Unbounded agentic selfishness isn’t possible unless you can unboundedly index on and retrocausally compress “self”. Otherwise future “you” is just this animal walking around, and how do you specify them in particular for good things to happen to? In practice, evil people do this by cancer like “make good things happen to people with my skin color”.
If you believe humans are “not coherent agents” i.e. what values someone ends up with is underdetermined, then why would you believe that acquisition of ability to index on values as self is coacquired with the underdetermined acquisition of those values? Like, that would be inconsistently postulating both having and lacking “inner alignment”.
(Note that Lesswrongers don’t think about cybernetics much like “but how does the thing reference itself”, if this style of argument seems unusual to you)
Incoherence of unbounded selfishness
Unbounded agentic selfishness isn’t possible unless you can unboundedly index on and retrocausally compress “self”. Otherwise future “you” is just this animal walking around, and how do you specify them in particular for good things to happen to? In practice, evil people do this by cancer like “make good things happen to people with my skin color”.
If you believe humans are “not coherent agents” i.e. what values someone ends up with is underdetermined, then why would you believe that acquisition of ability to index on values as self is coacquired with the underdetermined acquisition of those values? Like, that would be inconsistently postulating both having and lacking “inner alignment”.
(Note that Lesswrongers don’t think about cybernetics much like “but how does the thing reference itself”, if this style of argument seems unusual to you)