This would have been helpful to my 11-year-old self. As I had always been rather unnecessarily called precocious, I developed the pet hypothesis that my life was a simulation of someone whose life in history had been worth re-living: after all, the collection of all possible lives is pretty big, and mine seemed to be extraordinarily neat, so why not imagine some existential video game in which I am the player character?
Unfortunately, I think this also led me to subconsciously be a little lazier than I should have been, under the false assumption that I was going to make great things anyway. If I had realized that given I was a simulation of an original version of me, I would have to perform the exact same actions and have the exact same thoughts original me did, including those about being a simulation, I better buckle up and sweat it out!
Notice your argument does not imply the following: I am either a simulation or the original, and I am far more likely to be a simulation as there can only be one original but possibly many simulations, so I should weigh my actions far more towards the latter. This line of reasoning is wrong because all simulations of me would be identical experience copies, and so it is not the quantity that decides the weight, but the number of equivalence classes: original me, and simulated me. At this point, the weights again become 0.5, one recovers your argument, and finds I should never have had such silly thoughts in the first place (even if they were true!).
This would have been helpful to my 11-year-old self. As I had always been rather unnecessarily called precocious, I developed the pet hypothesis that my life was a simulation of someone whose life in history had been worth re-living: after all, the collection of all possible lives is pretty big, and mine seemed to be extraordinarily neat, so why not imagine some existential video game in which I am the player character?
Unfortunately, I think this also led me to subconsciously be a little lazier than I should have been, under the false assumption that I was going to make great things anyway. If I had realized that given I was a simulation of an original version of me, I would have to perform the exact same actions and have the exact same thoughts original me did, including those about being a simulation, I better buckle up and sweat it out!
Notice your argument does not imply the following: I am either a simulation or the original, and I am far more likely to be a simulation as there can only be one original but possibly many simulations, so I should weigh my actions far more towards the latter. This line of reasoning is wrong because all simulations of me would be identical experience copies, and so it is not the quantity that decides the weight, but the number of equivalence classes: original me, and simulated me. At this point, the weights again become 0.5, one recovers your argument, and finds I should never have had such silly thoughts in the first place (even if they were true!).