If you believe in Tegmark’s multiverse, what’s the point of uploading at all? You already inhabit an infinity of universes, all perfectly optimized for your happiness.
Personally I’m very inclined toward Tegmark’s position and I have no idea how to answer the above question.
Infinity, yes, but the relative sizes of infinity matter. There’s also an infinity of universes of infinite negative utility. Uploading yourself is increasing the relative measure of ‘good’ universes.
This is especially true if you think of ‘measure’ or ‘existence’ being assigned to computations via a universal prior of some kind as proposed by Schmidhuber and almost everyone else (and not a uniform prior as Tegmark tended towards for some reason). You want as large a swath of good utility in the ‘simple’ universes as possible, since those universes have the most measure and thus ‘count’ more according to what we might naively expect our utility functions to be.
Uploading in a simple universe would thus be worth significantly more utility than the infinity of universes all optimized for your happiness.
That said, it’s likely that our intuitions about this are all really confused: UDT is the current approach to reasoning about these issues, and I’m not fit to explain the intuitions or implications of UDT. Wei? Nesov? Anyone like to point out how all of this works, and how anthropics gets dissolved in the meantime?
If you believe in Tegmark’s multiverse, what’s the point of uploading at all? You already inhabit an infinity of universes, all perfectly optimized for your happiness.
Personally I’m very inclined toward Tegmark’s position and I have no idea how to answer the above question.
Infinity, yes, but the relative sizes of infinity matter. There’s also an infinity of universes of infinite negative utility. Uploading yourself is increasing the relative measure of ‘good’ universes.
This is especially true if you think of ‘measure’ or ‘existence’ being assigned to computations via a universal prior of some kind as proposed by Schmidhuber and almost everyone else (and not a uniform prior as Tegmark tended towards for some reason). You want as large a swath of good utility in the ‘simple’ universes as possible, since those universes have the most measure and thus ‘count’ more according to what we might naively expect our utility functions to be.
Uploading in a simple universe would thus be worth significantly more utility than the infinity of universes all optimized for your happiness.
That said, it’s likely that our intuitions about this are all really confused: UDT is the current approach to reasoning about these issues, and I’m not fit to explain the intuitions or implications of UDT. Wei? Nesov? Anyone like to point out how all of this works, and how anthropics gets dissolved in the meantime?