Memory is Everything

Option 1 is for you to pay Omega $1,000,000,000 and Omega will grant you unlimited utility potential for 1 week in which Omega will basically provide to your every wish. You will have absolutely no memory of the experience after the week is up.

Partying during university.

Option 2 is for Omega to pay you $1,000,000,000 but you must be willing to suffer unlimited negative utility potential for a week.

Summer jobs during university.

What I'm seeing is an extension to the extremes of normal life. I'm going to work on these watered down cases, because they are relatable.

Working the highest paying job available regardless of hellish working conditions in order to pay for university and the fun had at university sucked. I even practiced meditation to try to pretend I was somewhere else and to try to separate myself from the torment of the work. But it was a price paid to accomplish my goals.

Partying during university was a blast, but it was very costly. And this fits fairly well with your memory loss nirvana. Your results may vary, but I liked drunk me. He acted in a manner I fully approved of and did nothing that I was truly ashamed of. As happens with hard drinking, memory loss started to occur. As mentioned this was not a reputation/shame problem, I was still acting in a manner true to my ethics and goals in a way I approved of, but I did not remember the joy had. Not remembering the joy had took all the fun out of it. Joy had without the memory of joy had is worthless.

This is my attempt to move away from the far ends of the spectrum and engage the topic. I'd like to hear your feedback.

The clear and obvious "you'd have to be retarded not to take it" answer for me is option 2. I would take option 2 with extreme prejudice.

My intuition says that things that I can't remember (nor give me PTSD, nor affect me any other way) don't matter, but given that after I die I won't rememer anything anyway my intuition must be wrong.

I think this post belongs in reddit.com/r/showerthoughts.

The topic has been discussed many times here, for example (by searching for torture and amnesia): http://lesswrong.com/lw/eap/expected_utility_and_utility_after_time/
http://lesswrong.com/lw/8wi/inverse_pzombies_the_other_direction_in_the_hard/
http://lesswrong.com/lw/eu/off_topic_thread_may_2009/bhc

If you have no memory of an experience does that experience still matter?

What matters is the total utility. You have the utility of how you feel during the event, and how you feel remembering it later.

If memory was all that mattered, considering we're all going to die eventually and we won't remember anything, nothing would matter.

That basically the kind of philosophy that got young children tortured in the past because they supposedly were to young to form memories.

The idea of experiencing something without it having an effect on your psychological state is wrong. Memories are not really required for that to happen. You expect the concept of memories to behave in a way that it doesn't. Discussing memories based on bad concept of what it happens to be isn't very useful.

Memories are for example not required for Pavlovian conditioning.

Memory is everything. Explains neurologist Eric Kandel, who received his Nobel Prize in 2000 for his pioneering research on the physiology of brain memory: "Memory is the glue," says Kandel, who links the mind and ensures continuity. His last mentor, the respected neurologist Harry Grundfest, told him: "You must follow a reductionist approach, one cell at a time.

It occurs to me that we can express this problem in the following isomorphic way:

1. Omega makes an identical copy of you.

2. One copy exists for a week. You get to pick whether that week is torture or nirvana.

3. The other copy continues to exist as normal, or maybe is unconscious for a week first, and depending on what you picked for step 2, it may lose or receive lots of money.

I'm not sure how enlightening this is. But we can now tie this to the following questions, which we also don't have answers to: is an existence of torture better than no existence at all? And is an existence of nirvana good when it does not have any effect on the universe?

I teleport a hostage about to be executed to a capsule in lunar orbit. I then offer you three options: you pay me 1,000,000,000$, and I give him whatever pleasures are possible given the surroundings for a day, and then painlessly kill him; I simply kill him painlessly; I torture him for a day, and then painlessly kill him, and then pay you 1,000,000,000$.

Do you still take the money?

This strikes me as a pretty stark decision, such that I'd have a really hard time treating those who would take the money any different than I'd treat the babyeaters. It's almost exactly the same moral equation.

you will not be harmed physically or mentally; you will simply experience excruciating pain

That's not possible. A full week of unending pain beyond extreme thresholds will leave you with serious PTSD. If you get Obliviated afterwards, that will only get you more screwed up, with persistent anxiety for no discernible reason.