Sure. This setup couldn’t really be exploited for optimizing the universe. If we assume that the self-selection assumption is a reasonable assumption to make, inducing amnesia doesn’t actually improve outcomes across possible worlds. One out of 100 prisoners still dies.
It can’t even be considered “re-rolling the dice” on whether the specific prisoner that you are dies. Under the SSA, there’s no such thing as a “specific prisoner”, “you” are implemented as all 100 prisoners simultaneously, and so regardless of whether you choose to erase your memory or not, 1⁄100 of your measure is still destroyed. Without SSA, on the other hand, if we consider each prisoner’s perspective to be distinct, erasing memory indeed does nothing: it doesn’t return your perspective to the common pool of prisoner-perspectives, so if “you” were going to get shot, “you” are still going to get shot.
I’m not super interested in that part, though. What I’m interested in is whether there are in fact 100 clones of me: whether, under the SSA, “microscopically different” prisoners could be meaningfully considered a single “high-level” prisoner.
Sure. This setup couldn’t really be exploited for optimizing the universe. If we assume that the self-selection assumption is a reasonable assumption to make, inducing amnesia doesn’t actually improve outcomes across possible worlds. One out of 100 prisoners still dies.
It can’t even be considered “re-rolling the dice” on whether the specific prisoner that you are dies. Under the SSA, there’s no such thing as a “specific prisoner”, “you” are implemented as all 100 prisoners simultaneously, and so regardless of whether you choose to erase your memory or not, 1⁄100 of your measure is still destroyed. Without SSA, on the other hand, if we consider each prisoner’s perspective to be distinct, erasing memory indeed does nothing: it doesn’t return your perspective to the common pool of prisoner-perspectives, so if “you” were going to get shot, “you” are still going to get shot.
I’m not super interested in that part, though. What I’m interested in is whether there are in fact 100 clones of me: whether, under the SSA, “microscopically different” prisoners could be meaningfully considered a single “high-level” prisoner.