I have an impression is that what you call here ‘anthropic shadow’ is the idea of quantum immortality. One can’t ’use anthropic shadow”.
In that case your central thesis is reasonable for most altruistic policies. If I play a series of Russian roulette rounds and “won”, it will be still a bad policy to continue playing Russian roulette.
More over, antithesis is correct: if I survive long enough, I am probably underestimating the background risks. This idea—in my view—is true anthropic shadow. And for policy it means that I should be even more cautious about risks which look benign.
Also, survival in QI/AS is “timeless”. As in, rather than surviving a Russian Roulette round, you’ll junt find yourself as having avoided playing to begin with. This is because your 5D measure is greater when you avoid such activities (plus survive for free) than if you don’t and survive. Such activities aren’t begun in a counterfactual vacuum.
One more thing, QI invokes a notion of your consciousness “shifting” to youn surviving timeline, but that’s unnecessary. Since survival is timeless, you’ll simply find yourself in the longer timeline from the get go already. No shifting necessary.
This model explains secularly how I find myself as being a Christian. I’m on my longest (and thickest) counterfactual timeline already from my conception (eternal life stuff). Pretty neat stuff. I shouldn’t be so surprised though since secular reasoning isn’t so far fallen that it concludes as it does!
There is a possible bad decision theory consequence of this.
Imagine a person suffers a bad event like having a serious accident in which he damages other people. If he assumes ‘5D measure’ or “retrospective selection of thickest timelines” to be valid, he decides to commit suicide.
As a result he-tomorrow will find himself only in timelines where the accident didn’t happen.
This actually happens rather often (e.g. Epstein committed suicide after going to jail)
I’m on my longest (and thickest) counterfactual timeline already from my conception (eternal life stuff).
I mean, wouldn’t that timeline be more like “my consciousness keeps somehow hanging onto a husk of a body out of increasingly unlikely coincidences as the universe approaches heat death”? Quantum Immortality strikes me as a terrible world that I really hope isn’t true.
No. Husks have very little 5d measure. How? The same reason you find yourself as a man and not an ant. More precisely, as stated above previously, 5d measure is timeless. Since husks take a hit in both linear scope (4th-d) and counterfactual scope (5th-d), they occupy an infinitesimally-small to epsilon-large area of your anthropic measure landscape. This affects self-location even from the beginning. Read up on UDASSA for a similar formulation of timelessness in self-location. Though UDASSA is more environmental-affecting than this. Here, you can still find yourself as a nobody who’s fully reliant on civilization to protect him against an unbounded counterfactual scope with 0 producer-participation, only consumer-participation. Also, this implies your ontological substrate is a pereto-ideal of simultaneously very full, and very simple (eg, you won’t find yourself as a sim npc).
This only holds if there is any alternative to husks which is also compatible with the laws of physics as a whole. A whole civilisation that just happens to keep drawing its energy from an ever higher entropy universe seems a lot less likely, for example, because the improbabilities compound for the whole size. Seems to me that the most likely state would always be one that requires the bare minimum.
Anyway I didn’t know about UDASSA so I’ll check that out, seems interesting. I’ll maybe get back at this after having gone through it properly.
Yes that’s what I take would happen too unless I’m misunderstanding something? Because it would seem far more probable for *just* your consciousness to somehow still exist, defying entropy, than for the same thing to happen to an entire civilization (same argument why nearly all Boltzmann brains would be just a bare “brain”).
I have an impression is that what you call here ‘anthropic shadow’ is the idea of quantum immortality. One can’t ’use anthropic shadow”.
In that case your central thesis is reasonable for most altruistic policies. If I play a series of Russian roulette rounds and “won”, it will be still a bad policy to continue playing Russian roulette.
More over, antithesis is correct: if I survive long enough, I am probably underestimating the background risks. This idea—in my view—is true anthropic shadow. And for policy it means that I should be even more cautious about risks which look benign.
Also, survival in QI/AS is “timeless”. As in, rather than surviving a Russian Roulette round, you’ll junt find yourself as having avoided playing to begin with. This is because your 5D measure is greater when you avoid such activities (plus survive for free) than if you don’t and survive. Such activities aren’t begun in a counterfactual vacuum.
One more thing, QI invokes a notion of your consciousness “shifting” to youn surviving timeline, but that’s unnecessary. Since survival is timeless, you’ll simply find yourself in the longer timeline from the get go already. No shifting necessary.
This model explains secularly how I find myself as being a Christian. I’m on my longest (and thickest) counterfactual timeline already from my conception (eternal life stuff). Pretty neat stuff. I shouldn’t be so surprised though since secular reasoning isn’t so far fallen that it concludes as it does!
Thoughts?
There is a possible bad decision theory consequence of this.
Imagine a person suffers a bad event like having a serious accident in which he damages other people. If he assumes ‘5D measure’ or “retrospective selection of thickest timelines” to be valid, he decides to commit suicide.
As a result he-tomorrow will find himself only in timelines where the accident didn’t happen.
This actually happens rather often (e.g. Epstein committed suicide after going to jail)
Check my new post which favors the longest and thickest timelines https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/hB2CTaxqJAeh5jdfF/quantum-immortality-a-perspective-if-ai-doomers-are-probably?commentId=aAzrogWBqtFDqMMpp
I mean, wouldn’t that timeline be more like “my consciousness keeps somehow hanging onto a husk of a body out of increasingly unlikely coincidences as the universe approaches heat death”? Quantum Immortality strikes me as a terrible world that I really hope isn’t true.
No. Husks have very little 5d measure. How? The same reason you find yourself as a man and not an ant. More precisely, as stated above previously, 5d measure is timeless. Since husks take a hit in both linear scope (4th-d) and counterfactual scope (5th-d), they occupy an infinitesimally-small to epsilon-large area of your anthropic measure landscape. This affects self-location even from the beginning. Read up on UDASSA for a similar formulation of timelessness in self-location. Though UDASSA is more environmental-affecting than this. Here, you can still find yourself as a nobody who’s fully reliant on civilization to protect him against an unbounded counterfactual scope with 0 producer-participation, only consumer-participation. Also, this implies your ontological substrate is a pereto-ideal of simultaneously very full, and very simple (eg, you won’t find yourself as a sim npc).
This only holds if there is any alternative to husks which is also compatible with the laws of physics as a whole. A whole civilisation that just happens to keep drawing its energy from an ever higher entropy universe seems a lot less likely, for example, because the improbabilities compound for the whole size. Seems to me that the most likely state would always be one that requires the bare minimum.
Anyway I didn’t know about UDASSA so I’ll check that out, seems interesting. I’ll maybe get back at this after having gone through it properly.
Yes that’s what I take would happen too unless I’m misunderstanding something? Because it would seem far more probable for *just* your consciousness to somehow still exist, defying entropy, than for the same thing to happen to an entire civilization (same argument why nearly all Boltzmann brains would be just a bare “brain”).