I think given the scenario, I roll over and go back to sleep. Put simply that's such a silly god I'm not going to pay any attention to it.

Another thought, "exactly as it unfolded" suggests I will have no awareness of any prior loop as I certainly have none now. Moreover, such an awareness necessarily changes how my life would unfold. There simply seems no difference between the two options from a practical perspective for me.

Personally, I find life worth living.

High school again.... Does that count as infinite suffering ?

I don't think there's any difference between the two choices. Might as well choose option 1.

This seems like a question about aesthetics - thia choice won't change my experience, but it will change what kind of universe I live in. I think I'd choose duplication - I put a pretty low value on tiling the universe with conscious experience, but it's larger than zero.

Seems like you pick relive. Doesn't gain you anything, but maybe the horse will learn to sing.

I liked Nietzche's framing of the question in terms of infinite recurrence better. Strangely I would forgo infinite recurrence but would choose the second option in your scenario ( since if it turns out to be a mistake the cost will be limited ).

I don't see the difference between the two.

To answer the question of the title: Yes.

I have another test: If the only chance of your survival will be your head transplantation on a pig body, would you agree? It will be possible in 2019 in China, as they will start xenotransplantations and (separately) head transplants.

I will because most time I just lay on my bed and look into a computer screen of my macair and replacement of my body will not change much.

Haha, what a mind f**k :)

I believe that apart from the infinite loop the dizzying effect of the thought experiment is also due to the fact that you ask for a choice in a context that you have defined as deterministic. This is inherently contradictory. Hidden within is also the question 'is life worth living without free will?'.

This is my current concurrent implementation in language (imagined sound):

• I choose a pragmatist perspective.
• I choose to believe that free will exists.

I chill out. Phew that was tiring... :P

If I was presented with this choice ten years ago, I very well might have chosen (1), but I would have been aware that my life was fairly reliably getting more enjoyable as a function of time. (For me, being five was horrible, being ten sucked, being fifteen was frustrating, being twenty was actually pretty good, etc.)

Experiencing something twice doesn't seem indistinguishable to me, which is the notion I'm getting from a lot of other people's responses. I don't remember eating ice cream a few months ago, but I'm pretty sure I did and I enjoyed it. I ate ice cream yesterday and it was enjoyable. The enjoyment of something is still relevant even if I don't remember it; if I ate ice cream now, got mindwiped of the memory of that, and then had another cone I still think more than one ice cream's worth of utility is being generated. Likewise, reliving my life over again still has meaning.

I do kinda wish I could start the replay around fourteen though. That'd skip a lot of the worst moments.

Framing note: it's worth examining how intuitions change when you replace "God" with "Omega" and "relive" with "reset the deterministic simulation that computed".

To be a little pedantic, I suspect an infinite loop in that specification. If the code looks something like...

label START_OF_LIFE
...
if want_reboot() = TRUE {
  goto START_OF_LIFE }

annihilate()

...the last line would never execute either execute on the first pass or not at all. There is also the question of whether this is the first time through the loop. If it turns out the answer is no, then God is giving you a chance to live forever (though you'll never know it except for the last few seconds of each loop). edited for clarity

But in any case: since continued existence is an instrumental value whose worth is determined by our ability to pursue our terminal values, I don't see the point in taking the offer since it was stated that I would be unable to affect the universe in any way. Worse, if I were to retain my memories for the second pass I would be locked into a lifetime of torture (being fully aware of my impending doom but by definition unable to do anything to avert it). No, thanks.

Is one's answer to the dilemma supposed to illuminate something about the title question? Presumably a large part of the worth-livingness of life consists in the NPV of future experiences, not just in past experiences.

• Title question: Yes. Proof by revealed preference:

(1) Life is a good with free disposal.

(2) I am alive.

(3) Therefore, life is worth living.

• Dilemma: Choose the second, on the odds that God changes its mind and lets you keep living, can't find you again the second time around, is itself annihilated in the interim, etc.

Quibble: Annihilationism is an eschatalogical doctrine about the final fate of all souls, not the simple event of the annihilation.

I assume the thought experiment ignores instrumental considerations like altruistic impact.

For re-living my actual life, I wouldn't care that much either way, because most of my experiences haven't been extremely good or extremely bad. However, if there was randomness, such that I had some probability of, e.g., being tortured by a serial killer, then I would certainly choose not to repeat life.

re-live. Although I'd rather live the same amount of time from now onward.

This has already happened, you're reliving your 498,776th life and will be asked again in a few weeks (and you'll choose 2 again, because you did the first time).

However, as the saying goes "past performance does not necessarily predict future results". Whether your past is worth re-living and whether your unknown future is worth living are two very different questions, which could easily have different answers.

And finally, everyone who answers (1), can you identify the point when your past turned from nonnegative to negative? If not, you probably have a skewed memory and the sum of your experiences at those points in time is probably higher value than your aggregated memory at this point in time.

My first thought is one of some sort of heroic defiance against a God that ridiculous and tyrannical, and yelling imprecations at the God while he presumably annihilates my soul. That probably wouldn't be smart though, as I have enjoyed life thus far, so I guess reliving in would be enjoyable as well, as I imagine I would have to have no prior knowledge of having already lived it, so I suppose I would choose the second option.

This isn't working for me as pumping the intuition you seem to want it to. I think life is worth living and I'd just cut to the chase and pick 1 because option 2 doesn't make sense as a way to get more life. Pattern theory of identity, life is a process, not a weighted lump of time-space-matter-stuff where you can just say "let's double the helping" like this. If you run the exact same process twice, that doesn't get you any new patterns and new life compared to just running it once.

Or if the idea is that I'd be aware of having gotten a second run, the part about the exact same decisions and experiences seems to make this amount to spending a few decades watching a boring home video with nothing you-on-second-trip can do about it and constantly aware that you'll be annihilated at the end. I guess the "maybe the horse will learn to sing" thinking would make sense here, but that's just fighting the hypothetical that the thought experiment will unfold exactly as described.

There are many moments of my life that would give me pause about re-living them. However, were I much younger and aware that I was doomed to that set of experiences, I wouldn't opt to commit suicide. It therefore follows that my life thus far has been worth living, and that I should opt to re-live it, rather than be annihilated.

That said, it seems to me that these 'choices' are not an opportunity to make a choice at all. In this thought experiment, do we live out our second instance with the knowledge that it is a second instance and we are incapable of acting differently? If "God" makes the offer to bring me right up to that very moment in exactly the same way, all the while I'm aware that the decision is approaching, the experience of living will be qualitatively different than it was in ignorance of this fate, even if I am powerless to change it. However, the wording of option 2 seems to imply that this is not the case.

Assuming I do not have some sort of epistemic access to the fact that God has rewound my life, I will live my life exactly as I did in the first instance. To me, this is metaphysically indistinguishable from (and morally equivalent to) living it in the first place. However, there is an important difference. At the time God approaches me, the "choice" has become a lie: because God already rewound my life and let it play out again, I will behave in the same way (choose option 2) and God will annihilate me anyway! It is, after all, a stipulation of the rules God presented.

From my perspective, God is just going to annihilate me no matter what, so I'm indifferent between the two options.