>Thus, by not signing for cryonics she increases the share of her futures where she will be hostily resurrected in total share of her futures.
But she decreases the share of her futures where she will be resurrected at all, some of which contain hostile resurrection, and therefore she really decreases the share of her futures where she will be hostilely resurrected. She just won’t consciously experience those where she doesn’t exist, which is better than suffering from the perspective of those who consider suffering negative utility.
If we assume that the total share matters, we will get some absurd capabilities to manipulate such share by selective forgetting things and thus merging with our copies in different worlds and increase our total share. I tried to explain this idea here. So only relative share matters.
Another argument to ignore “total measure” comes from many-worlds interpretation: as the world branches, my total measure should decline many orders of magnitude every second, but it doesn’t affect my decision making.
>as the world branches, my total measure should decline many orders of magnitude every second
I’m not sure why you think that. From any moment in time, it’s consistent to count all future forks toward my personal identity without having to count all other copies that don’t causally branch from my current self. Perhaps this depends on how we define personal identity.
>but it doesn’t affect my decision making.
Perhaps it should—tempered by the possibilities that your assumptions are incorrect, of course.
Another accounting trick: Count future where you don’t exist as neutral perspectives of your personal identity (empty consciousness). This should collapse the distinction between total and relative measure. Yes, it’s a trick, but the alternative is even more counter-intuitive to me.
Let’s regard a classical analogy: You’re in a hypothetical situation where your future contains of negative utility. Let’s say you suffer −5000 utils per unit time for the next 10 minutes, then you die with certainty. But you have the option of adding another 10 trillion years of life at −4999 utils per unit time. If we regard relative rather than total measure, this should be preferable because your average utils will be ~-4999 per unit time rather than −5000. But it’s clearly a much more horrible fate.
I always found average utlitarianism unattractive because of mere addition problems like this, in addition to all the other problems utilitariansims have.
>Thus, by not signing for cryonics she increases the share of her futures where she will be hostily resurrected in total share of her futures.
But she decreases the share of her futures where she will be resurrected at all, some of which contain hostile resurrection, and therefore she really decreases the share of her futures where she will be hostilely resurrected. She just won’t consciously experience those where she doesn’t exist, which is better than suffering from the perspective of those who consider suffering negative utility.
If we assume that the total share matters, we will get some absurd capabilities to manipulate such share by selective forgetting things and thus merging with our copies in different worlds and increase our total share. I tried to explain this idea here. So only relative share matters.
That’s a clever accounting trick, but I only care what happens in my actual future(s), not elsewhere in the universe that I can’t causally affect.
Another argument to ignore “total measure” comes from many-worlds interpretation: as the world branches, my total measure should decline many orders of magnitude every second, but it doesn’t affect my decision making.
>as the world branches, my total measure should decline many orders of magnitude every second
I’m not sure why you think that. From any moment in time, it’s consistent to count all future forks toward my personal identity without having to count all other copies that don’t causally branch from my current self. Perhaps this depends on how we define personal identity.
>but it doesn’t affect my decision making.
Perhaps it should—tempered by the possibilities that your assumptions are incorrect, of course.
Another accounting trick: Count future where you don’t exist as neutral perspectives of your personal identity (empty consciousness). This should collapse the distinction between total and relative measure. Yes, it’s a trick, but the alternative is even more counter-intuitive to me.
Let’s regard a classical analogy: You’re in a hypothetical situation where your future contains of negative utility. Let’s say you suffer −5000 utils per unit time for the next 10 minutes, then you die with certainty. But you have the option of adding another 10 trillion years of life at −4999 utils per unit time. If we regard relative rather than total measure, this should be preferable because your average utils will be ~-4999 per unit time rather than −5000. But it’s clearly a much more horrible fate.
I always found average utlitarianism unattractive because of mere addition problems like this, in addition to all the other problems utilitariansims have.