I understand that you say that you are a policy and not a snapshot, I don’t understand why exactly you consider yourself a policy if you say “I also hold to your timeless snapshot theory”. Even from a policy perspective, the snapshot you find yourself in is the “standard” by which you judge divergence of other snapshots. I think you might underestimate how different you are even from yourself in different states and ages. Would you not wish happiness on your child-self or old-self if they were too different from you in terms of “policy”? Would you feel “the desire to help another person as yourself” if he was similar enough to you?
And I still don’t understand what do you mean by a “mechanism to choose who you would be born as” (other than killing everyone and making your forks the most common life form in the universe). Even if we consider you not as a snapshot, but as a “line of continuity of consciousness”/policy/person in the standard sense, you could have been born a different person/policy. And in the absence of such a mechanism, I think utilitarianism is “selfishly” rational. I don’t understand why timeless pacts can’t form either, it’s like the basis of TDT and you already don’t believe in time.
Maybe it’s my genome’s fault that I care so much about future me. It is very similar to future it, and so it forces me to help it survive, even if in a very different person than I am today.
I understand that you say that you are a policy and not a snapshot, I don’t understand why exactly you consider yourself a policy if you say “I also hold to your timeless snapshot theory”. Even from a policy perspective, the snapshot you find yourself in is the “standard” by which you judge divergence of other snapshots. I think you might underestimate how different you are even from yourself in different states and ages. Would you not wish happiness on your child-self or old-self if they were too different from you in terms of “policy”? Would you feel “the desire to help another person as yourself” if he was similar enough to you?
And I still don’t understand what do you mean by a “mechanism to choose who you would be born as” (other than killing everyone and making your forks the most common life form in the universe). Even if we consider you not as a snapshot, but as a “line of continuity of consciousness”/policy/person in the standard sense, you could have been born a different person/policy. And in the absence of such a mechanism, I think utilitarianism is “selfishly” rational. I don’t understand why timeless pacts can’t form either, it’s like the basis of TDT and you already don’t believe in time.
Maybe it’s my genome’s fault that I care so much about future me. It is very similar to future it, and so it forces me to help it survive, even if in a very different person than I am today.