Things outside of your future light cone (that is, things you cannot physically affect) can “subjunctively depend” on your decisions. If beings outside of your future light cone simulate your decision-making process (and base their own decisions on yours), you can affect things that happen there. It can be helpful to take into account those effects when you’re determining your decision-making process, and to act as if you were all of your copies at once.
Those were some of my takeaways from reading about functional decision theory (described in the post I linked above) and updateless decision theory.
A far off decision maker can’t have direct evidence of your existence as then you would be the cause of their existence.
A far off observer can see a process that it can predict will result into you and things that it does may be cocauses with the future between you. I still think that the verb “affect” is wrong here.
Say there is a pregnant mother and he friend leaves into another country and lives there in isolation for 18 years but knowing there is likely to be a person sends a birthday gift with a card referring to “happy 18th birthday”. Nothing that you do in your childhood or adulthood can affect what the information on the card reads if the far off country is sufficiently isolated. The event of you opening the box will be both a product how you lived your childhood and what the sender chose to put in the box. Even if the gift sender would want to reward better persons with better gifts the choice needs to eb based on what kind of baby you were and not what kind of adult you are.
And maybe crucially adult you will have past tht is not the past of baby you. The gift giver has no hope of taking a stance towards this data.
Things outside of your future light cone (that is, things you cannot physically affect) can “subjunctively depend” on your decisions. If beings outside of your future light cone simulate your decision-making process (and base their own decisions on yours), you can affect things that happen there. It can be helpful to take into account those effects when you’re determining your decision-making process, and to act as if you were all of your copies at once.
Those were some of my takeaways from reading about functional decision theory (described in the post I linked above) and updateless decision theory.
A far off decision maker can’t have direct evidence of your existence as then you would be the cause of their existence.
A far off observer can see a process that it can predict will result into you and things that it does may be cocauses with the future between you. I still think that the verb “affect” is wrong here.
Say there is a pregnant mother and he friend leaves into another country and lives there in isolation for 18 years but knowing there is likely to be a person sends a birthday gift with a card referring to “happy 18th birthday”. Nothing that you do in your childhood or adulthood can affect what the information on the card reads if the far off country is sufficiently isolated. The event of you opening the box will be both a product how you lived your childhood and what the sender chose to put in the box. Even if the gift sender would want to reward better persons with better gifts the choice needs to eb based on what kind of baby you were and not what kind of adult you are.
And maybe crucially adult you will have past tht is not the past of baby you. The gift giver has no hope of taking a stance towards this data.