Well, short of having a deity reward those who copy themselves with extra afterlife, I’m having difficulty imagining how creating non-interacting identical copies could help, either.
The problem with the availability heuristic here isn’t so much that it’s not a formal logical proof. It’s that it fails to convince me, because I don’t happen to have the same intuition about it, which is why we’re having this conversation in the first place.
I don’t see how you could assign positive utility to truly novel actions without being able to say something about their anticipated consequences. But non-interacting copies are pretty much specified to have no consequences.
Well, in my understanding of the mathematical universe, this sort of copying could be used to change anthropic probabilities without the downsides of quantum suicide. So there’s that.
Robin Hanson probably has his own justification for lots of noninteracting copies (assuming that was the setup presented to him as mentioned in the OP), and I’d be interested to hear that as well.
Well, short of having a deity reward those who copy themselves with extra afterlife, I’m having difficulty imagining how creating non-interacting identical copies could help, either.
The problem with the availability heuristic here isn’t so much that it’s not a formal logical proof. It’s that it fails to convince me, because I don’t happen to have the same intuition about it, which is why we’re having this conversation in the first place.
I don’t see how you could assign positive utility to truly novel actions without being able to say something about their anticipated consequences. But non-interacting copies are pretty much specified to have no consequences.
Well, in my understanding of the mathematical universe, this sort of copying could be used to change anthropic probabilities without the downsides of quantum suicide. So there’s that.
Robin Hanson probably has his own justification for lots of noninteracting copies (assuming that was the setup presented to him as mentioned in the OP), and I’d be interested to hear that as well.