My initial reaction is “This is all correct… except that Azerthoth isn’t smart enough to have invented counter factual trade!”. Just imagine trying to counterfactually trade with your past self from before you knew about counter-factual trade. A similar case is coming up with a great product you’d like to buy, only to discover when you get to the market you were the first to come up with the idea and nobody is selling the product despite that it’d be good for both of you if they had.
For further clarity here’s a scenario where you reasoning probably WOULD work:
You find yourself on a planet, and you know this planet is in a phase of development in which conditions remain almost perfectly unchanged for 3^^^3 years/generations (the laws of physics would need to be different in this universe for this to work I think). The environment is also completely reset every few generations and only the extremely durable spores for the next generation is able to survive so there’s no way to relay messages to the future. No tech solutions like directly editing and putting messages in the genes because you can’t develop tech in a single generation.
If i lived on that planet I’d pay very close attention to the reasoning of this post. In the world that’s unly existed for a few billion years and is about to hit the singularity, and where I’ve grown up in conditions completely different from my ancestors… not so much.
“This is all correct… except that Azerthoth isn’t smart enough to have invented counter factual trade!”—This answered this problem for me. Your chance of existing, depends on the past depends on how successful your genes were at propagating given the ancestral environment, but since none of your ancestors knew about counterfactual trade, genes to push people towards this behaviour wasn’t selected for. This then leads to the following question: If counterfactual trade becomes sufficiently widely known, as does the possibility of trading with Azathoth, does this logic work in the distant future? I actually don’t think that it does as no agent has a reason to adopt counterfactual trade unless they believe that a significant proportion of the human race used this to reason in the past and that there has been enough time for selection effects to ensure that humans who don’t reason in this way won’t come into existence. However, if generations of humans adopted this belief for mistaken reasons, then later humans might have a reason to accept this argument
My initial reaction is “This is all correct… except that Azerthoth isn’t smart enough to have invented counter factual trade!”. Just imagine trying to counterfactually trade with your past self from before you knew about counter-factual trade. A similar case is coming up with a great product you’d like to buy, only to discover when you get to the market you were the first to come up with the idea and nobody is selling the product despite that it’d be good for both of you if they had.
For further clarity here’s a scenario where you reasoning probably WOULD work:
You find yourself on a planet, and you know this planet is in a phase of development in which conditions remain almost perfectly unchanged for 3^^^3 years/generations (the laws of physics would need to be different in this universe for this to work I think). The environment is also completely reset every few generations and only the extremely durable spores for the next generation is able to survive so there’s no way to relay messages to the future. No tech solutions like directly editing and putting messages in the genes because you can’t develop tech in a single generation.
If i lived on that planet I’d pay very close attention to the reasoning of this post. In the world that’s unly existed for a few billion years and is about to hit the singularity, and where I’ve grown up in conditions completely different from my ancestors… not so much.
Good post thou, upvoted.
“This is all correct… except that Azerthoth isn’t smart enough to have invented counter factual trade!”—This answered this problem for me. Your chance of existing, depends on the past depends on how successful your genes were at propagating given the ancestral environment, but since none of your ancestors knew about counterfactual trade, genes to push people towards this behaviour wasn’t selected for. This then leads to the following question: If counterfactual trade becomes sufficiently widely known, as does the possibility of trading with Azathoth, does this logic work in the distant future? I actually don’t think that it does as no agent has a reason to adopt counterfactual trade unless they believe that a significant proportion of the human race used this to reason in the past and that there has been enough time for selection effects to ensure that humans who don’t reason in this way won’t come into existence. However, if generations of humans adopted this belief for mistaken reasons, then later humans might have a reason to accept this argument