If there are five murder worlds branching off from myself at 17, then there are five no matter what.
That’s equivalent to saying “if at the moment of my 17th birthday there is a probability 5% that I will murder someone, then in that moment there is a probability 5% that I will murder someone no matter what”. I agree with this.
there’s still a fixed number of murder worlds extending from the day I was born, and there’s nothing I can do to change that.
That’s equivalent to saying “if at the day I was born there is an X% chance that I will become a murderer, there is nothing I can do to change that probability on that day”. True; you can’t travel back in time and create a counterfactual universe.
Short summary: You are mixing together two different views—timeful and timeless view. In timeful view you can say “today at 12:00 I decided to kill my neighbor”, and it makes sense. Then you switch to a position of a ceiling cat, an independent observer outside of our universe, outside of our time, and say “I cannot change the fact that today at 12:00 I killed my neighbor”. Yes, it also makes sense; if something happened, it cannot non-happen. But we confusing two narrators here: the real you, and the ceiling cat. You decided to kill your neighbor. The ceiling cat cannot decide that you didn’t, because the ceiling cat does not live in this universe; it can only observe what you did. The reason you killed your neighbor is that you, existing in this universe, have decided to do so. You are the cause. The ceiling cat sees your action as determined, because it is outside of the universe.
If we apply it to Many World hypothesis, there are 100 different yous, and one ceiling cat. From those, 5 yous commit murder (because they decided to do so), and 95 don’t (because they decided otherwise, or just failed to murder successfully). Inside the universes, the 5 yous are murderers, the 95 are not. The ceiling cat may decide to blame those 95 for the actions of those 5, but that’s the ceiling cat’s decision. It should at least give you credit for keeping the ratio 5:95 instead of e.g. 50:50.
Would you be willing to commit to an a priori ethical principle such that ought implies can?
That’s tricky. In some sense, we can’t do anything unless the atoms in our bodies do it; and our atoms are following that laws of physics. In some sense, there is no such thing as “can”, if we want to examine things on the atom level. (And that’s equally true in Many Worlds as in One World; only in One World there is also a randomness in the equations.) In other sense, humans are decision-makers. But we are decision-makers built from atoms, not decision-makers about the atoms we are built from.
So my answer would be that “ought” implies psychological “can”; not atomic “can”. (Because the whole ethics exists on psychological level, not on atomic level.)
Short summary: You are mixing together two different views—timeful and timeless view.
This sounds right to me, and I think your subsequent analysis is on target. So we have two views, the timeless view and the timeful view and we can’t (at least directly) translate ethical principles like ‘minimize evils’ across the views. So say we grant this and move on from here. Maybe my question is just that the timeless view is one in which ethics seems to make no sense (or at least not the same kind of sense), and the timeful view is a view in which it is a pressing concern. Would you object to that?
the timeless view is one in which ethics seems to make no sense
I didn’t fully realize that previously, but yes—in the timeless view there is no time, no change, no choice. Ethics is all about choices.
Ethical reasoning only makes sense in time, because the process of ethical reasoning is moving the particles in your brain, and the physical consequence of that can be a good or evil action. Ethics can have an influence on universe only if it is a part of the universe. The whole universe is determined only by its laws and its contents. The only way ethics can act is through the brains of people who contemplate it. Ethics is a human product (though we can discuss how much freedom did we have in creating this product; whether it would be different if we had a different history or biology) and it makes sense only on the human level, not on the level of particles.
I just stick with the timeless view and don’t have any trouble with ethics in it, but that’s because I’ve got all the phenomena of time fully embedded in the timeless view, including choice and morality. :)
Ethics is a human product (though we can discuss how much freedom did we have in creating this product; whether it would be different if we had a different history or biology) and it makes sense only on the human level, not on the level of particles.
I’m happy with the idea that ethics is a human product (since this doesn’t imply that it’s arbitrary or illusory or anything like that). I take this to mean, basically, that ethics concerns the relation of some subsystems with others. There’s no ethical language which makes sense from the ‘top-down’ or from a global perspective. But there’s also nothing to prevent (this is Eliezer’s meaning, I guess) a non-global perspective from being worked out in which ethical language does make sense. And this perspective isn’t arbitrary, because the subsystems working it out have always occupied that perspective as subsystems. To see an algorithm from the inside is to see world as a whole by seeing it as potentially involved in this algorithm. And this is what leads to the confusion between the global, timeless view from the (no less global, in some sense) timeful inside-an-algorithm view.
If that’s all passably normal (as skeptical as I am at the coherence of the idea of ‘adding up to normality’) then the question that remains is what I should do with my idea of things mattering ethically. Maybe the answer here is to see ethical agents as ontologically fundamental or something, though that sounds dangerously anthropocentric. But I don’t know how to justify the idea that physically-fundamental = ontologically-fundamental either.
That’s equivalent to saying “if at the moment of my 17th birthday there is a probability 5% that I will murder someone, then in that moment there is a probability 5% that I will murder someone no matter what”. I agree with this.
That’s equivalent to saying “if at the day I was born there is an X% chance that I will become a murderer, there is nothing I can do to change that probability on that day”. True; you can’t travel back in time and create a counterfactual universe.
It is explained here, without the Many Words.
Short summary: You are mixing together two different views—timeful and timeless view. In timeful view you can say “today at 12:00 I decided to kill my neighbor”, and it makes sense. Then you switch to a position of a ceiling cat, an independent observer outside of our universe, outside of our time, and say “I cannot change the fact that today at 12:00 I killed my neighbor”. Yes, it also makes sense; if something happened, it cannot non-happen. But we confusing two narrators here: the real you, and the ceiling cat. You decided to kill your neighbor. The ceiling cat cannot decide that you didn’t, because the ceiling cat does not live in this universe; it can only observe what you did. The reason you killed your neighbor is that you, existing in this universe, have decided to do so. You are the cause. The ceiling cat sees your action as determined, because it is outside of the universe.
If we apply it to Many World hypothesis, there are 100 different yous, and one ceiling cat. From those, 5 yous commit murder (because they decided to do so), and 95 don’t (because they decided otherwise, or just failed to murder successfully). Inside the universes, the 5 yous are murderers, the 95 are not. The ceiling cat may decide to blame those 95 for the actions of those 5, but that’s the ceiling cat’s decision. It should at least give you credit for keeping the ratio 5:95 instead of e.g. 50:50.
That’s tricky. In some sense, we can’t do anything unless the atoms in our bodies do it; and our atoms are following that laws of physics. In some sense, there is no such thing as “can”, if we want to examine things on the atom level. (And that’s equally true in Many Worlds as in One World; only in One World there is also a randomness in the equations.) In other sense, humans are decision-makers. But we are decision-makers built from atoms, not decision-makers about the atoms we are built from.
So my answer would be that “ought” implies psychological “can”; not atomic “can”. (Because the whole ethics exists on psychological level, not on atomic level.)
This sounds right to me, and I think your subsequent analysis is on target. So we have two views, the timeless view and the timeful view and we can’t (at least directly) translate ethical principles like ‘minimize evils’ across the views. So say we grant this and move on from here. Maybe my question is just that the timeless view is one in which ethics seems to make no sense (or at least not the same kind of sense), and the timeful view is a view in which it is a pressing concern. Would you object to that?
I didn’t fully realize that previously, but yes—in the timeless view there is no time, no change, no choice. Ethics is all about choices.
Ethical reasoning only makes sense in time, because the process of ethical reasoning is moving the particles in your brain, and the physical consequence of that can be a good or evil action. Ethics can have an influence on universe only if it is a part of the universe. The whole universe is determined only by its laws and its contents. The only way ethics can act is through the brains of people who contemplate it. Ethics is a human product (though we can discuss how much freedom did we have in creating this product; whether it would be different if we had a different history or biology) and it makes sense only on the human level, not on the level of particles.
I just stick with the timeless view and don’t have any trouble with ethics in it, but that’s because I’ve got all the phenomena of time fully embedded in the timeless view, including choice and morality. :)
I’m happy with the idea that ethics is a human product (since this doesn’t imply that it’s arbitrary or illusory or anything like that). I take this to mean, basically, that ethics concerns the relation of some subsystems with others. There’s no ethical language which makes sense from the ‘top-down’ or from a global perspective. But there’s also nothing to prevent (this is Eliezer’s meaning, I guess) a non-global perspective from being worked out in which ethical language does make sense. And this perspective isn’t arbitrary, because the subsystems working it out have always occupied that perspective as subsystems. To see an algorithm from the inside is to see world as a whole by seeing it as potentially involved in this algorithm. And this is what leads to the confusion between the global, timeless view from the (no less global, in some sense) timeful inside-an-algorithm view.
If that’s all passably normal (as skeptical as I am at the coherence of the idea of ‘adding up to normality’) then the question that remains is what I should do with my idea of things mattering ethically. Maybe the answer here is to see ethical agents as ontologically fundamental or something, though that sounds dangerously anthropocentric. But I don’t know how to justify the idea that physically-fundamental = ontologically-fundamental either.