The (only) trouble with this is that it doesn’t answer the question about what probabilities you_0 should assign to various experiences 5 seconds later. Personal identity may not be ontologically fundamental, it may not even be the appropriate sort of thing to be programmed into a utility function—but at the level of our everyday existence (that is, at whatever level we actually do exist), we still have to be able to make plans for “our own” future.
I would say that the ordinarily very useful abstraction of subjective probability breaks down in situations that involve copying and remerging people, and that our intuitive morality breaks down when it has to deal with measure of experience. In the current technological regime, this isn’t a problem at all, because the only branching we do is quantum branching, and there we have this neat correspondence between quantum measure and subjective probability, so you can plan for “your own” future in the ordinary obvious way. How you plan for “your own” future in situations where you expect to be copied and merged depends on the details of your preferences about measure of experience. For myself, I don’t know how I would go about forming such preferences, because I don’t understand consciousness.
In the current technological regime, this isn’t a problem...[the future] depends on the details of your preferences about measure of experience.
Quantum suicide is already a problem in the current regime, if you allow preference over measure.
Splitting and merging adds another problem, but I think it is a factual problem, not an ethical problem. At least, I think that there is a factual problem before you come to the ethical problem, which may be the same as for Born measure.
The (only) trouble with this is that it doesn’t answer the question about what probabilities you_0 should assign to various experiences 5 seconds later. Personal identity may not be ontologically fundamental, it may not even be the appropriate sort of thing to be programmed into a utility function—but at the level of our everyday existence (that is, at whatever level we actually do exist), we still have to be able to make plans for “our own” future.
I would say that the ordinarily very useful abstraction of subjective probability breaks down in situations that involve copying and remerging people, and that our intuitive morality breaks down when it has to deal with measure of experience. In the current technological regime, this isn’t a problem at all, because the only branching we do is quantum branching, and there we have this neat correspondence between quantum measure and subjective probability, so you can plan for “your own” future in the ordinary obvious way. How you plan for “your own” future in situations where you expect to be copied and merged depends on the details of your preferences about measure of experience. For myself, I don’t know how I would go about forming such preferences, because I don’t understand consciousness.
Quantum suicide is already a problem in the current regime, if you allow preference over measure.
Splitting and merging adds another problem, but I think it is a factual problem, not an ethical problem. At least, I think that there is a factual problem before you come to the ethical problem, which may be the same as for Born measure.