Before entering, should you accurately anticipate dying with 50% probability?
First, you discard the word that is causing all the confusion. When you are in a situation where:
“I want to live!” and
“I don’t want to die!”
End up with such entirely different meanings any mental shortcuts for preference evaluation built around the word ‘dead’ become obsolete. Similar reasoning applies when you are wearing an Amulet of Life Saving or your friend can cast Resurrection on you. Death kind of loses its sting.
Just look at the expected future outcomes in the play scenario and the outcome in the not-play scenario and decide which one is more desirable. From what I understand the play scenario is one in which a whole bunch of ‘you’s lose Russian Roullette and 1 ‘you’ wins Russian Roullette lots of times and gets money. Given the preferences you had us assume in the introduction, the uploads would clearly want to play. More generally it may depend on whether the ‘you’s experience anything when ‘losing’ or whether you have some specific considered negative preference for the event of a you being killed that is completely independent of both whether it results in there being less you left in the world and of any negative experiences that go with it.
First, you discard the word that is causing all the confusion. When you are in a situation where:
“I want to live!” and
“I don’t want to die!”
End up with such entirely different meanings any mental shortcuts for preference evaluation built around the word ‘dead’ become obsolete. Similar reasoning applies when you are wearing an Amulet of Life Saving or your friend can cast Resurrection on you. Death kind of loses its sting.
Just look at the expected future outcomes in the play scenario and the outcome in the not-play scenario and decide which one is more desirable. From what I understand the play scenario is one in which a whole bunch of ‘you’s lose Russian Roullette and 1 ‘you’ wins Russian Roullette lots of times and gets money. Given the preferences you had us assume in the introduction, the uploads would clearly want to play. More generally it may depend on whether the ‘you’s experience anything when ‘losing’ or whether you have some specific considered negative preference for the event of a you being killed that is completely independent of both whether it results in there being less you left in the world and of any negative experiences that go with it.