It appears impossible to meaningfully decrease our probability of infinite suffering, if a god who would create hell exists, as we cannot know the criteria for avoiding hell even if we know the correct God, as we have no guarantee that heaven is an infinite respite from hell and as we have an infinite number of religions to choose between. No tradition appears consistent on the correct means of attaining salvation. A being capable of creating hell appears to my mind likely to continue damning people after they enter heaven. We have literally an infinite number of religions to choose between as religions which are unknown to man, such a non-evidentialist damning God or the god who really rally hates cows mentioned above, have just as much likelyhood of existing than religions not known to man (probably more so as such gods would be simpler, not having to have visited Earth) and the chance of choosing the correct religion would be rendered infantismal enough to counter even infinite reward or punishment.

I think the utilitarian case for proselytism is somewhat weaker than the egoist case for personal conversion, because while I can imagine only a few scenarios other than hell according to which actions I take now will determine whether I suffer eternally, I can think of lots of scenarios in which actions I take now will prevent infinite suffering on the part of others. This is partly because, when I adopt a utilitarian concern for all sentient organisms, I can prevent infinite suffering by preventing finite amounts of suffering on the part of infinitely many organisms, not just suffering of infinite duration on the part of one particular organism.

I’d be much more likely to be swayed by an argument if I saw it applied consistently: to those among the saved as well as those still in danger.

steven, interesting point. However, it’s not clear to me why the egoist case should parallel the utilitarian one. I would think an egoist would care only about his own particular instantiation, not all of the instantiations of himself that might be run. I guess this gets back to the Unification vs. Duplication discussion above.

This doesn’t mean that I’m saying the wager is wrong, but that normal humans cannot accept it, because their brains do not work that way. If someone based on some theory believes that we should act as though we had unbounded utility functions, he is trying to get around his own brain, and he may well consequently accept the wager (or some variant, as Robin suggested.)

Where does this correlation come from? If you mean that U1 and U2 have psychologically indistinguishable histories up to the present, that implies nothing about their correlation in the future, does it? U1 and U2 were picked from all the mind-histories in the universe as two that happened to share the same history up to this moment. But unless there’s some causal mechanism correlating them, why does that tell us anything about future moments? Or we could say that we chose U1 and U2 to be two mind-histories that are identical in both the past and the future, but there are lots of other mind-histories that are identical in the past only, and U1, U2, … would have no way to know that they aren’t one of those. You can’t get a relevant correlation by “data mining” of random noise — somewhere causation has to be involved.

One causal mechanism is that U1 is programmed to copy whatever U2 does. Yes, there’s correlation, but it’s in the wrong direction to help U1.

What am I missing here?

Nick: It seems to me that you should consider yourself as the set {U1, U2, …} = {all systems having this experience}, not as one member.

Does that commit you to the position that Nick Bostrom calls “Unification” on p. 186 of this piece? If so, what do you think of his arguments against Unification in the subsequent three pages? If not, perhaps you could elaborate your position further, or point me to a reference?

Robin: The Christian God scenario doesn’t weigh in my beliefs much larger than many other possible gods, but I suspect I may well in principle succumb to some other wagers-to-placate-gods.

Can you think of other wagers that you find compelling? I’d be quite interested to hear them.