So, should we take big world immortality seriously?
Whether or not we take it seriously doesn’t seem to have any effect on how we should behave as far as I can tell, so what would taking it seriously imply?
I mostly wanted to hear opinions on whether to believe it or not. But anyways, I’m not so sure that you’re correct. I think we should find out whether big world immortality should affect our decisions or not. If it is true then I believe that we should, for instance, worry quite a bit about the measure of comfortable survival scenarios versus uncomfortable scenarios. This might have implications regarding, for example, whether or not to sign up for cryonics (I’m not interested in general, but if it significantly increases the likelihood that big world immortality leads to something comfortable, I might) or worrying about existential risk (from a purely selfish point of view, existential risk is much more threatening if I’m guaranteed to survive no matter what, but from my point of view no one else is, than in the case where it’s just as likely to wipe me out as anyone else).
If you’re going to worry about things like that if big world immortality is true, you can just worry about them anyway, because the only thing that you will ever observe (even if big world immortality is false) is that you always continue to survive, even when other people die, even from things like nuclear war.
Your observations will always be compatible with your personal immortality, no matter what the truth is.
Well, sort of, but I still think there is an important difference in that without big world immortality all the survival scenarios may be so unlikely that they aren’t worthy of serious consideration, whereas with it one is guaranteed to experience survival, and the likelihood of experiencing certain types of survival becomes important.
Let’s suppose you’re in a situation where you can sacrifice yourself to save someone you care about, and there’s a very, very big chance that if you do so, you die, but a very, very small chance that you end up alive but crippled, but the crippled scenarios form the vast majority of the scenarios in which you survive. Wouldn’t your choice depend at least to some degree on whether you expect to experience survival no matter what, or not?
Whether or not we take it seriously doesn’t seem to have any effect on how we should behave as far as I can tell, so what would taking it seriously imply?
I mostly wanted to hear opinions on whether to believe it or not. But anyways, I’m not so sure that you’re correct. I think we should find out whether big world immortality should affect our decisions or not. If it is true then I believe that we should, for instance, worry quite a bit about the measure of comfortable survival scenarios versus uncomfortable scenarios. This might have implications regarding, for example, whether or not to sign up for cryonics (I’m not interested in general, but if it significantly increases the likelihood that big world immortality leads to something comfortable, I might) or worrying about existential risk (from a purely selfish point of view, existential risk is much more threatening if I’m guaranteed to survive no matter what, but from my point of view no one else is, than in the case where it’s just as likely to wipe me out as anyone else).
If you’re going to worry about things like that if big world immortality is true, you can just worry about them anyway, because the only thing that you will ever observe (even if big world immortality is false) is that you always continue to survive, even when other people die, even from things like nuclear war.
Your observations will always be compatible with your personal immortality, no matter what the truth is.
Well, sort of, but I still think there is an important difference in that without big world immortality all the survival scenarios may be so unlikely that they aren’t worthy of serious consideration, whereas with it one is guaranteed to experience survival, and the likelihood of experiencing certain types of survival becomes important.
Let’s suppose you’re in a situation where you can sacrifice yourself to save someone you care about, and there’s a very, very big chance that if you do so, you die, but a very, very small chance that you end up alive but crippled, but the crippled scenarios form the vast majority of the scenarios in which you survive. Wouldn’t your choice depend at least to some degree on whether you expect to experience survival no matter what, or not?