(I, in fact, lifted it off of you, a number of years ago :-p)
but you still need to handle the dependence on subjective uncertainty.
Of course. (And noting that I am, perhaps, more openly confused about how to handle the subjective uncertainty than you are, given my confusions around things like logical uncertainty and whether difficult-to-normalize arithmetical expressions meaningfully denote numbers.)
Running through your examples:
It’s unclear whether we can have an extraordinarily long-lived civilization …
I agree. Separately, I note that I doubt total Fun is linear in how much compute is available to civilization; continuity with the past & satisfactory completion of narrative arcs started in the past is worth something, from which we deduce that wiping out civilization and replacing it with another different civilization of similar flourish and with 2x as much space to flourish in, is not 2x as good as leaving the original civilization alone. But I’m basically like “yep, whether we can get reversibly-computed Fun chugging away through the high-entropy phase of the universe seems like an empiricle question with cosmically large swings in utility associated therewith.”
But nearly-reversible civilizations can also have exponential returns to the resources they are able to acquire during the messy phase of the universe.
This seems fairly plausible to me! For instance, my best guess is that you can get more than 2x the Fun by computing two people interacting than by computing two individuals separately. (Although my best guess is also that this effect diminishes at scale, \shrug.)
By my lights, it sure would be nice to have more clarity on this stuff before needing to decide how much to rush our expansion. (Although, like, 1st world problems.)
But also it seems quite plausible that our universe is already even-more-exponentially spatially vast, and we merely can’t reach parts of it
Sure, this is pretty plausible, but (arguendo) it shouldn’t really be factoring into our action analysis, b/c of the part where we can’t reach it. \shrug
Perhaps rather than having a single set of physical constants, our universe runs every possible set.
Sure. And again (arguendo) this doesn’t much matter to us b/c the others are beyond our sphere of influence.
Why not all of the above? What if the universe is vast and it allows for very long lived civilization? And once we bite any of those bullets to grant 10^100 more people, then it starts to seem like even less of a further ask to assume that there were actually 10^1000 more people instead
I think this is where I get off the train (at least insofar as I entertain unbounded-utility hypotheses). Like, our ability to reversibly compute in the high-entropy regime is bounded by our error-correction capabilities, and we really start needing to upend modern physics as I understand it to make the numbers really huge. (Like, maybe 10^1000 is fine, but it’s gonna fall off a cliff at some point.)
I have a sense that I’m missing some deeper point you’re trying to make.
I also have a sense that… how to say… like, suppose someone argued “well, you don’t have 1/∞ probability that “infinite utility” makes sense, so clearly you’ve got to take infinite utilities seriously”. My response would be something like “That seems mixed up to me. Like, on my current understanding, “infinite utility” is meaningless, it’s a confusion, and I just operate day-to-day without worrying about it. It’s not so much that my operating model assigns probability 0 to the proposition “infinite utilities are meaningful”, as that infinite utilities simply don’t fit into my operating model, they don’t make sense, they don’t typecheck. And separately, I’m not yet philosophically mature, and I can give you various meta-probabilities about what sorts of things will and won’t typecheck in my operating model tomorrow. And sure, I’m not 100% certain that we’ll never find a way to rescue the idea of infinite utilities. But that meta-uncertainty doesn’t bleed over into my operating model, and I’m not supposed to ram infinities into a place where they don’t fit just b/c I might modify the type signatures tomorrow.”
When you bandy around plausible ways that the universe could be real large, it doesn’t look obviously divergent to me. Some of the bullets you’re handling are ones that I am just happy to bite, and others involve stuff that I’m not sure I’m even going to think will typecheck, once I understand wtf is going on. Like, just as I’m not compelled by “but you have more than 0% probability that ‘infinite utility’ is meaningful” (b/c it’s mixing up the operating model and my philosophical immaturity), I’m not compelled by “but your operating model, which says that X, Y, and Z all typecheck, is badly divergent”. Yeah, sure, and maybe the resolution is that utilities are bounded, or maybe it’s that my operating model is too permissive on account of my philosophical immaturity. Philosophical immaturity can lead to an operating model that’s too permisive (cf. zombie arguments) just as easily as one that’s too strict.
Like… the nature of physical law keeps seeming to play games like “You have continua!! But you can’t do an arithmetic encoding. There’s infinite space!! But most of it is unreachable. Time goes on forever!! But most of it is high-entropy. You can do reversible computing to have Fun in a high-entropy universe!! But error accumulates.” And this could totally be a hint about how things that are real can’t help but avoid the truly large numbers (never mind the infinities), or something, I don’t know, I’m philisophically immature. But from my state of philosophical immaturity, it looks like this could totally still resolve in a “you were thinking about it wrong; the worst enhugening assumptions fail somehow to typecheck” sort of way.
Trying to figure out the point that you’re making that I’m missing, it sounds like you’re trying to say something like “Everyday reasoning at merely-cosmic scales already diverges, even without too much weird stuff. We already need to bound our utilities, when we shift from looking at the milk in the supermarket to looking at the stars in the sky (nevermind the rest of the mathematical multiverse, if there is such a thing).” Is that about right?
If so, I indeed do not yet buy it. Perhaps spell it out in more detail, for someone who’s suspicious of any appeals to large swaths of terrain that we can’t affect (eg, variants of this universe w/ sufficiently different cosmological constants, at least in the regions where the locals aren’t thinking about us-in-particular); someone who buys reversible computing but is going to get suspicious when you try to drive the error rate to shockingly low lows?
To be clear, insofar as modern cosmic-scale reasoning diverges (without bringing in considerations that I consider suspicious and that I suspect I might later think belong in the ‘probably not meaningful (in the relevant way)’ bin), I do start to feel the vice grips on me, and I expect I’d give bounded utilities another look if I got there.
(I, in fact, lifted it off of you, a number of years ago :-p)
Of course. (And noting that I am, perhaps, more openly confused about how to handle the subjective uncertainty than you are, given my confusions around things like logical uncertainty and whether difficult-to-normalize arithmetical expressions meaningfully denote numbers.)
Running through your examples:
I agree. Separately, I note that I doubt total Fun is linear in how much compute is available to civilization; continuity with the past & satisfactory completion of narrative arcs started in the past is worth something, from which we deduce that wiping out civilization and replacing it with another different civilization of similar flourish and with 2x as much space to flourish in, is not 2x as good as leaving the original civilization alone. But I’m basically like “yep, whether we can get reversibly-computed Fun chugging away through the high-entropy phase of the universe seems like an empiricle question with cosmically large swings in utility associated therewith.”
This seems fairly plausible to me! For instance, my best guess is that you can get more than 2x the Fun by computing two people interacting than by computing two individuals separately. (Although my best guess is also that this effect diminishes at scale, \shrug.)
By my lights, it sure would be nice to have more clarity on this stuff before needing to decide how much to rush our expansion. (Although, like, 1st world problems.)
Sure, this is pretty plausible, but (arguendo) it shouldn’t really be factoring into our action analysis, b/c of the part where we can’t reach it. \shrug
Sure. And again (arguendo) this doesn’t much matter to us b/c the others are beyond our sphere of influence.
I think this is where I get off the train (at least insofar as I entertain unbounded-utility hypotheses). Like, our ability to reversibly compute in the high-entropy regime is bounded by our error-correction capabilities, and we really start needing to upend modern physics as I understand it to make the numbers really huge. (Like, maybe 10^1000 is fine, but it’s gonna fall off a cliff at some point.)
I have a sense that I’m missing some deeper point you’re trying to make.
I also have a sense that… how to say… like, suppose someone argued “well, you don’t have 1/∞ probability that “infinite utility” makes sense, so clearly you’ve got to take infinite utilities seriously”. My response would be something like “That seems mixed up to me. Like, on my current understanding, “infinite utility” is meaningless, it’s a confusion, and I just operate day-to-day without worrying about it. It’s not so much that my operating model assigns probability 0 to the proposition “infinite utilities are meaningful”, as that infinite utilities simply don’t fit into my operating model, they don’t make sense, they don’t typecheck. And separately, I’m not yet philosophically mature, and I can give you various meta-probabilities about what sorts of things will and won’t typecheck in my operating model tomorrow. And sure, I’m not 100% certain that we’ll never find a way to rescue the idea of infinite utilities. But that meta-uncertainty doesn’t bleed over into my operating model, and I’m not supposed to ram infinities into a place where they don’t fit just b/c I might modify the type signatures tomorrow.”
When you bandy around plausible ways that the universe could be real large, it doesn’t look obviously divergent to me. Some of the bullets you’re handling are ones that I am just happy to bite, and others involve stuff that I’m not sure I’m even going to think will typecheck, once I understand wtf is going on. Like, just as I’m not compelled by “but you have more than 0% probability that ‘infinite utility’ is meaningful” (b/c it’s mixing up the operating model and my philosophical immaturity), I’m not compelled by “but your operating model, which says that X, Y, and Z all typecheck, is badly divergent”. Yeah, sure, and maybe the resolution is that utilities are bounded, or maybe it’s that my operating model is too permissive on account of my philosophical immaturity. Philosophical immaturity can lead to an operating model that’s too permisive (cf. zombie arguments) just as easily as one that’s too strict.
Like… the nature of physical law keeps seeming to play games like “You have continua!! But you can’t do an arithmetic encoding. There’s infinite space!! But most of it is unreachable. Time goes on forever!! But most of it is high-entropy. You can do reversible computing to have Fun in a high-entropy universe!! But error accumulates.” And this could totally be a hint about how things that are real can’t help but avoid the truly large numbers (never mind the infinities), or something, I don’t know, I’m philisophically immature. But from my state of philosophical immaturity, it looks like this could totally still resolve in a “you were thinking about it wrong; the worst enhugening assumptions fail somehow to typecheck” sort of way.
Trying to figure out the point that you’re making that I’m missing, it sounds like you’re trying to say something like “Everyday reasoning at merely-cosmic scales already diverges, even without too much weird stuff. We already need to bound our utilities, when we shift from looking at the milk in the supermarket to looking at the stars in the sky (nevermind the rest of the mathematical multiverse, if there is such a thing).” Is that about right?
If so, I indeed do not yet buy it. Perhaps spell it out in more detail, for someone who’s suspicious of any appeals to large swaths of terrain that we can’t affect (eg, variants of this universe w/ sufficiently different cosmological constants, at least in the regions where the locals aren’t thinking about us-in-particular); someone who buys reversible computing but is going to get suspicious when you try to drive the error rate to shockingly low lows?
To be clear, insofar as modern cosmic-scale reasoning diverges (without bringing in considerations that I consider suspicious and that I suspect I might later think belong in the ‘probably not meaningful (in the relevant way)’ bin), I do start to feel the vice grips on me, and I expect I’d give bounded utilities another look if I got there.