No, if 99% of timelines have utility 1, while in 1% of timelines something very improbable happens and you instead cause utility to go to 0, the global utility is still pretty much 1. Some part of the human utility function seems to care about absolute existence or nonexistence, and that component is going to be sort of steamrolled by multiverse theory, but we will mostly just keep on going in pursuit of greater relative measure.
That amounts to saying that if the conjunction of MWI and utilitarianism is correct, we would or should behave as though it isn’t. That is a major departure from typical rationalism (eg the Litany of Tarski).
No, if 99% of timelines have utility 1, while in 1% of timelines something very improbable happens and you instead cause utility to go to 0, the global utility is still pretty much 1. Some part of the human utility function seems to care about absolute existence or nonexistence, and that component is going to be sort of steamrolled by multiverse theory, but we will mostly just keep on going in pursuit of greater relative measure.
That amounts to saying that if the conjunction of MWI and utilitarianism is correct, we would or should behave as though it isn’t. That is a major departure from typical rationalism (eg the Litany of Tarski).
The question isn’t really whether it’s correct, the question is closer to “is it equivalent to the thing we already believed”.