To make this calculation in a MWI multiverse, you still have to place a zero (or extremely small negative) value on all the branches where you die and take most or all of your species with you. You don’t experience them, so they don’t matter, right? That’s a specialized form of a general question which amounts to “does the universe go away when I’m not looking at it?”
If one can make rational decisions about a universe that doesn’t contain oneself in it (and life insurance policies, high-level decorations for valor, and the like suggest this is possible), then outcomes we aren’t aware of have to have some nonzero significance, for better or for worse.
As for “question in its own right,” I think you misunderstood what I was getting at. If advanced civilizations are probable and all or nearly all of them try to go Omega, and they’ve all (in our experience, on this worldline) failed, it suggests that the probability must be extremely low, or that the power benefits to be had from going Omega are low enough that we cannot detect them over galaxy-scale distances.
In the first case, the odds of dissenters not drinking the “Omegoid” Kool-Aid increase: the number of people who will accept a multiverse that kills them in 9 branches and makes them gods in the 10th is probably somewhat larger than the number who will accept one that kills them in 999999999 branches and makes them gods in the 10^9th. So you’d expect dissenter cultures to survive the general self-destruction of the civilization and carry on with their existence by mundane means (or trying to find a way to improve the reliability of the Omega process)
In the second case (Omega civilizations are not detectable at galactic-scale distances), I would be wary of claiming that the benefits of going Omega are obvious. In which case, again, you’ll get more dissenters.
To make this calculation in a MWI multiverse, you still have to place a zero (or extremely small negative) value on all the branches where you die and take most or all of your species with you. You don’t experience them, so they don’t matter, right? That’s a specialized form of a general question which amounts to “does the universe go away when I’m not looking at it?”
If one can make rational decisions about a universe that doesn’t contain oneself in it (and life insurance policies, high-level decorations for valor, and the like suggest this is possible), then outcomes we aren’t aware of have to have some nonzero significance, for better or for worse.
As for “question in its own right,” I think you misunderstood what I was getting at. If advanced civilizations are probable and all or nearly all of them try to go Omega, and they’ve all (in our experience, on this worldline) failed, it suggests that the probability must be extremely low, or that the power benefits to be had from going Omega are low enough that we cannot detect them over galaxy-scale distances.
In the first case, the odds of dissenters not drinking the “Omegoid” Kool-Aid increase: the number of people who will accept a multiverse that kills them in 9 branches and makes them gods in the 10th is probably somewhat larger than the number who will accept one that kills them in 999999999 branches and makes them gods in the 10^9th. So you’d expect dissenter cultures to survive the general self-destruction of the civilization and carry on with their existence by mundane means (or trying to find a way to improve the reliability of the Omega process)
In the second case (Omega civilizations are not detectable at galactic-scale distances), I would be wary of claiming that the benefits of going Omega are obvious. In which case, again, you’ll get more dissenters.