If you knew something about the expected development process of potential alien civilizations and could use that information to estimate a probability of them defecting in case like this, then which utility functions would you include in your set of aliens to cooperate with? Roughly, should you cooperate with each civilization proportional to your expectation of each civilization cooperating? Also, should you cooperate proportional to the number of expected civilizations implementing each utility function?
This seems unavoidable to me, as long as you first except “acausal trade”, which it seems you must accept if you accept Pearl-style causality and additive consequentialism.
If aliens cooperate in a way independent on your decision, you should defect. Only if they cooperate conditional on your cooperation, it might make sense to cooperate. That is, who cooperates unconditionally is irrelevant. (Which of these do you mean? I can’t tell, taken literally you seem to be talking about unconditional cooperation.)
What I should have been saying is that the ones that cooperate conditionally are the ones that would matter. (I wasn’t even thinking about conditional and unconditional cooperation, at the time.)
If you knew something about the expected development process of potential alien civilizations and could use that information to estimate a probability of them defecting in case like this, then which utility functions would you include in your set of aliens to cooperate with? Roughly, should you cooperate with each civilization proportional to your expectation of each civilization cooperating? Also, should you cooperate proportional to the number of expected civilizations implementing each utility function?
This seems unavoidable to me, as long as you first except “acausal trade”, which it seems you must accept if you accept Pearl-style causality and additive consequentialism.
If aliens cooperate in a way independent on your decision, you should defect. Only if they cooperate conditional on your cooperation, it might make sense to cooperate. That is, who cooperates unconditionally is irrelevant. (Which of these do you mean? I can’t tell, taken literally you seem to be talking about unconditional cooperation.)
What I should have been saying is that the ones that cooperate conditionally are the ones that would matter. (I wasn’t even thinking about conditional and unconditional cooperation, at the time.)