Locating future personal experience is possible when we are talking about possible futures, and not possible when we are talking about the future containing multiple copies at the same time. Only in the second case does the mechanism for representing preference breaks down. The problem is not (primarily) in failure to assign preference to the right person, it’s in failure to assign it at all. Humans just get confused, don’t know what the correct preference is, and it’s not a question of not being able to shut up and calculate, as it’s not clear what the answer should be, and how to find it. More or less the same problem as with assigning value to groups of other people: should we care more when there are a lot people at stake, or the same about them all, but less about each of them? (“Shut up and divide”.)
In counterfactual mugging, there is a clear point of view (before the mugging/coin flip) from where preference is clearly represented, via intermediary of future personal experience, as seen from that time, so we can at least shut up and calculate. That’s not the issue I’m talking about.
While for some approaches to decision-making, it might not matter whether we are talking about multiplicative indexical uncertainty, or additive counterfactuals, the issue here is the concept of personal identity through which a chunk of preference is represented in human mind. Decision theories can handle situations where personal identity doesn’t make sense, but we’d still need to get preference about those situations from somewhere, and there is no clear assignment of it.
Some questions about fine distinctions in preference aren’t ever going to be answered by humans, we don’t have the capacity to see the whole picture.
Locating future personal experience is possible when we are talking about possible futures, and not possible when we are talking about the future containing multiple copies at the same time. Only in the second case does the mechanism for representing preference breaks down. The problem is not (primarily) in failure to assign preference to the right person, it’s in failure to assign it at all. Humans just get confused, don’t know what the correct preference is, and it’s not a question of not being able to shut up and calculate, as it’s not clear what the answer should be, and how to find it. More or less the same problem as with assigning value to groups of other people: should we care more when there are a lot people at stake, or the same about them all, but less about each of them? (“Shut up and divide”.)
In counterfactual mugging, there is a clear point of view (before the mugging/coin flip) from where preference is clearly represented, via intermediary of future personal experience, as seen from that time, so we can at least shut up and calculate. That’s not the issue I’m talking about.
While for some approaches to decision-making, it might not matter whether we are talking about multiplicative indexical uncertainty, or additive counterfactuals, the issue here is the concept of personal identity through which a chunk of preference is represented in human mind. Decision theories can handle situations where personal identity doesn’t make sense, but we’d still need to get preference about those situations from somewhere, and there is no clear assignment of it.
Some questions about fine distinctions in preference aren’t ever going to be answered by humans, we don’t have the capacity to see the whole picture.