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Comment by ThomasJorgensen on On the Anthropic Trilemma · 2011-05-22T12:40:27.673Z · LW · GW

The basic problem with the trilemma is that given the setup the "you won" message is a lie.

There are a large number of copies with equal claim to the prize and nearly all of them are about to be consigned to oblivion, and have thus not won a damm thing - The odds of winning the prize have not shifted an iota, instead what you have done is add on a extra possible outcome to the act of playing the lottery, that of spending ten seconds going "oh fuck, Im going to die" then dying. If creating more identical copies of me carries extra anticipatory freight, then ignoring the deletion of said copies is inconsistent.

This, is however a really good argument for why making copies of persons should be forbidden. Actually, more than just forbidden, it should be anathema. Given a world in which making and running simultanious copies of yourself is permitted, then the highly improbable future timelines in which you end up turning the entire universe into computronium running copies of you for all eternity would make up the wast bulk of your subjective future experience. And everyone should anticipate likewise becoming the abomination that destroyed the universe.This is .. Undesirable. As in "Copying people will, in all likelyhood, carry the penalty of summary execution".