GA

g@leuenberger.ai

0 karmaJoined Oct 2023

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Empty individualism is quite different from open individualism. 
Empty individualism says that you only exist during the present fraction of a second. This leads to the conclusion that no matter what action you take, the amount of pain or pleasure you will experience as a consequence thereof will remain zero. This therefore leads to nihilism.
Open Individualism on the other hand says that you will be repeatedly reincarnated as every human that will ever live. In the words of David Pearce: “If open individualism is true, then the distinction between decision-theoretic rationality and morality (arguably) collapses. An intelligent sociopath would do the same as an intelligent saint; it’s all about me.” 
This means that the egoistic sociopaths would change themselves into altruists of sorts.

The only way I know of in which empty individualism can lead towards open individualism works as follows:
When choosing which action to take, one should select the action which leads to the least amount of suffering for oneself. If there were a high probability that empty individualism is true and a very small but non-zero probability that open individualism is true, one would still have to take the action dictated by open individualism because empty individualism stays neutral with regads to which action to take, thereby making itself irrelevant.

Note however that empty individualism vs open individualism is a false dichotomy as there are other contenders such as closed individualism which is the common-sensical view, at least here in the West. So since empty individualism makes itself irrelevant, at least for now the contention is just between open individualism and closed individualism. It would in principle certainly be possible to calculate whether open individualism or closed individualism is more likely to be true. Furthermore, it would be possible to calculate whether AGI would be open individualist towards humanity or not. To conduct such a caclulation successfully before the singularity would however require a collaboration between many theoreticians.