For my preference to be meaningful, I have to be aware of the distinction.
You’re aware of the distinction right now—would you be willing to act right now in a way which doesn’t affect the world in any major way during your lifetime, but which makes a big change after you die?
Edit: It seems to me as if you noted the fact that your utility function is no longer instantiated after you die, and confused that with the question of whether anything after your death matters to you now.
Would you be willing to act right now in a way which doesn’t affect the world in any major way during your lifetime, but which makes a big change after you die?
Of course I would. Why does a difference have to be “major” before I have permission to care? A penny isn’t much money, but I’ll still take the time to pick one up, if I see it on the floor and can do so conveniently. A moth isn’t much intelligence, or even much biomass, but if I see some poor thing thrashing, trapped in a puddle, I’ll gladly mount a fingertip-based rescue mission unless I’d significantly endanger my own interests by doing so.
Anything outside the light cone of my conscious mind is none of my business. That still leaves a lot of things I might be justifiably interested in.
My point didn’t relate to “major”—I wanted to point out that you care about what happens after you die, and therefore that your utility function is not uniformly 0 after you die. Yes, your utility function is no longer implemented by anything in the universe after you die—you aren’t there to care in person—but the function you implement now has terms for times after your death—you care now.
I would agree that I care now about things which have obvious implications for what will happen later, and that I would not care, or care very differently, about otherwise-similar things that lacked equivalent implications.
Beyond that, since my utility function can neither be observed directly, nor measured in any meaningful sense when I’m not alive to act on it, this is a distinction without a difference.
You’re aware of the distinction right now—would you be willing to act right now in a way which doesn’t affect the world in any major way during your lifetime, but which makes a big change after you die?
Edit: It seems to me as if you noted the fact that your utility function is no longer instantiated after you die, and confused that with the question of whether anything after your death matters to you now.
Of course I would. Why does a difference have to be “major” before I have permission to care? A penny isn’t much money, but I’ll still take the time to pick one up, if I see it on the floor and can do so conveniently. A moth isn’t much intelligence, or even much biomass, but if I see some poor thing thrashing, trapped in a puddle, I’ll gladly mount a fingertip-based rescue mission unless I’d significantly endanger my own interests by doing so.
Anything outside the light cone of my conscious mind is none of my business. That still leaves a lot of things I might be justifiably interested in.
My point didn’t relate to “major”—I wanted to point out that you care about what happens after you die, and therefore that your utility function is not uniformly 0 after you die. Yes, your utility function is no longer implemented by anything in the universe after you die—you aren’t there to care in person—but the function you implement now has terms for times after your death—you care now.
I would agree that I care now about things which have obvious implications for what will happen later, and that I would not care, or care very differently, about otherwise-similar things that lacked equivalent implications.
Beyond that, since my utility function can neither be observed directly, nor measured in any meaningful sense when I’m not alive to act on it, this is a distinction without a difference.