Would the following be a True Fact that is supported by evidence?
You open the white box, and are hit by a poison dart, which causes you to drop into a irreversible, excruciatingly painful, minimally aware, coma, where by all outward appearances you look fine, and you find out the world goes downhill, while you get made to live forever, while still having had enough evidence that Yes, the dart DID in fact contain a poison that drops you into an:
irreversible(Evidence supporting this, you never come out of a coma),
excruciatingly painful(Evidence supporting this, your nerves are still working inside your head, you can feel this excruciating pain)
minimally aware (Evidence supporting this, while you are in the coma you are still vaugely aware that you can confirm all of this and hear about bad news that makes you feel worse on a level in addition to physical pain, such as being given the old poison dart because someone thinks it’s a treasured memento instead of a constant reminder that you are an idiot.)
coma(Evidence supporting this, you can’t actually act upon the outer world as if you were conscious),
where by all outward appearances you look fine(Evidence supporting this, no one appears to be aware that you are in utter agony to the point where you would gladly accept a mercy kill.)
and you find out the world goes downhill (Evidence supporting this, while in a minimally aware state, you hear about the world going downhill, UFAI, brutal torture, nuclear bombs, whatever bad things you don’t want to hear about.)
while you get made to live forever: (Evidence supporting this, you never, ever die.)
I mean, the disutility would probably be worse than that, but… surely you never purposely pick a CERTAINTY of such an optimized maximum disutility, regardless of what random knowledge it might comes with. It would be one thing if the knowledge was such that it was going to be helpful, but since it comes as part and parcel of a optimized maximum disutility, the knowledge is quite likely to be something useless or worse, like “Yes, this dart really did contain a poison to hit you with optimized maximum disutility, and you are now quite sure that is true.” (You would probably have been sure of that well before now even if it wasn’t explicitly given to you as a true fact by Omega!)
And Omega didn’t mislead you, the dart REALLY was going to be that bad in the class of facts about darts!
Since that (or worse) seems likely to be the White Box, I’ll probably as carefully as possible select the Black box while trying to be extremely sure that I didn’t accidentally have a brain fart and flip the colors of the boxes by mistake in sheer panic. Anyone who would pick the White box intentionally doesn’t seem to be giving enough credence to just how bad Omega can make a certainty of optimized maximum disutility and how useless Omega can select the true fact to be.
It does seem to me that the question, which box, is is your utility associated with knowing truth able to overcome your disutility associated with fear of the unknown. If you are afraid enough, I don’t have to torture you to break you, I only have to show you my dentist tools and talk to you about what might be in the white box.
As stated, the only trap the white box contains is information… which is quite enough, really. A prediction can be considered a true statement if it is a self-fulfilling prophecy, after all. More seriously, if such a thing as a basilisk is possible, the white box will contain a basilisk. Accordingly, it’s feasible that the fact could be something like “Shortly after you finish reading this, you will drop into an irreversible, excruciatingly painful, minimally aware coma, where by all outward appearances you look fine, yet you find out the world goes downhill while you get made to live forever”, and there’s some kind of sneaky pattern encoded in the pattern of the text and the border of the page or whatever that causes your brain to lock up and start firing pain receptors, such that the pattern is self-sustaining. Everything else about the world and living forever and such would have to have been something that would have happened anyway, lacking your action to prevent it, but if Omega knows UFAI will happen near enough in the future, and knows that such a UFAI would catch you in your coma and stick you with immortality nanites without caring about your torture-coma state… then yeah, just such a statement is entirely possible.
But the information in either box is clearly an influence on the universe—you can’t just create information. I’m operating under the assumption that Omega’s boxes don’t violate the entropy principles here, and it just seems virtually impossible to construct a mind such that Omega could not possibly, with sufficient data on the universe, construct a truth and a falsehood for which when learned by you would arrive at causal disruption of the world in the worst-possible-by-your-utility-function and best-possible-by-your-utility-function manners respectively.
As such, since Omega is saying the truth and Omega has fully optimized these two boxes among a potentially-infinite space of facts correlating to a potentially-infinite (unverified) space of causal influences on the world depending on your mind. To me, it seems >99% likely that opening the white box will result in the worst possible universe for the vast majority of mindspace, and the black box in the best possible universe for the vast majority of mindspace.
I can conceive of minds that would circumvent this, but these are not even remotely close to anything I would consider capable of discussing with Omega (e.g. a mind that consists entirely of “+1 utilon on picking Omega’s White Box, −9999 utilon on any other choice” and nothing else), and I infer all of those minds to be irrelevant to the discussion at hand since all such minds I can imagine currently are.
Would the following be a True Fact that is supported by evidence?
You open the white box, and are hit by a poison dart, which causes you to drop into a irreversible, excruciatingly painful, minimally aware, coma, where by all outward appearances you look fine, and you find out the world goes downhill, while you get made to live forever, while still having had enough evidence that Yes, the dart DID in fact contain a poison that drops you into an:
irreversible(Evidence supporting this, you never come out of a coma),
excruciatingly painful(Evidence supporting this, your nerves are still working inside your head, you can feel this excruciating pain)
minimally aware (Evidence supporting this, while you are in the coma you are still vaugely aware that you can confirm all of this and hear about bad news that makes you feel worse on a level in addition to physical pain, such as being given the old poison dart because someone thinks it’s a treasured memento instead of a constant reminder that you are an idiot.)
coma(Evidence supporting this, you can’t actually act upon the outer world as if you were conscious),
where by all outward appearances you look fine(Evidence supporting this, no one appears to be aware that you are in utter agony to the point where you would gladly accept a mercy kill.)
and you find out the world goes downhill (Evidence supporting this, while in a minimally aware state, you hear about the world going downhill, UFAI, brutal torture, nuclear bombs, whatever bad things you don’t want to hear about.)
while you get made to live forever: (Evidence supporting this, you never, ever die.)
I mean, the disutility would probably be worse than that, but… surely you never purposely pick a CERTAINTY of such an optimized maximum disutility, regardless of what random knowledge it might comes with. It would be one thing if the knowledge was such that it was going to be helpful, but since it comes as part and parcel of a optimized maximum disutility, the knowledge is quite likely to be something useless or worse, like “Yes, this dart really did contain a poison to hit you with optimized maximum disutility, and you are now quite sure that is true.” (You would probably have been sure of that well before now even if it wasn’t explicitly given to you as a true fact by Omega!)
And Omega didn’t mislead you, the dart REALLY was going to be that bad in the class of facts about darts!
Since that (or worse) seems likely to be the White Box, I’ll probably as carefully as possible select the Black box while trying to be extremely sure that I didn’t accidentally have a brain fart and flip the colors of the boxes by mistake in sheer panic. Anyone who would pick the White box intentionally doesn’t seem to be giving enough credence to just how bad Omega can make a certainty of optimized maximum disutility and how useless Omega can select the true fact to be.
It does seem to me that the question, which box, is is your utility associated with knowing truth able to overcome your disutility associated with fear of the unknown. If you are afraid enough, I don’t have to torture you to break you, I only have to show you my dentist tools and talk to you about what might be in the white box.
As stated, the only trap the white box contains is information… which is quite enough, really. A prediction can be considered a true statement if it is a self-fulfilling prophecy, after all. More seriously, if such a thing as a basilisk is possible, the white box will contain a basilisk. Accordingly, it’s feasible that the fact could be something like “Shortly after you finish reading this, you will drop into an irreversible, excruciatingly painful, minimally aware coma, where by all outward appearances you look fine, yet you find out the world goes downhill while you get made to live forever”, and there’s some kind of sneaky pattern encoded in the pattern of the text and the border of the page or whatever that causes your brain to lock up and start firing pain receptors, such that the pattern is self-sustaining. Everything else about the world and living forever and such would have to have been something that would have happened anyway, lacking your action to prevent it, but if Omega knows UFAI will happen near enough in the future, and knows that such a UFAI would catch you in your coma and stick you with immortality nanites without caring about your torture-coma state… then yeah, just such a statement is entirely possible.
But the information in either box is clearly an influence on the universe—you can’t just create information. I’m operating under the assumption that Omega’s boxes don’t violate the entropy principles here, and it just seems virtually impossible to construct a mind such that Omega could not possibly, with sufficient data on the universe, construct a truth and a falsehood for which when learned by you would arrive at causal disruption of the world in the worst-possible-by-your-utility-function and best-possible-by-your-utility-function manners respectively.
As such, since Omega is saying the truth and Omega has fully optimized these two boxes among a potentially-infinite space of facts correlating to a potentially-infinite (unverified) space of causal influences on the world depending on your mind. To me, it seems >99% likely that opening the white box will result in the worst possible universe for the vast majority of mindspace, and the black box in the best possible universe for the vast majority of mindspace.
I can conceive of minds that would circumvent this, but these are not even remotely close to anything I would consider capable of discussing with Omega (e.g. a mind that consists entirely of “+1 utilon on picking Omega’s White Box, −9999 utilon on any other choice” and nothing else), and I infer all of those minds to be irrelevant to the discussion at hand since all such minds I can imagine currently are.