I’m another one who is signed up, has always been risk-averse, and hasn’t changed risk-averse behavior as a result of cryonics membership.
One general comment: To my mind, infinite life has something like a net present value with a finite interest rate. I probably don’t apply a consistent discount rate (yes, I’ve read the hyperbolic discounting article). For a order-of-magnitude guess, assume that I discount at 1% annually and treat a billion year life expectancy as being roughly as valuable as 100 years of life—and a 1% chance of that as being roughly equal to gaining an extra year. I’m now 51, so adding 1 year to say 25 years is a 4% gain. Not trivial, but not a drastic increase either.
I’m saying that, roughly speaking, I value next year at 99% of this year, the year after that at (99%)^2 of this year, the year after that at (99%)^3 and so on. The integral of this function out to infinity gives 100 times the value of one immediate year. I’m not quite sure what you mean by “certain”. Could you elaborate? I’m not trying to calculate the probability that I will actually get to year N, just to very grossly describe a utility function for how much I’d value year N from a subjective view from the present moment.
But you can’t value year N at a time-discounted rate, because the unit you are discounting is time itself. Why discount 1,000,000,000 years if you won’t discount 100 years? I don’t understand why one can be discounted, yet the other cannot.
I don’t see the difference. Money can be spent at once, or over a period of time, so the time value of money makes sense. But you can’t live 100 years over any period other than 100 years. I don’t understand the time value of the experience of living.
Me-in-100 years is not me-now. I can barely self identity with me-10-years-ago. Why should I value a year someone else will live as much as I value this year that I’m living?
I have a pretty different set of values than I had fifteen years ago, but I still consider all those experiences to have happened to me. That is, they didn’t happen to a different identity just because I was 18 instead of 33.
It is possible that if the me of 18 and the me of 33 talked through IRC we wouldn’t recognize each other, or have much at all to talk about (assuming we avoid the subject of personal biography that would give it away directly).
The me of 67 years from now, at 100 years of age, I can also expect to be very different from the me of now, even more different from the me of now than the me of 18. We might have the same difficulty recognizing ourselves in IRC.
Yet I’m confident I’ll always say I’m basically the same person I was yesterday, and that all prior experiences happened to me, not some other person; regardless of how much I may have changed. I have no reason not to think I’d go on saying that for 100,000 years.
I remember all (well, most) of my prior experiences, but memory is a small aspect of personal identity, in my opinion. Compared to my old self 10 years ago, I react different, feel differently, speak differently, have different insights, different philosophical ideas, different outlooks. It comes down to a definition though, which is arbitrary. What’s important is: do you identify with your future self enough to have a 1-1 trade off between utility for yourself (you-now) and utility for them (you-in-the-future)?
It is not just memory of experiences from fifteen years ago that make me consider it may be the same identity but the fact that those experiences shaped my identity today, and it happened slowly and contiguously. Every now and then I’d update based on new experiences, data or insights but that didn’t make me a different person the moment it happened.
If identity isn’t maintained through contiguous growth and development then there really is no reason to have any regard at all for your possible future, because it isn’t yours. So smoke ‘em if you got ’em.
Good point. Maybe my future self isn’t exactly me, but its enough like me that I still value it.
It doesn’t really matter though, because I never get to evaluate my future self. I can only reflect on my past. And when I do I do I feel like it is all mine...
Jordan states it correctly. bgrah449, to put it in terms of decisions: I sometimes have to make decisions which trade off the experience at one point in time vs the experience at another. As you noted in your most recent post, money can be discounted in this way, and money is useful because it can be traded for things that improve the experience of any given block of time. By discounting money exponentially, I’m really discounting the value of experience—say eating a pizza—at say 5 years from now vs. now. Now I also need to be alive (I’m taking that to include an uploaded state) to have any experiences. I make choices (including having set up my Alcor membership) that affect the probability of being alive at future times, and I trade these off against goods that enhance my experience of life right now. When I say that I value a year of time N years from now at around .99^N of the value I place on my current year, it means that I would trade the same goods for the same probability change with that difference of weights for those two years. If I, say, skip a pizza to improve my odds of surviving this year (and experiencing all of the events of the year) by 0.001%, I would only be willing to skip half a pizza to improve my odds of surviving from year 72 to year 73 (and having the more distant experiences of that year) by 0.001%.
Is that clearer?
I’m another one who is signed up, has always been risk-averse, and hasn’t changed risk-averse behavior as a result of cryonics membership.
One general comment: To my mind, infinite life has something like a net present value with a finite interest rate. I probably don’t apply a consistent discount rate (yes, I’ve read the hyperbolic discounting article). For a order-of-magnitude guess, assume that I discount at 1% annually and treat a billion year life expectancy as being roughly as valuable as 100 years of life—and a 1% chance of that as being roughly equal to gaining an extra year. I’m now 51, so adding 1 year to say 25 years is a 4% gain. Not trivial, but not a drastic increase either.
I’m not following this. Is the billion year life expectancy roughly as valuable as 100 years certain?
I’m saying that, roughly speaking, I value next year at 99% of this year, the year after that at (99%)^2 of this year, the year after that at (99%)^3 and so on. The integral of this function out to infinity gives 100 times the value of one immediate year. I’m not quite sure what you mean by “certain”. Could you elaborate? I’m not trying to calculate the probability that I will actually get to year N, just to very grossly describe a utility function for how much I’d value year N from a subjective view from the present moment.
But you can’t value year N at a time-discounted rate, because the unit you are discounting is time itself. Why discount 1,000,000,000 years if you won’t discount 100 years? I don’t understand why one can be discounted, yet the other cannot.
It’s not time you’re discounting; it’s the experience of living that quantity of time.
I don’t see the difference. Money can be spent at once, or over a period of time, so the time value of money makes sense. But you can’t live 100 years over any period other than 100 years. I don’t understand the time value of the experience of living.
Me-in-100 years is not me-now. I can barely self identity with me-10-years-ago. Why should I value a year someone else will live as much as I value this year that I’m living?
I have a pretty different set of values than I had fifteen years ago, but I still consider all those experiences to have happened to me. That is, they didn’t happen to a different identity just because I was 18 instead of 33.
It is possible that if the me of 18 and the me of 33 talked through IRC we wouldn’t recognize each other, or have much at all to talk about (assuming we avoid the subject of personal biography that would give it away directly).
The me of 67 years from now, at 100 years of age, I can also expect to be very different from the me of now, even more different from the me of now than the me of 18. We might have the same difficulty recognizing ourselves in IRC.
Yet I’m confident I’ll always say I’m basically the same person I was yesterday, and that all prior experiences happened to me, not some other person; regardless of how much I may have changed. I have no reason not to think I’d go on saying that for 100,000 years.
I remember all (well, most) of my prior experiences, but memory is a small aspect of personal identity, in my opinion. Compared to my old self 10 years ago, I react different, feel differently, speak differently, have different insights, different philosophical ideas, different outlooks. It comes down to a definition though, which is arbitrary. What’s important is: do you identify with your future self enough to have a 1-1 trade off between utility for yourself (you-now) and utility for them (you-in-the-future)?
It is not just memory of experiences from fifteen years ago that make me consider it may be the same identity but the fact that those experiences shaped my identity today, and it happened slowly and contiguously. Every now and then I’d update based on new experiences, data or insights but that didn’t make me a different person the moment it happened.
If identity isn’t maintained through contiguous growth and development then there really is no reason to have any regard at all for your possible future, because it isn’t yours. So smoke ‘em if you got ’em.
I think you’re making things artificially binary. You offer these two possibilities:
Contiguous experience implies I completely identify with my past and future selves
Identity isn’t maintained through contiguous growth so there is no reason to have any regard at all for my future
Why can’t contiguous experience lead one to partially identify with their past and future selves?
Good point. Maybe my future self isn’t exactly me, but its enough like me that I still value it.
It doesn’t really matter though, because I never get to evaluate my future self. I can only reflect on my past. And when I do I do I feel like it is all mine...
So can you state the discount rate equivalencies in terms of Me-in-an-amount-of-years?
Jordan states it correctly. bgrah449, to put it in terms of decisions: I sometimes have to make decisions which trade off the experience at one point in time vs the experience at another. As you noted in your most recent post, money can be discounted in this way, and money is useful because it can be traded for things that improve the experience of any given block of time. By discounting money exponentially, I’m really discounting the value of experience—say eating a pizza—at say 5 years from now vs. now. Now I also need to be alive (I’m taking that to include an uploaded state) to have any experiences. I make choices (including having set up my Alcor membership) that affect the probability of being alive at future times, and I trade these off against goods that enhance my experience of life right now. When I say that I value a year of time N years from now at around .99^N of the value I place on my current year, it means that I would trade the same goods for the same probability change with that difference of weights for those two years. If I, say, skip a pizza to improve my odds of surviving this year (and experiencing all of the events of the year) by 0.001%, I would only be willing to skip half a pizza to improve my odds of surviving from year 72 to year 73 (and having the more distant experiences of that year) by 0.001%. Is that clearer?
Yes—thanks!