouble understanding this post, because its (apparent) thesis (“you can’t have 3^^^3 human-like beings without having duplicates”) is never actually stated in the post itself—it was only Hedonic _Treader’s comment that clued me in. Please consider revising to improve clarity.
(Maybe it seemed to you that the reference to “pigeons and holes” in the title was enough, but it wasn’t: in fact I was expecting a new thought experiment involving birds, which indeed you seemed to promise here:
I’ve made this pigeon-hole example to demonstrate[...]
Same difficulty. Good work reconstructing the (obvious in restrospect) point. I kept skimming around, wondering if the author was somehow insane, or neglected to paste some text …
I’m still left to wonder why it matters that 3^^^3 is such a large number that it’s more than the number of possible human-like mind-states.
I hadn’t considered that. I must grant that it’s hard to argue about the issue in a way that’s universally convincing. It quite depends on what you mean by “identical copies”.
Non-diverging cheap mergeable copies (e.g. in the context of additional deterministic whole-universe copies) don’t have much additional weight for me. But copies that are merely identical in their internal state, but (will) have a different external context and thus future are important.
So 3^^^3 is much larger than anything physical in our universe … that doesn’t stop me from entertaining hypotheticals about 3^^^3 (with or without collisions) people.
Maybe I can take as the point that it can’t possibly matter if our intuitions fail at the scale of 3^^^3 (likely they do, but we can do explicit math instead) - it only matters if our intuitions fail at the scale of things that are actually possible in the universe.
Sorry for that. The problem, as you said, is that it is fairly obvious in retrospect, and the only way I can see my post is in this obvious retrospect.
It matters because it is an error to consider the 3^^^3 people without considering whenever you even care about most of them being identical; even if the identical-ness does not make any difference to you, you still should at least retrieve that before proceeding to consider 3^^^3 people.
The issue is that really huge numbers like 3^^^3 are larger than many numbers we would carelessly assume to be infinite—e.g. number of possible beings.
I had trouble understanding this post, because its (apparent) thesis (“you can’t have 3^^^3 human-like beings without having duplicates”) is never actually stated in the post itself—it was only Hedonic _Treader’s comment that clued me in. Please consider revising to improve clarity.
(Maybe it seemed to you that the reference to “pigeons and holes” in the title was enough, but it wasn’t: in fact I was expecting a new thought experiment involving birds, which indeed you seemed to promise here:
but never delivered.)
Same difficulty. Good work reconstructing the (obvious in restrospect) point. I kept skimming around, wondering if the author was somehow insane, or neglected to paste some text …
I’m still left to wonder why it matters that 3^^^3 is such a large number that it’s more than the number of possible human-like mind-states.
Because it isn’t settled whether harming two different people is worse than harming two identical copies of one person.
I hadn’t considered that. I must grant that it’s hard to argue about the issue in a way that’s universally convincing. It quite depends on what you mean by “identical copies”.
Non-diverging cheap mergeable copies (e.g. in the context of additional deterministic whole-universe copies) don’t have much additional weight for me. But copies that are merely identical in their internal state, but (will) have a different external context and thus future are important.
So 3^^^3 is much larger than anything physical in our universe … that doesn’t stop me from entertaining hypotheticals about 3^^^3 (with or without collisions) people.
Maybe I can take as the point that it can’t possibly matter if our intuitions fail at the scale of 3^^^3 (likely they do, but we can do explicit math instead) - it only matters if our intuitions fail at the scale of things that are actually possible in the universe.
It’s the same thing, as I understand. Two identical copies are two different people.
The root of this might be in determining what is “identical”.
If you have two identical copies and one is destroyed/hurt, then the copies are no longer identical.
Perhaps in this case, and maybe others, two identical copies of people can be worth one, until something changes them, eg getting destroyed.
I’ll leave this here.
Sorry for that. The problem, as you said, is that it is fairly obvious in retrospect, and the only way I can see my post is in this obvious retrospect.
It matters because it is an error to consider the 3^^^3 people without considering whenever you even care about most of them being identical; even if the identical-ness does not make any difference to you, you still should at least retrieve that before proceeding to consider 3^^^3 people.
The issue is that really huge numbers like 3^^^3 are larger than many numbers we would carelessly assume to be infinite—e.g. number of possible beings.