The idea is that you can’t change whether a mind exists but you can, possibly, change how much of it exists, or perhaps, how much of different futures it has. By multiply instantiating it? I guess so. It doesn’t seem to make much sense, but if I don’t presume something like this, I have to weight Boltzmann brains the same as myself.
I’m not trying to rest this argument on the details of the anthropics. Something more along the lines of—in a Big World, I don’t have to worry as much about creating diversity or giving possibilities a chance to exist, relative to how much I worry about average quality of life for sentients. If we create a comfortable number of diverse people with high standards of living in our own Everett branch, we can rely on other diverse people being realized elsewhere.
I have confessed my own confusion about anthropics; I do not at present have any non-paradoxical visualization of this problem in hand. Still—in a Big World, it sounds a little more okay to have fewer people locally with a higher quality of life; do you see the intuitive appeal?
We’re not talking about “few people” in any absolute sense; there’s six billion of us already. But say that, as we spread across galaxies, that number goes up to six quadrillion (10^15) instead of six decillion (10^30) and everyone has 10^15 times the standard of living, or however that scales.
When the vast majority of orders of magnitude in the diversity of realized possibilities, 10^something orders of magnitude, come from quantum branching, isn’t it okay to just take fifteen orders of magnitude for the standard of living improvement?
The idea is that you can’t change whether a mind exists but you can, possibly, change how much of it exists, or perhaps, how much of different futures it has. By multiply instantiating it? I guess so. It doesn’t seem to make much sense, but if I don’t presume something like this, I have to weight Boltzmann brains the same as myself.
I’m not trying to rest this argument on the details of the anthropics. Something more along the lines of—in a Big World, I don’t have to worry as much about creating diversity or giving possibilities a chance to exist, relative to how much I worry about average quality of life for sentients. If we create a comfortable number of diverse people with high standards of living in our own Everett branch, we can rely on other diverse people being realized elsewhere.
I have confessed my own confusion about anthropics; I do not at present have any non-paradoxical visualization of this problem in hand. Still—in a Big World, it sounds a little more okay to have fewer people locally with a higher quality of life; do you see the intuitive appeal?
We’re not talking about “few people” in any absolute sense; there’s six billion of us already. But say that, as we spread across galaxies, that number goes up to six quadrillion (10^15) instead of six decillion (10^30) and everyone has 10^15 times the standard of living, or however that scales.
When the vast majority of orders of magnitude in the diversity of realized possibilities, 10^something orders of magnitude, come from quantum branching, isn’t it okay to just take fifteen orders of magnitude for the standard of living improvement?